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A few years back, fantasy author Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn, Wheel of Time, Stormlight Archive) wrote a series of essays describing laws of magic systems. In the second of these essays, Sanderson posits that limitations are of greater importance than powers when it comes to effective magic systems....

Its either you pay first or they work and you pay later? The two payment arrangements I've commonly observed are: 1. Payment upon delivery of services. (This usually happens in situations where the buyer is an established entity, and can provide references, etc., with comparatively more credibility...

First off, you need to consider what side of the application process you are on. Are people coming to you, asking you specifically to write for your project? If so, then it's helpful to have a classified saying "Here are my rates, and here is the kind of work I will accept." But if you're ...

This post I made in a different forum speaks some to the point about "bland" protagonists--most harem protagonists tend to be designed as "self insert" characters for the audience, and by necessity tend to be as featureless and plain as possible. However, this kind of character d...

I think it's valuable (and often important) to create unique and distinct cultures. But you can often run into problems when you don't properly separate the characteristics of a culture from the characteristics of individual characters. Fail to do this, and you wind up with characters that are walki...

One way that you can make devious characters more sympathetic is by having them use their powers for good. You describe the characters as a "bunch of jerks" for resorting to insults, lying, blackmail, and violence, but these are tools that could also be used to defend the weak (for example...

To take things in a completely different direction, you could try writing creative nonfiction--that is, nonfiction writing that is focused on conveying a narrative and applies the sensibilities of fiction writing (while still staying factually accurate). Many journalistic pieces fall into this. For ...

I hear that usually writers would start outlining plots and characters first, then begin writing the manuscript for their fictions/novels. This is common (especially for larger speculative works, like science fiction and fantasy), but not universal. Stephen King is famous for never writing off an o...

Looks somewhat educational. ^^ I'll be looking forward to this. Thanks! I hope you enjoy the finished product once it's released. Just a fair warning, I hope you don't go in expecting something too educational. I'm writing the story as a somewhat cartoonish caricature of the actual court systems, i...

I'd be interested in everyone's opinions on some VNs that you feel have really really good dialogue (both commercial and free). For us new writers, seeing examples of something that is very well done can really help :) It's more ADV than traditional VN, but I've always felt that the localization Ca...

If you are a co-author would you like to write being limited, having to follow plot points and possible endings or would you like to write with control over what happens in the route? It's going to vary from person to person, so I'd recommend discussing this topic in some amount of detail with the ...

"Conflict" is pretty foundational to storytelling, even when it comes to stories without a lot of drama or high stakes. It can simply mean that we have a status quo, and one or more characters who are unsatisfied with that status quo and working to change it. Sometimes, the status quo is &...

I think it might be helpful to ask more generally, "What is a fan?" Or, "what makes a fan?" Generally, in every case where I've been a "fan" of a franchise or creator, it's because 1) they created something that I enjoyed and 2) that thing built up my anticipation of fu...

George R.R. Martin describes these two writing approaches as "architecture" and "gardening." "I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms ...

One thing that's pretty foundation to fiction writing is the idea of viewpoint. Generally, the most common viewpoints we see employed in fiction are first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient. (There are also other viewpoints, like the second-person narrative that some interacti...