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I was so excited. It was all I wanted to do. Writing was the first thing I’d do in the morning and the last thing I’d do at night. That wore off after a while, and I found that the way to actually get going was to put aside all the big ideas I had and focus on smaller ones that—while still...

I find that Grain Into Gold, a resource for building a realistic, well-crafted fantasy economy within TTRPGs, works more than well enough for novels.

I’ve been tinkering with an idea for a story set on an ecumenopolis for so long that I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever actually be able to do it. At the moment, I still can’t get it to work.

There are plenty of military juntas and dictatorships that you can look at for inspiration, but it can be easy to write a paper-thin, uninteresting regime where everyone who isn’t in the regime hates it. For some extra depth, I’d encourage you to also look at militarized societies (especially...

All the time. I usually focus my best efforts on the story I want to tell and then write a junk story whenever I get writer's block. That said, everything I post online is 'junky,' including the ones I put effort into. The stuff I actually try to write for anything other than practice gets kept...

Certainly, and I didn't mean to imply that you wouldn't have an intentional thematic undertone to your work. What I meant to say was more along the lines of the second half of what you admit yourself: that this kind of framing, where religion is explicitly a tool of control, does imply something...

That's such a complicated question. It really depends on what I'm going for. Richard III? Paul Atreides? Dedra Meero, Ervin Burrell? Daniel Plainvew? Does the Green Knight count? Does Area X?

I find this to be distracting and not really worth the effort. If our primary point of view in this story is a first person point of view through the eyes of someone who doesn’t understand a language, we as readers shouldn’t understand it either. The whole point of using first person is to in...

I think that this is a perfectly fine idea. That said, as others have pointed out, it feels somewhat generic. A good way to avoid this is to make sure the religion central to the story feels grounded in real worship and approaches to faith. It’s a complicated subject that many people overlook...

I’d venture to say that steampunk’s heyday has come and gone. I’m sure there are at least a few you could find here, but I doubt there’s a consistent stream of new works.

Some very good advice here, folks. Thank you!

Hey, folks. Here's the essence of my question: How do you write a community that feels real without having to develop a dozen separate characters? In the story I'm working on now, my protagonists leave home and travel into the unknown to save their village. Choosing to leave is a big decision...

Not ‘switching’ necessarily, but it does feel jarring to jump from 3rd person limited, ‘He ran upstairs,’ to, ‘Yikes, it’s messy up here,’ without a clearly marking that we’re reading a character’s thoughts (with italics, quotation marks, or a ‘speech’ tag).

First, I want to echo what other folks have been saying. Putting every sentence on a new line is really not the way to go about things. It pulls a lot of the weight from your storytelling, makes what you've written tough to read, and is generally messy. Stick to standard, 5-8 sentence paragraphs...

Still not for me, but this is much better. The only other bit of advice I'll offer is that, occasionally, your narration becomes too personal. While third person doesn't have to be cold and detached and you can mix your character's thoughts with the removed point of view, you occasionally...

There's a lot to be said about how much you say. I know that it's a convention of shounen (and prose in general that's styled after visual mediums like manga and comics) and that I'm not your target audience there, but I have some advice anyway. My biggest gripe is how blunt you are. Everything...

I’ve had a few ‘This is good!’ comments, but ultimately, the best feedback I’ve ever received was on a short story I wrote, where my reader asked me a lot of tough questions about the structure of my narrative and the depth of my characterization. It changed the way I approach a lot of my...

I'm a big fan of old, obsolete or archaic words like rivelled or wan. I think they're fun. Right now, I'm having an especially good time with fallow, specifically for the meaning of yellow/brown. I can't say I have any specific words that I feel are underused or overused, but I think a lot of...

I try to pick something central to the chapter that is different from what the chapter's actually about. In my most recent chapters, The Campfire and The Fallow Petals, both the fire and the petals are important in their chapters, but are ultimately just devices for what is actually important in...

That's mostly just what it's like these days. Most grammar tools have tried to integrate LLMs into their services even though I have yet to see it be worthwhile. It's still usable for checking punctuation, but I would avoid letting it rewrite really anything. That said, despite whatever their...