Search results

Alien vs. Predator vs. Brown vs. the Board of Education

But if you mysteriously don't get a star cap as a child, you'll know you're the protagonist and are going to be the world's first 200 level god tier when you hit 18.

It's just there to have zero backstory for the protagonist while also being able to use the word "isekai" to attract a certain crowd. It does take actual work to have a protagonist with a compelling background leading up to the events of the main story. It's a lot easier to have someone spawn in...

Among the other popular examples you gave, the only one that comes to mind is Flowers For Algernon. It's one of the few examples where the diary style is essential for the story it's telling. A major component of the tragedy is watching the protagonist's mental state improve and degrade over the...

Head-hopping is a pretty loose term. While it technically does count as one even with omniscient third-person, I don't think anyone but the biggest pedants would notice unless you brought it up yourself. When you do usually see head-hopping mentioned, it's when it's jarring to look at...

I wouldn't tell my family if I made a sandwich, let alone a novel. Our area's culture is far too obsessed with judging and one-upping (or putting-down) each other. For one example, I took a national test and was told by the school principal that I had scored the highest in the school's history...

That sounds more like you could have a first-person perspective either way, simply with one being the researcher and the other being the real MC. It would be less jarring that way than having a third-and-first switch, if it does keep switching between chapters.

Narcissist has the best potential, but it's also very easy to do poorly and without charm. There needs to be care taken to not have them come off as solely a delusional, selfish jerk, since then even being the butt of the joke will be hard to appreciate. I'd say "crazy MC" has the highest...

It's been pretty uneventful. Most of the comment or DM notifications I receive are from accounts that are deleted before I can read them, so probably bot scams. I haven't gotten much feedback one way or the other.

Guaranteeing popularity is an impossible goal. You could do every attention-seeking measure on the planet and just get written off as little more than a mosquito buzzing in people's ears. There's just too much fickle subjectivity for it to be anything worth worrying about as a goal. That's...

I got the same kind of message last month from someone also called "natalie", saying the same thing to a lot of writers. They got banned pretty quickly so I can only imagine they were sending suspicious links to people who responded.

Writing a longer novel is only a bad idea when the story doesn't need it and it's being done of some sort of self-imposed obligation. If anything, writing a single long novel makes it infinitely harder to run out of ideas, because you'll always be working in the same general framework and...

The hardest part for me is the ignition step. Once I get into the flow of writing or editing, it can be very hard to want to stop. It's just that it's hard to actually find the right time when I'm worried about X, Y, or Z that's going to force me to break out of that flow. You'll never see a...

"Kill your baby" is common advice for a lot of reasons. You're just keeping yourself rooted to what you already have. It's not always a bad thing, but don't be afraid to wrap things up and move on. I've had to give up two stories of over a million words before. It's never fun, but sometimes you...

I write primarily with third-person limited. Sometimes I'll play loose with it, but that's more for explaining things the character(s) would already know, rather than actual omniscient narration. It's one advantage that the written medium has over others, not needing to have the MC ask or be...

It's like a form of advertising, huh?

You'd actually be harder pressed to find LitRPGs that thoroughly incorporate other characters' game systems into the narrative. At best, it's usually just thrown at you from the moment you meet the other characters to avoid having to actually think of how to naturally introduce them to show you...

I've mentioned before that I like to treat fiction as if I was writing historical events of that world, but I feel like this is pushing a similar idea to an untenable extreme. It sounds like you need to get your feet wet before you go off the deep end.

I always approach stories like I'm writing historical accounts of what happened, not that I'm personally causing things to happen. It can lead to a lot of twists and turns that are more natural, even if uncomfortable or inconvenient for me as a writer. That natural flow is still important enough...

I only see one msg from them which is even weirder than spamming