Recent content by Penpilot

There's nothing wrong with using said. It's an invisible word when it comes to stories. I think it's mostly writers who notice it, and/or worry about how much it's used. I've found going to extremes to avoid things that don't necessarily need to be avoided doesn't usually end well. With that...

I don't think it's necessarily a deal breaker. If I remember right, The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss does this. If you do a google search for novels that mix first and third person, you'll find many traditionally published books that have done this. As with almost everything in...

I suspect that it might have something to do with the US occupation of Japan after WWII. It planted an admiration for the west and thus a western flavor into parts of their culture. I remember seeing news reports of Japanese people getting operations on their eyes to make them look more western.

I've never done any of the following with any of my stories, but here's where I think the line is. I think asking AI to explain a specific grammar rule and give examples, so I can apply that knowledge as I write is fine. I think asking AI if a sentence is grammatically correct, so I can make...

I don't think what I do is anything special, but for my climaxes, it generally unfolds like this. Come up with plan, execute plan, plan fails. come up with new plan on the fly, and execute new plan. What you do specifically depends on the type of story you're telling and the details of your...

Reddit is a... weird... place. Each subreddit has it's own personality. Some places are cool. Some are not. Some times you get a genuine interaction. Sometimes you encounter people who only want to hear unconditional affirmation. I think one of the worst aspects of it is there are people who go...

Umm... not really. I'd imagine they'd all be looking at me like this.

I've found learning structure to be very freeing. Part of learning to write is learning to organize your thoughts and ideas in a way that makes sense. Structure helps with that. It's only limiting if you let it be limiting. Everything has a basic shape, houses, cars, wheels, computer programs...

After the first draft, I start with big picture stuff and the move my way down to little picture stuff. Big picture is stuff like plot and character arcs. Little picture stuff is like sentence structure and word choice. Edits are never linear. I sometimes have to jump up a level if I forget...

How does that compare to Scrivener? I've been working with Scrivener for years, and looking at DabbleWriter, on the surface it looks to be similar except way more expensive.

I'm a terrible speller. When I started taking writing seriously many-many years ago, my punctuation was terrible. I'm much better now, and how I got better was simply by writing a lot. Any time I would encounter a punctuation problem, I would look up the rule I was having trouble with, and then...

When I worked primarily in Word, I would have revision numbers for that one large file. Eg Novel-V001. But then I realized it was easier to work with smaller files. So instead, I would split a book into its chapters with each chapter having it's own folder. So, a chapter would be named like...

This is a bit tangential, but hopefully there's something useful to be gleaned from it. I grew up playing various sports. In terms of success, failure, and pressure, one of the keys I found for handling things was in repeating the following statement to myself. "Control the things you can...

Many-many years ago, my first book had an ending where the heroes were facing an army of the dead. After watching a documentary on the Great Wall of China, I got the idea for my third book, which involved a great wall that guarded the known lands from mysterious creatures known as the the...

IMHO, you identify and sharpen your writing voice by simply writing and revising. Finding your voice is kind of like going out and finding yourself as a person. When you're first starting out, you'll try on lots of different hats. You'll be influence by what you read, by what you see, etc...