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All the time. Whether or not I actually go back and rewrite it depends on when I have the idea. If it's while I'm still writing the chapter, absolutely. If it's while I'm working on the chapter that comes next, or even the one after that, I'll probably still go back. If it's a much larger idea...

Your sentences aren’t necessarily too long-winded (they’re maybe half the length of mine on average), it’s that you use the same structure too frequently. Variation is a better solution than cutting down your sentences.

There's some good advice here regarding how to structure a synopsis, but not a lot about how to write one. Something that I think is important that I find a lot of folks overlook is the specific language you use. Write your synopsis as though you yourself care about the story. This means giving...

On a micro-level, you start a lot of your sentences with participle phrases. While not the worst thing in the world, I'd go back and see where it would be possible to change up your sentence structure a bit. You also occasionally talk to your reader, reciting cliches and asking rhetorical...

There's not a lot of meat here. Your chapter is almost exclusively dialogue, with bits of really bare prose here and there. On top of that, most of the dialogue is observational--where characters observe the obvious around them. The result is that there's not a lot going on. It's hard to tell...

First person can be really tough, especially for new writers. There's a tendency to be very...quipy? I suppose? Meta? Often, I find first person narrators remove a lot of the weight a story has by making light of everything around them. It's a desire to be very interpersonal...

Congrats! It's always a great feeling when you actually start to get somewhere with your ideas. It makes the whole thing feel more real.

Some of the best literature in the world is about characters who get worse. Sometimes, by the end of a story, they realize who've they become and try to get better. Sometimes they don't. Ultimately, we are all writing about the human condition, and that includes aspects of ourselves that are...

I've only ever written for other people. Writing is a destructive process--you can't ever fully take what's in your mind and put it into someone else's. When you write down your ideas, they, by necessity, become flawed in some way. If it were all about me, I'd keep my ideas in my head where...

Certainly not unique to the genre, but unique to me: I've really been trying to work on Le Guin's 'elfland accdent' and to experiment with sentence length and composition. How much information can I fit into a single sentence before it's way too unwieldy? Is there a way I can write a sentence...

It takes a lot of work to put together worthwhile feedback. Why put in all that effort if the author themselves won't put in the same amount to create the text to begin with?

Can I ask why you're so invested in using first person if you're interested in going beyond the limited point of view it offers? The strength of utilizing a tool like first person (as opposed to third person limited) is to convey a particular perspective, with all the incorrect, biased, and...

I can't say I've ever forgotten fundamental details, but I constantly forget when a character is injured (or how). More than once, my rough drafts have skipped over a broken bone or a stab wound written about just a few chapters beforehand.

I think that writing characters through the lens of 'archetypes' might be artificially creating some difficulty here. If your character is designed based on present values for how they should act rather than being tailor-made to the story you want to tell and developed from your own...

At the heart of any story should be the drama within and between your characters. I think a lot of folks get sidetracked by the spectacle (the magical duels) and their writing suffers for it. Politics, while also spectacle to a degree, much more easily lends itself to developing the kind of...

I plan a bit here and there. I've found that planning everything out in detail is really helpful for being able to stick to a deadline, but I can also get caught up in outlining and never actually get around to writing anything. I'd say most often, I'll paint in really broad strokes and then...

I typically don't find much of a difference between the two. Every story beat is an important moment for one character or another and every major moment of characterization is an important scene in the story. For me, this means a Google Sheet with a set of cells for each chapter: one for the...

Absolutely. It's always enjoyable to see what other people are doing with the same tools.

I'm generally pretty vague about place descriptions, unless the layout of a place is especially important. I like to leave a lot of room for interpretation and I find that the more I try to nail down on the page the specifics of how a place, person, or thing looks in my mind, the more I wind up...

More than anything, I would like to make someone else feel something. If I could make even one person feel the way I have felt reading the stories that have stuck with me most, that would be enough.