When anyone has the time to do so. Go ahead and give some pointers and i'll add em in the main body. I'll add my own ones too

up here to sit for now. When i have time during the weekend i'll put something in here

You should go back under your rock.

> Darkmatt wrote:
> honest:
KNOW MORE THAN YOUR READERS WILL EVER KNOW ABOUT YOUR CHARATERS <

Indeed; I wrote an entire life-story for Zero, Commander Krg, and Subcommander Erf before joining Space.
This also prevented me from doing something silly like suddenly deciding that Krg has enough telekinetic power to split a world just because he got captured and imprisoned.

Instead of writing about aliens, write about Catholics. You won't need to change the plot, just the geography. So a story about Mondo the Martian trying to conquer earth from a secret vault under Olympus Mons becomes a story of Cardinal Mark conquering earth from a secret vault under the Vatican.

Put in a lot of puzzles. This shows how really devious your Catholics are. In real life bad guys prep teens to blow themselves up in movie theaters without making a Soduku out of it, but nobody wants to read that crap.

Your characters should spend a lot of time running around between puzzles talking about how confused they are and wondering what Catholic lied to them and about what. The best ending is that every Catholic lies about everything. This will fill chapters of your story and make the heroes more likeable to your readers, who will feel better about being totally confused and disliking Catholics.

It helps to explain why the heroes are up to their eyeballs in a secret world of Catholic conspiracy, if the Catholics hired them to get some answers.

Your heroes, despite working for celibates, or maybe because of it, must get laid.

In real life, the bad guy dies in a shootout without a lenghty debate over the inevitable failure of his conspiracy in the face of sex and drugs and rock and roll, but again nobody wants to read that crap.

If you do that, and you're a crap writer, you're the next Dan Brown.

If you do that, and you're a good writer, you're the next Umberto Eco.

Either way--Kaching!

Given that my characters all seem to have three-letter names, unless their name is a pun, I have to agree with that.  Also, there are maybe two good pieces of advice in this whole thread.

A guide: How to write

Don't read this thread.

Essentially, everything in this thread is bad advice and should be ignored.  Even those parts that tell you not to read the thread.  If this does not cause you to have a headache, I'm explaining it wrong.

If you want to learn to write.

#1 - Read A LOT!
Look at great writers from Milton to Wilde to Conrad to Gaiman to Moore, they're all well-read and so have firm understanding of literature that preceded them.
Also, in reading you can compare writing styles and find what kind of writing you like or dislike.  This can be a tremendous help when you sit down to write your own stories.

#2 - Read either "The Writer's Journey" by Christopher Vogler or "The Hero of a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell.
You want to know structure, characters, plot devices, tension, action, drama?  Learn the structure of writing.  Once you know the rules, you can find more creative ways to bend and break them while still writing an incredible story.

#3 - Write constantly.
Kafka wrote at least one short story a day.  If you go back and read them, a lot of them were crap.  But he also wrote some of the most amazing short stories you can find.  In consistently writing you find your own voice, you learn about human nature, you learn what works and what doesn't work, you find out what you want to write, you force yourself to be creative with always having to invent another story, you make mistakes and learn from them, and then one day you find that you actually know what you're doing.

#4 - Make mistakes and learn from them.
This one is pretty self-explanatory, but important. 

#5 - Search for constructive feedback.
It hurts sometimes, but find someone who'll be honest about your work.  If the people who read it only say they like it and its good, you'll never know what can make it EVEN better.  There's always a way to improve your work, find someone who can challenge you to reach a higher level in your writing.

That's all I can think of at the moment.  There's probably other good suggestions, but that's it for now.

I believe the biggest issue in the IC forum space thus far is adequate description. Everyone presumes that a table is a table, and rightfully so. However, an oak table, whose downward appendages, shaped into the powerfully muscular legs of the phoenix, talons grasping at marble spheres, giving it the appearance of floating inches above the dark stained carpet, is much more interesting to the reader. The story isn't lost much, however the reader can completely immerse themselves into the writer's world.