Recent content by ignova

When immortal god-beings talk like teenagers.

One of the weirder things I learned was that it used to be against the law to wear clothes that were too fancy for your station (sumptuary laws).

I think everything is equally hard, because everything is relative, and our standards of what is 'good' are set by everything that came before. We're not being measured againt an objective standard, but against whatever has been previously possible. So it might seem easy to write a story about...

well this escalated quickly

Swearing is a tool like any other used in writing. Too much swearing makes you look like you're trying too hard to be edgy, or like your vocabulary is too stunted to come up with something more expressive. However, people swear in real life, and avoiding it entirely can lead to unrealistically...

I have long playlists, but even these can get repetitive after a while. Radio stations with instrumental music (classical, jazz, etc.) are useful when I get stuck in a rut with the old stand-bys.

Some platforms deliberately lack (or got rid of) downvoting features, because they get abused by trolls or brigades. One star reviews have similar abuse potential. For that reason, I'm not a fan of star based review systems. But what can you do. ?

My inclination would be to call a flash-forward a prologue, but people may skip it if you do. ? Maybe some others will weigh in.

Prologues are like anything in a story - they can be done well, or done badly. A good prologue adds something important to the story. A bad one is just redundant. I gather a lot of people skip prologues because they're used to seeing bad ones, which is a shame. I personally don't skip them, fwiw.

I may or may not do a title drop. It might have to wait until neayly the end, when everything is coming together and getting summed up.

Writing from the perspective of a character I hate.

My personal opinion is that a movie script format is for works that are destined to become movies. If that isn't a realistic aspiration for you, it would be better to just use a novel format for a novel. Some kinds of uniqueness are innovations; some are just out of place. Formatting gimmicks...

Generally, good dialogue is invisible, so you don't notice it unless you're deliberately looking. (An exception would be certain styles going for that Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde flavour of witticism.) Bad dialogue is hyper-visible. I'm OK with utilitarian dialogue, so long as it's not super...

I wrote my latest story because I wanted to read something that didn't exist yet. It came out of some covid hobbies, and weird dreams.

As others have pointed out, a lot of acclaimed stories do this, or use similar techniques. It's also common in mystery stories to not exactly start at the end, but start with the death, and then reconstruct what happened as the investigation plays out. Sometimes 'giving away' the ending...