If you don't have a copy of 9 stories by J. D. Salinger, I highly recommend picking up a copy. He writes very short paragraphs and his character...
Eugene O'Neil was famous/infamous for putting long descriptions into his scripts so that they ended up reading more like novels than plays. But...
I agree with this if you're just writing for yourself or simply to improve. If you're writing with publication in mind, though, I have to...
A lot of people will say that there aren't any original stories, that every story has already been told in one form or another. Some idealistic...
I'll start with an easy one - #4. Even if you don't put the copyright symbol on your work you still own the copyright. You have to sign away your...
Thinking about your audience beforehand is very important if you're considering writing anything for children/adolescents. You should go into it...
As Amy said every scene should have a point. Sometimes the point of a scene is to give a break. Constant tension is as wearing in a novel as in...
genre is tricky and publishers often have a hard time marketing novels that are cross genre, but that's about 100 steps away from where you are...
Sometimes I like to start from a picture - drawing, photograph, painting, anything really - and either let it inspire me, or to actively try to...
Haha, oops. I thought I read through the other posts but I must have had some kind of mental block. To be fair that is a passage worth pointing...
Lolita is full of great descriptions. Here's one I think is particularly brilliant: One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of...
Check out Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It's about both the art and the writing of comics and a great place to start if you want to learn...
Telling always gets a bad rap and in general people will say that you should favor showing in your writing. The truth is that you need a balance...
Also don't forget that wise characters often seem to know more than other characters because the author decides how much information each...
No matter how you define a character's strength it should be tested at some point in a story and in isolation be inadequate to completely overcome...
Separate names with a comma.