: Re: Where to draw the line between fantasy and reality in a story? I realize this question may sound broad or vague, so allow me to explain. I never knew much about combat or dealing with injuries

I like to use Sanderson's First Law for this:

An author's ability to resolve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to the reader's ability to understand it.

The key to that sentence is "resolve conflict." You can get away with using "magic" to create conflict far better than you can get away with resolving it that way.

You don't even have to call it magic. The rules work for things that are not stated to be magic as well. There's always the magic of storytelling. Its what makes little girls in capes happen to have grandmothers who live all alone in the woods.

In other words, you will get away with the setup you mentioned where the protagonist gets knocked unconscious for hours far better than you would get away with the protagonist knocking the villain out and having the villain be unconscious for hours, unless the reader has some way of understanding why the villain went out for so long (maybe he had narcolepsy).

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: Re: Where to draw the line between fantasy and reality in a story? I realize this question may sound broad or vague, so allow me to explain. I never knew much about combat or dealing with injuries

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: It depends, but probably you want the distributed approach where the chapter on X tells you everything you need to know about X, even if some of that is only relevant if you're using feature

: How to find the balance between research and the obvious I'm embarking on writing my first popular science book on a controversial subject. For sure the writing must be rational, coherent with

: How many names in a book are too many? It seems to me there is a relative limit for commercial fiction regarding the number of named characters. This makes sense, of course. Readers get confused;

: Describing laughter in dialogue? I'm having a problem that is not addressed by The Chicago Manual of Style or the AP Style Guide I have access to: How does a writer express laughter in fiction?

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