Search results

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...

I don't have much to say--it's really difficult to give any kind of helpful feedback on an outline, especially one for a single chapter, but I'll tell you right now that this: Is always a recipe for disaster. This is an intro as old as time itself. It's tired and in desperate need of a long...

When I first really got into the weeds, I wrote whatever I wanted, regardless of audience or purpose. It took a while to realize I was writing for someone and that I might need to be less obtuse. It helped that I was 'publishing' as I went, so I got feedback as I wrote and was able to realize...

This is something I wish SH had more options for. I know it’s a niche feature that likely makes an unnecessary mess of chapter indexing, but I think it would be nice to be able to have a book split into distinct parts without bloating chapter titles.

I haven’t been able to find that kind of thing myself just yet either. I’d be happy to help start or join a fantasy authors’ writer’s group if you mange to find one, though.

I think the description you have in the first passage is the strongest. I'd cut out the details about the clasp and his pommel, but it's good to see his face, and the rest is clearly important to your narrative (at least, I imagine that's why you kept it in both passages). I'd mix the two: The...

All the time. The big parts are the exciting ones. But there's a lot of joy and love to be found in the little moments with your characters. If you try your best to view the moments as days in their own right and not stepping stones to something greater (which takes time and a little bit of...