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Moral ambiguity = the fuel of good literature. To answer your question in more concrete, and perhaps useful, terms: As all us really old people know, there's really no such thing as a happy ending. Things break down, everyone dies, entropy rules, and so on, blah, blah, blah. Whether an ending is "happy" or not I've found to be negligible as far as the ...

What's the most important thing that your readers need to know right way? What's the scene that will drag them into your story? The answers to those questions will tell you what should come first. It's certainly possible to write a convoluted, insanely complex story, jumping back and forth in time. Kurt Vonnegut wrote: "Start as close to the end as ...

I promise you, if you do it without permission and get published nonetheless, they will sue the shit out of you. You have to ask for permission, there will be legal contracts, because the world's "owner" wants money, your story must really fit and must not disrupt anything the owner wants to do in the future. So, if you have a name and are already ...

Really long answer, I apologize. Hope it's useful. I thought about learning from novelists. But it seemed that some of the skills, i.e. expressing ideas through writing, won't translate well to expressing ideas through a game. I thought about learning from screenplay writers. It seems fairly relevant to storywriting for games. No, no, wrong ...

If you are writing it to make money: don't. If the world created gives you inspiration and makes you sit down and write for hours, then go ahead and do it. It's your mind, and you can write whatever you want as long as it's not published. Let people/editors/whoever read it, and if the feedback tells you it is really, really good, the you can contact the ...

Here's several tricks I have used to handle flashbacks: Vary their length and use them more often. If you think of flashbacks more like memories of varying length, it becomes apparent that they can be as short as one sentence or as long as an entire chapter. Humans are constantly bombarded with moments of past experience. Some are just a single second of ...

Technically you cannot copyright a plot. However, you can copyright a particular instance of that plot as long as it is not based on an older work in the public domain. In your Harry Potter example if every chapter had exactly the same incidents and more or less the same dialogue with slightly altered character names you would probably lose in court trying ...

I think you found one of the big uses: Character introductions. There are many books that have a segment along the lines of "As they were riding the train to Lyon, he couldn't help but to look at her and her perfect auburn hair. It was this hair that immediately caught his eye when he first saw her 6 years ago. It was the graduation party at her brothers ...

The best advice I ever read regarding flashbacks was from the excellent book, "How To Write A Damn Good Novel" by James N. Frey. He commented that flashbacks are very much overused and misunderstood, and speculated that writers often use them because they get anxious about the characters they themselves have created, and are trying to avoid conflict. At ...

As always in a good story, I'd say it depends. Is the riddle itself relevant to the story? Or, is the method of solving it relevant to the story? If so, I think it's fair to show the reader how the protagonist solves the riddle, even if it ends up boiling down only to something like he thought about it for a moment before it dawned on him that these ...

The other option - additional option, as you should definately write under a pseudonym - is to write something that is clearly fictional, but tells the true story. Then you are not being libelous, as you are not making any claims to truth, but you are getting the story out there. You could write another piece for publication once resolved, indicating the ...

I think your approach is wrong. Rather than trying to write what you love, you are trying to write for all the market segments. This almost never works. If it was so easy to cater to different market segments with a single book, publishers would have done so by now by using salaried writers. Instead, you not only have vampire novels, but vampire romance, ...

It seems to me that highly non-linear plots are rather different than simultaneous sub-plots, so I think I will address them separately. Simultaneous Plots When I do longer work, I usually have multiple sub-plots running. I never write one sub-plot all the way through. I always go back and forth, usually switching every chapter. This question actually ...

Obviously if you need to withhold something from the readers, such as the background of a character or past events that have relevance for the plot, you will need to use a flashback. Flashbacks about a character that is not the main focus of the novel can help to reveal motives and help enhance the plot. This is because the reader than can better understand ...

To add a little to Scarlett's answer (which is excellent BTW): Happy endings are far more prevalent than tragic ones because they're easier to pull off badly. In order to understand how an ending should be executed it is necessary to understand a little about endings. It cannot have escaped your attention that in many happy endings a male and female ...

CAVEAT: I am not a lawyer. At the level you're describing, yes, this is copyright infringement. Basically, if it's easy to demonstrate that your work is "substantially similar" to another piece, to which you had access, then infringement can be proved. Working with similar themes, plot elements, and tropes generally doesn't constitute such extreme ...

I get the impression that underneath this question is a question about ideal structure. That's too philosophical a topic so you have just presumed such a thing exists and based your question on that presumption. So to reword slightly: "Given the existence of an ideal plot structure and all that goes with it how do I, as a writer, take advantage of that to ...

This is a very interesting question that touches on the nature of fiction and non-fiction and the many ways in which they intersect. Two approaches come to mind, both encapsulated in books I've read. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (2003). The author describes the true and somewhat dangerous circumstance of secretly meeting with female English ...

Using in a pen name will work just fine in this situation. True, the publisher will know who you really are and you will be paid using your real name, but if they have any level of ethics they aren't going to go around saying who it really is. There have been a few popular Roman à clef style novels with anonymous authors, Primary Colors comes to mind. That ...

There are actually two books, specifically dedicated to writing for games, that I know of. The first is Creating Emotion in Games: The Art and Craft of Emotioneering by David Freeman. I've been to a couple of screenwriting classes with him and they are very intense and full of information. I've read this and I can tell you that it's worth buying but you will ...

I think it is a mistake to try to be all things to all readers. Most books focus on one specific genre, or maybe a combination of a couple of different loosely matched genres. That alone is going to alienate certain readers. If you try to throw in additional elements to try to appeal to readers who might not otherwise like the base genre, then all you will ...

Call me boring, but, at least for now, I only disobey the chronological order for historical-based interludes. In my current novel, which spans for thousands of years, I need to sometimes describe events that happened a long time in the past, so that I present them as sources or motives for events in the present. Character introductions is another area when ...

Just be aware, why flashbacks are considered bad: Many people cannot follow them. Take as example the movie Pulp Fiction. There is a character which is shot during the movie (I do not want to spoil). Later in the movie you see him alive again for an (for me) obvious reason: the movie is now showing a scene which took place later (like a flashback). I think ...

I'm afraid this is all too telly. It's more like a news paper article than a story, you're just dumping all the information in one big info dump. This is lazy writing. Instead of stating that "Kid’s either take their own lives, turn to drugs, prostitution or serve a life behind bars" you need to show it through action, dialogue, plot... Show us a day in ...

Google can be your friend. Here are some links I found by typing in the search term "video game writing" http://www.writing-world.com/freelance/games.shtml http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/12/breaking-into-video-game-writing http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Video-Writing-Design/dp/158065066X http://www.gamecareerguide.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4858

Most books have this page with small-print at the front or back which usually goes like (example from the book nearest to my bed): © Dan Simmons 2004 Hyperion copyright © 1989; All rights reserved This means that the book has specific copyright claimed to it. In most countries (I am not a lawyer, don't blame/believe me, yada...) copyright ...