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Slow and steady wins the race. Cliché's out the way (although I do think it's true), one of the things I find with writing is that you should always stick to what you're comfortable with, unless you're finding it detrimental to your writing. So, if you're doing 250 words/hour, and feel that's too slow, then I would suggest you set yourself an easy target. ...

Time is based on an Event. We are in the year 2010 because someone inaccurately took the birth of Jesus Christ as the base (hence b.c. And a.d. denominations). Other cultures have other years, I believe either the China or the Arabian countries have a completely different year. In the Star Wars Extended Universe, the battle of Yavin is the base for their ...

Firstly, you need to make a living so you can eat, pay the bills, and support yourself. If you like the job, and enjoy programming, take the job. Being able to support yourself from just your writing from word go is a tall order indeed; I don't think there are many writers out there that are able to do that from their first book. Secondly, having a job ...

Your writing career will only end if you stop writing. Period. So don't stop writing. You may not have as much time as you want, or as much as you think you need. But don't stop. Write at night, write on the weekend, write over lunch. If you want it badly enough, don't look for excuses to stop writing. Look for excuses to continue writing.

Don't look at it as ending your career. Think of it more as gaining more real-world experience to enrich your writing. Maybe you'll go through something that you can apply to your story. I've found that through working in an area that's not writing (in IT as well) I meet people and learn many things that have helped my writing and understanding of my plots ...

I can think of a few ways: 1) Cheat. This was how Tolkien did it, so you'd be in good company. He just listed somewhere in the appendices that "Year 5798 by Gondor's calendar = 144 Shire Reckoning" and let the readers do the math. 2) Make the characters work out a solution. If you have characters on Terra and characters on Pluto who meet, they're going to ...

If you look to Tolkien, you see no time. Everything is long ago, far away, in the past, whatever. I am a dork of the numeric kind, so I'm forever trying to squash my tendency to use "real" numbers, because I think it's mostly unnecessary, limiting, and a little jarring...When you speak, you never use exact time. The closest you're going to get is "a few ...

You may not like this suggestion, and it may not necessarily work financially, but it's an idea that I'm seriously considering: how about temporarily picking up a manual labor job, like washing dishes or bagging groceries? Instead of thinking of manual labor as being menial work for the uneducated, you could think of it as being thinking time, free from the ...

Like others have said, if writing is truly something you want to do, you can find time to do it. Lunch, breaks, nights (stay up an extra hour). Any time you go to turn on the TV, stop and ask, "why aren't I writing instead?" I'm also a software developer, and I have a wife and three young kids, but I've been able to write nearly 60,000 words on my first ...

five and a half years No hyphens. Hyphens are for adjective phrases: It was a five-and-a-half-year journey. You also don't use the hyphen with the fraction. 51⁄2 years

AP Style requires a.m. or p.m. -- lower case, separated by periods. There is no need for an additional period if the sentence ends with the time. The briefing began at 2:30 p.m. This would be the correct format for anything journalistic (newspaper, magazine, wire service, etc.) In addition, many other publications and websites will ask for things to ...

If you set any part of your story in a place and time which your readers will recognize, that part will eventually be dated. That's simply fact. Look at The Invisible Man or The Time Machine or The First Men in the Moon. Those are all classics of scifi, but the parts set in the "present" feel, clearly, of that time. The question is whether the non-Earth ...

Different writers have different writing disciplines. Mark Twain said that his discipline was to write a certain number of pages per day, but he wrote in longhand and as he got older he began to write in a larger and larger hand, so that his actual output was less. He was, he confessed, a profoundly lazy man. I read that Stephen King used the "pages per ...

If your concern is the how-to of changing perspective, you can do it a few ways, but the idea should always be that you finish one beat, and the next beat starts the different time-voice: 1) End the current chapter and start a new one. That allows you to have a different POV, a different time-scale, a different location, anything. 2) End the current ...

If you are just using dates in narration, as opposed to in dialog, you could just use Gregorian dates. When an American or European writes a history book today, they routinely use the Gregorian calendar even if that's not the calendar used by the people they're talking about. This only matters if the date itself is significant to the subjects. If the ...

Details will always date, but you should add whatever details you feel bring a sense of truthfulness. Take The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: Arthur Dent starts off in southern England. There is a muddy driveway, a dressing gown, a pub, salted peanuts, a leather satchel, 3 pints of beer at lunchtime and then ten minutes later he's on a Vorgon sparecraft ...

I really wouldn't worry too much about words per hour. I agree with Craig (and Dean Wesley Smith) that 1000 words an hour is a good, sustainable rate, at least for some genres, but I don't think professional writers got there by trying consciously to write faster - I think that the faster writing comes naturally as you get more comfortable with your craft. ...

On the off chance that this isn't a novel, just be consistent. Some writing (academic, non-fiction, and news, for example) is edited to a style guide, and most style guides will have a preferred way to format times and dates. For fiction, and particularly in dialog, you specifically don't want to come up with a consistent system unless you want everything ...

From the point of view of practicality it's pretty hard for human beings from earth to adjust to other solar cycles etc. We're not built to operate in days much outside of our current 24 hour clock. People working in locations where the days are unusually long or short (or practically non-existent e.g. the South Pole) experience bizarre physiological and ...

What you are talking about isn't "voice", but a scene change. If something is important to your to your scene, you need to describe it in detail. This is especially true in scenes with danger or suspense. So if your heroes are entering a dungeon, where you know there is a monster hiding, you may describe the dungeon in great detail, making the characters ...

No rules. But some guidelines: Try to stay consistent with the layout of the gaps. There are traditionally two allowed "zones of sparsity": Prologue and epilogue. Other than that, progression should be mostly linear. Bigger gaps are allowed but mark them as such. Four months in a coma shouldn't be a three-asterisk break. It should be a start of another ...

Time lapses, time advancements are used to move the story forward per plot situation, tempo, and cohesiveness. If your story is going to span several generations of characters...well, then, you are going to move the story forward (skipping the non-pertainent boring crap) by time advancements. If your story is going to stay in the moment, perhaps spanning ...

Yes, there is a respected rule: Skip the boring stuff! It depends on your story, on your style and what you want to show. If you have a gunslinger and you want to establish how good he is, you may want to describe in detail his fight against five other people which only lasts a few seconds to a minute. If the reader already knows how good he is, just ...

I would use commas between each component, and use "and" only if the last component is seconds. I learned way back in intermediate school that "and" is only used before fractions (so 10,247 is said "ten thousand, two hundred forty-seven" but 10 7/8 is said "ten and seven-eighths"). I would call seconds the smallest "lay person" time interval — if ...

Firstly, while I like HP, I am not sure they are the best style guide for a writer. They are not all especially well written. The stories and concepts behind them are superb, which is what captured the readers imagination. Secondly, the writer is describing the critical events, and giving the timescales around them. The time for Harry to put on the owl ...

If it's for a novel, then I would say your characters should express the time in the most natural way for them to be doing so. The retired colonel would refer to 'dishes done by oh-nine-hundred' and the slacker teenager would say 'dude, around 8-ish'. It seems rare to me in everyday living that we talk about A.M./P.M, but in caps with dots is technically ...

I guess it depends on how it's being presented. If a character is speaking the time it would be whatever flows naturally. Most of the time people talk about time in relation to now, so three in the afternoon could just be 'three o'clock'. On the other hand, when reading a clock (more so a digital clock) it might work best to be very exact with the time ...