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| bio | website | |
|---|---|---|
| location | ||
| age | ||
| visits | member for | 2 years, 3 months |
| seen | Mar 6 at 21:18 | |
| stats | profile views | 22 |
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May 11 |
answered | Pitfalls of writing a main character of different gender to the author, specifically first-person perspective? |
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May 6 |
comment |
Books to improve writing skills @RalphGallagher -- I'm not complaining that Brown is shallow, but that he's bad. To use an analogy: I happily eat at In-n-Out Burger. It isn't great cuisine, the ambiance is sterile, and it's pretty fatty; but it tastes good, it's cheap, and it's fresh. I don't eat at McDonald's, because it tastes like crap. I don't object to thriller writers. Right now, I'm re-reading a novel by Stephen Hunter, a pulp writer if there ever was one. I don't read Brown because his prose sucks. YMMV, of course. |
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May 6 |
answered | plagiarism vs. reference? |
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May 6 |
comment |
Books to improve writing skills @RalphGallagher -- I'm not sure what your point is. Yes, Brown is trying to make money by writing shitty books and succeeding at it. You or I could either try that or go down to the bus station and offer $20 hand-jobs in the men's room, and the latter would be more dignified, more useful to society, and more likely to actually show a profit. |
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Apr 29 |
awarded | Editor |
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Apr 29 |
revised |
What's a good title to a presentations' table of contents? added 176 characters in body |
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Apr 29 |
answered | What's a good title to a presentations' table of contents? |
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Apr 26 |
answered | Can I ePublish my out-of-print history book? |
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Apr 24 |
answered | In what order should I describe a setting? |
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Apr 24 |
comment |
Potential confusion: referring to home planet as “Earth” "Trim" means to cut stuff out. "Tighten" means to change text to be more specific and more evocative. |
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Apr 23 |
comment |
How to refer to character of focus in a story "looking back over a paragraph and realizing you've used a word like 'looked' 5 times." If that was deliberate, Matt is a genius. Yes, repetition used deliberately and well produces a poetic effect; used accidentally or poorly, it can be exasperating. |
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Apr 23 |
comment |
How to refer to character of focus in a story @mattlohkamp -- you must hate Tennyson and Browning with their "Theirs nots" and "Half a leagues" and "I love thees" repeated over and over and over ... |
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Apr 20 |
comment |
Explicitly correcting yourself while writing - how appropriate is it ? Metanoi runs deep; into your life it will creep. |
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Apr 19 |
answered | Avoiding foot¬e disease |
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Apr 18 |
comment |
Do writers use highlighting to clarify ideas in their work in progress? The former -- where the book was just over-stuffed, there were too many character, too many scenes -- is achingly common. Fantasy, as a genre, is probably the worst offender (I'm looking at you, JRR! You too, JK!) but lots of other authors (Tolstoy) are almost as bad. I know I sound like Emperor Joseph in Amadeus saying "Too many notes" but I'm a more careful reader than most and it enrages me when the extra care is not exercised in appreciating the subtleties of language or characterization but wasted trying to remember who took that horse to Gimblethorpe five chapters ago. |
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Apr 18 |
comment |
Do writers use highlighting to clarify ideas in their work in progress? @JSBangs -- I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying that I've seen a lot more books where the author forgot that I, the reader, am not studying his book, I'm not taking notes or committing it to memory than books where the author forgot something important about the plot, timeline, or characters. In fact, I can only think of one example of the latter: in Catch-22, arguably the most complicated successful American novel, Heller twice mentions "the Splendid Atabrine Insurrection" but forgets to include the actual scene. (cont.) |
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Apr 18 |
comment |
Do Novels follow a 3 Act/2 Plot Point structure like most Movie Scripts? @jae -- my opinion? Are you sure? I thought I got that from Wikipedia... |
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Apr 17 |
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Do Novels follow a 3 Act/2 Plot Point structure like most Movie Scripts? @jae -- that's why most jazz sucks. Only a truly phenomenal talent can produce art of any value without introspection, practice, reflection. When the milieu of some popular art form encourages improvisation, most of the result is unbearable. |
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Apr 17 |
answered | What's the proper way of formatting writing from a character in a novel? |
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Apr 17 |
answered | Do writers use highlighting to clarify ideas in their work in progress? |
