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1500 questions
26
votes
11 answers
Tips for expanding my vocabulary?
Looking back through my texts, I noticed that I often use a lot of the same words and resort to using quite a basic vocabulary. I was wondering if there are any good exercises or anything else for expanding my active vocabulary. I know that the…
pHneuma
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26
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19 answers
How do you make a super villain's plan smart enough to outwit genuinely intelligent heroes but still have the heroes win?
Even if they are not super-geniuses, many villains are portrayed as cunning, charismatic, and manipulative, staying three steps ahead of the heroes at every turn.
But creating a good villain plan is difficult for both the villain and the writer. If…
Nyctophobia457
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26
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12 answers
How do I define smells I have never experienced?
I am a lifelong writer, who was also born without an ability to smell. I have been trained to engage the reader by applying the five senses, or as many of the five as is practical without becoming excessive. My problem is that I am straight up…
PastAndFuture
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26
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7 answers
How can I make "acts of patience" exciting?
This answer to the question Averting Real Women Don’t Wear Dresses introduces a distinction between acts of patience and acts of daring.
[...] when it comes to telling a story [...]
acts of daring are easy to show, and acts of patience are
not…
sesquipedalias
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26
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Is there a name for the technique in songs/poems, where the rhyming pattern primes the listener for a certain line, which never comes?
Usually used for comedic purposes, for example in Shrek:
Welcome to Duloc, such a perfect town
Here we have some rules, let us lay them down
Don't make waves, stay in line
and we'll get along fine
Duloc is a perfect place
Please keep off the…
Sean
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26
votes
11 answers
How do I stop my characters falling in love?
So I'm writing a short story based in a WW2 American military base camp stationed in Germany. It's about A Jewish Soviet soldier that, with the help of an American soldier and a series of coincidences, switches his identity and slips into the…
brandi
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26
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4 answers
How do we handle pauses in a dialogue?
How do we handle pauses in a dialogue?
Let's say that character A speaks and then after a pause character A speaks again. How should we separate the two moments, should we write two lines of dialogues or should we cut the two lines of dialogues with…
user36239
26
votes
11 answers
How to prevent "they're falling in love" trope
I have two characters, the male being sort of a jerk, but lightening up later in the story, and the female is...very hateful. But a person who read the first chapter asked me if they were going to get together. I mean, I planned that for way later,…
Kale Slade
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26
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2 answers
How to make readers know that my work has used a hidden constraint?
According to this wikipedia article, Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern. The same link also provides examples of constrained writing. I will…
Karan Desai
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26
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7 answers
How do we objectively assess if a dialogue sounds unnatural or cringy?
By unnatural, I don't mean ungrammatical, but something people wouldn't really say. For example, in many fictions, you find yourself in very weird situations and it's hard to know how a person would react and what they would say in such situations.…
user36239
26
votes
6 answers
What keeps most authors writing after receiving multiple rejections?
Last year, I completed a heavily researched 95,000-word novel about an emerging pandemic that targets primarily children. I am a former scientist and current nurse and wanted to do teaching about what to expect if a serious pandemic emerges.
My…
Richard Stanzak
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26
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9 answers
What do you do when your message could be dangerous?
I've long believed that for a novel (or any kind of fiction) to have a certain weight or power behind it, there must be a message. I've been writing this why for many years, and it's lent my fiction direction and purpose.
However, I am now faced…
Thomas Reinstate Monica Myron
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26
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7 answers
How to make characters more than the words on the page?
At the time of writing this question there are 5337 Harry Potter questions on SciFi and a further 165 on Movies. Many of these questions drill right into the character's motivations and emotions such as Why would Snape set his office password to…
Liath
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26
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6 answers
How can someone become a beta reader?
We have several questions on beta readers, including this one on how writers can find beta readers. How does it work from the other side? How can a non-beta reader make the "jump" and start beta reading?
There is a question here on how someone who…
Robert Columbia
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26
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2 answers
What are widely-used UK-English style guides?
In the UK, what are the equivalents to Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press style guide, Yahoo, APA, MLA, etc? Most importantly, what are their intended audiences? (AP is used for journalists, Yahoo for the web, APA for academia, et…
Goodbye Stack Exchange
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