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Do not aim for a twist ending... Otherwise you risk writing the story for the sake of the twist and it can come off as trite and annoying. Ahem.. . I've got news for you, speaking from professional experience, if you plan to have a twist in a story --especially if it's near the end-- you ARE suppos...

I remember it fondly. I had to write the script for a play in sixth grade. I turned in a whackjob story about a guy who time traveled to give his past self ideas so he could pass his class. The dialogue were lines I filched from the local Filipino dub of the anime Yuyu Hakusho. No one had any idea a...

I only keep a close circle of people that I trust. They're the ones I call my friends. A few of them live overseas and I don't even see them much but we keep in touch so we know what's going on in each others life. I'm not afraid of offending my friends. I trust them to tell me off if I do after whi...

Do not aim for a twist ending unless you've written about 80% of the story. Otherwise you risk writing the story for the sake of the twist and it can come off as trite and annoying. At 80%, you can better see what ending your story can have and any twist you think of will be much more organic. Also,...

Characters are only as memorable as the stories they are in. So to make unique and memorable characters you must write an engaging and memorable story. A common pitfall among amateur writers is to focus on the characters and forget about the rest of the story. That's how the caricatures we make fun ...

Fly solo but get an editor. Someone you trust to give you good feedback. Someone you can bounce ideas off of.

The difficulty with having a co-author is having to seek compromises between two people working in the same narrative space. Unless that's the entire point of the work, best avoid it.

Perhaps this is a bit of an unorthodox tip, but I personally find that a visually stimulating writing environment helps me get my thoughts flowing. I use a black background with pixely green text on full screen in Word. The less surrounding distractions the better. Many years ago, I discovered that...

I use this to tame my inner critic http://i.imgur.com/D6rsgVa.jpg Seriously though, finding someone you trust to take a look at your stuff and give honest comments is one of the best ways. Of course you have to listen to him or her and not second guess so much. And of course, sharing drinks makes fo...

So she DOES turn into his sword! That sounds pretty cool and seems to be an important part of their characterization. I wouldn't hide it so much. The mystery and so on will come from the reasons behind everything. You can easily create tension in the space between the actual start of the story and t...

Thanks, folks. It really helps to have instruction from subject matter experts on this kind of stuff. I'm beginning to feel the difference in what I'm accepting from myself now that I've got better guidelines to follow. I've got two excerpts to share with regard to the topic at hand. I'm shooting f...

A common problem writers run into when writing complex choreography such as battle sequences is getting the balance of detail and abstraction right. That balance becomes a problem when writing dialogue as well so it's not surprising they're both giving you trouble. I often found that it's caused by ...

Fly Away and Summer Sojourn sound a little generic to be honest.

Maybe lean towards the humorous bits more? We dunno anything about the island's population so maybe start there?

I don't work with Ren'py but I used to work in ONScripter back when I was trying to make VNs. I found that writing in a stage play manuscript format makes it easy to transfer to code and lets me better visualize how the scenes work. It's a lot better than if I wrote in a short story prose or novella...

Funerals are pretty private affairs. The most a school would do would be to have an announcement by the principal with everyone gathered in the auditorium and put a flower or something on the deceased's desk in the classroom.

Everyone's added quite a few excellent points already, so I hope you don't mind if I throw some of my ideas into the mix. Word repetition is an issue with young writers but not the only thing you should be looking out for if you want to improve yourself. Vary your sentence length and structure! Loo...