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I get one-star ratings for just about all of my stories. Just look at any of my series - you'll invariably find lots of five-star ratings, a smattering of four-star ratings, and one or two one-stars with, usually, nothing in between. Not to come across as arrogant, but I know I'm a pretty good...

Personally, when I create fantasy settings, I do that by taking a hodgepodge of historical ideas and one or more fantasy ideas, some of them original. In a fantasy story, it would be boring and unrewarding for me (not to mention way too much research) to exactly duplicate the mores and...

As others have said, the best way to develop an intuitive sense of style and description is to practice. Write, write, write. But I have a few rules of thumb that I use that are probably good overall ideas. 1) The difference between a scene with poor description and a scene with good description...

My chapters are a similar length - they probably average 5.5-6k words. Now, my narrative style might be different from yours, but I tend to split my chapters up into sub-chapters of about a thousand words where there's a break in the narrative but it's much smaller and without the thematic jump...

Fiction writing is an art and not a science. That said, you need to be very observant about people and how they act, react, and talk about their own experiences to understand them - women, men, children, it doesn't matter. If you can leave as much of your personal bias by the wayside as possible...

I'm nonbinary but moderately masculine. By that, I mean I was born male, pass as male, and have a reasonably masculine body type. And yet I feel absolutely zero connection to masculinity, and no dysphoria from my body ether... like I present how I present just because of inertia, and I'd be just...

Well... mission accomplished! Your story is great - I was hooked from the start and it's kept up the superb quality throughout. And I think it also has what needs to be present in niche stories for them to be really successful - it stands on its own even without the trans/gender changing aspect...

As somebody who writes primarily genderbender fiction (at least on this site), I may be able to offer some insight. I'm not going to go off and state that I'm doing it right or that I've not fallen prey to any of the criticisms levied here, but I also don't feel like I've used genderbending as a...

Ideally, a blurb will have specific ideas from the story and a clever hook to get people interested. It can't just inform readers - it has to make them want to find out who these interesting characters are and what happens to them. For instance: Life is hard when you're a misfit catboy. Xin's...

If you define CC in such a way that it does not exist, then I suppose it doesn't. However, I've definitely received what I consider to be CC, and I think both of the premises here are flawed because: 1) I have received critique that I agreed with on items that I might not have fixed anyway...

If you have an existing chapter/passage, there are a few easy ways to remove double carriage returns without otherwise affecting the document. In Google Docs: Do a find-replace (Control-H). Make sure "match using regular expressions" is checked. Find: \n\n Replace With: \n In MS Word: Do a...

Well said - I think this is key here. The reason there's a rule not to use adverbs in dialogue tags* is because, if you don't have that rule, lazy writers tend to pepper them freaking everywhere and they lose all meaning. I sometimes use adverbs in dialogue, but I'd be surprised if it was one...

I should clarify my bona-fides: I am not a professional writer, but I do make money from my writing. A few thousand dollars a year from fiction writing between Patreon, commissions, and Amazon sales, which is a nice supplement to my job - a hobby that more than pays for itself! Having got that...

I think every writer has to develop their own style and figure out what works for them - but reader feedback is important for this and we're remiss if we ignore it. Here's my advice on managing dialog: When I'm worried that readers will get confused about who's talking and want to add nonverbal...