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1500 questions
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How do I keep the gender of my main character purposely ambiguous?
I'm a newcomer to this community, and have recently started giving serious thought to my first novel. I'm basically working on an idea I had a few years back. It's fiction, has a lot to do with faeries, Celtic mythology, dark fantasy, nightmarish…
Jack Rabbit
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How do you avoid purple prose?
I try to watch out for bland, overused adjectives and I keep adverbs to a minimum but -- I hear this phrase a lot and I'm not even sure what it means?
Ben
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I spent 25 years in prison writing epic fantasy manuscripts. All are handwritten due to my circumstances. What is the best way to get them published?
I have spent years trying to get published. I even had a publisher at one time who took my hard earned money and never published my manuscripts. I finished my first manuscript in 2003. It's now 20 years later and I've gotten nowhere. I have dozens…
Robert Austin
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How to write strategy and schemes beyond my real-life capabilities?
I am interested in how to write compelling schemes, large-scale strategies and tactics etc.
There are lots of fictional stories where the characters are amazing strategists, or incredibly intelligent. I doubt that authors, put into the same…
user31257
39
votes
5 answers
How to write a nice frame challenge?
When answering questions on Stack Exchange, some of us challenge the assumptions of the author. These frame challenges can often be quite popular answers. This popularity, however, can simply be a measure of entertainment value, and not quality.…
Summer
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12 answers
How can I answer high-school writing prompts without sounding weird and fake?
Being given a prompt makes me freeze up immediately.
Let me clarify. I'm talking about high school writing prompts. You know. Those. The ones that ask you to write an essay about what you would change about something. Or the ones that ask you to…
Carlos Cienfuegos
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How can I portray body horror and still be sensitive to people with disabilities?
Building on my answer in Proven psychological or scientific means of scaring people?, I'm working on a universal horror-theme structure for a branching-narrative series with an occult detective. I won't discuss the whole system, but the idea is that…
wetcircuit
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10 answers
Would readers feel cheated if the villain is successful in convincing the protagonist to change sides?
So I'm writing a story where the main character is sent to kill the main villain. I have the basic world set out before me, and now I focus on story. I was planning out the main storyline and I hit a bit of a snag... uh-oh. I was thinking that the…
M.Wallace
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12 answers
How does the 10,000 hour rule apply to writing?
The 10,000 hour rule, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, says that:
the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours
Now, to be a good writer, you need to be a very good…
Shantnu Tiwari
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How to represent jealousy in a cute way?
The main character (which is a girl) of the first romance I'm writing would feel jealous sometimes of her love interest, but I want it to be a cute trait or even a setup for funny scenes, not a very obsessive or possessive trait, so they can have a…
KLTKGK
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3 answers
What is meant by "purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous" actions?
In his "Characters" essay, Samuel R. Delany purports there are three types of actions to characters: "purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous." He also defends that, in a novel, if "a character [is] involved in a number of all three types of actions,…
dkaeae
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What are the Pros and Cons of long names?
Background:
I'm developing names for places/characters/races/etc. in my world. One example are a particular political sect. The sect are a group within a different species that are named (the species in general) "Sun's children" (lit. translation.)…
FoxElemental
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How do I write LGBT characters without looking like I'm trying to be politically correct?
So I have a few characters now (two possibly three) who identify as LGBT. My problem is I'm worried that I might come across as "trying to be politically correct".
How do I write about characters who are LGBT so as to avoid the "trying to be…
Ajnatorix Zersolar
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How to prevent ebook piracy from stealing your livelihood?
I'm a part-time writer, still working on my novel (with a long term goal to make a living as a writer). My partner is also a writer, full time, with a couple dozen novels in ebook format, who makes a reasonable living solely from ebook sales. …
Zeiss Ikon
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How important is writing for games?
I am trying to create a game that has a small plot (maybe more of a theme). The plot just describes why the characters are fighting each other. Other than that I have not fleshed out the story.
How important would it be to flesh out the…
Bhupen
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