General Q&A about the craft of professional writing, editing, and publishing. Questions about all types of writing are welcome -- fiction, technical documentation, scholarly articles, poetry, scriptwriting, blogs, and more.
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I work for a costume company that has a company blog intended to inspire costuming and general ideas. We focus on Halloween sales, but we also have Renaissance and Oktoberfest themed costumes that...
A good SDK (software development kit) includes plenty of well-documented examples. It also includes good tutorials and developer guides, which introduce concepts in logical progressions, typically ...
I am writing an essay on project management within IT and in my introduction I will give a brief description of project management, to being my essay I was looking at using one of these: Pro...
If you're writing a fantasy novel, would it be best to include a map of the geography that the story takes place in at the beginning of the book? I've seen quite a lot of fantasy books (Redwall s...
I find it hard to name my characters. Every normal name sounds funny if applied to a product of my fantasy. If I take a common name, I may get the image of someone I know into my head. And that may...
A personal frustration of mine is when I see a cluster of nouns sitting together in a sentence. I usually see these in highly technical emails, but not exclusively. Here is a particularly bad ex...
SPOILER ALERT: Questions and answers may contain spoilers for all three books in the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Symbolic Conflict as the Climax of Social Conflict I noticed an i...
There are actually Wiktionaries for many languages and the English Wiktionary also defines and translates words of many other languages. But ignoring these other languages, have you tried the Engli...
In my novel, I have a part where there is a war scene, and I need to explain it precisely from the king's point of view. How can I explain the war graphics vividly?
... are very skilled in getting men to like them, men really easily fall in love with them, but they (the women) are not interested in anything more than a sexual relationship?
What are specific requirements, a writer should follow, when writing something that is going to be (or just can possibly be) not only read but listened as well?
It has around 200 poems, a lot of vulgarisms, and many of them seem senseless.
Am I right in assuming that a fantasy book will garner much less interest than a realistic fiction novel? On one hand, fantasy has its own market of readers that are always looking for new, great f...
I've written a children's story and had it illustrated. It's a picture book. I've heard that publishers prefer to receive manuscript only — not illustrated, unless the author is the illustrator. ...
For our SDK, we generate individual documents (PDFs) and one big HTML doc set (CHM file) from the same Docbook source. Each book has an index, and the HTML version has an integrated index that is ...
I write fiction as well as poetry. And many a times I use poetry as a tool to bring out that acute feeling of pain or love (as required) in my explanations. What if I use poetry to introduce or en...
What is a better way to write in an email to tell my client that I will charge him a fee of say $100? Often, I feel very reluctant to write these ways: I will quote the hosting and development ...
I'm interested in newer software/software stack to use in writing technical papers. For the longest time I have been use LaTeX to handle this but in looking at getting longer pieces published, such...
Nabokov was very discouraged when he translated his Lolita into Russian. And he spent half a year on it. So should I try the translation myself?
I'm planning to title a book "Taiwan Seek." The book is about starting a classified ads website in Taiwan. So I thought about short words that are related to classified ads: want, seek, looking fo...
I write epic fantasy; I've written two trilogies in a joint setting, and am writing further books in the same setting. I would like to start writing short stories for my setting as well - stories ...
I'm curious. After reading some other questions, I've been pondering about the frequency and reason for happy endings. That is, a positive and/or hopeful ending, even if not everything went right, ...
I'm rewriting a technical book that will list two authors: the original author and me. Much of the text has been changed and there are some informal parts where reader is addressed in first person:...
In my story, there are two characters: a schoolgirl and a strange person with a creepy mask who gives her a tour in an art museum at night. Well, actually there is a third character; the boyfriend ...
I'm weak at building characters. What resources are there to create rich characters? I'm thinking beyond name generators: Quirks, biography, diseases like allergies, hobbies and jobs, wealth, omen...
What's the best way to show a character speaking a foreign language in a fiction manuscript? Should the foreign words be italicized and include a translation? Should it just be included in the sent...
I am writing an essay in which I used a simple chronological flow. Setting first the background, then the circumstances I was involved in and the decision I took, and finally my conclusion after th...
In a first-person narrative, I’d like to use the following sentence: It took me nearly a decade to write this script, and now I’d pitch it to the top producer in Hollywood. I’m not following ...
After using a Logitech Internet Pro keyboard for the past several years, as well as an Acer OEM keyboard occasionally, I'm seriously thinking about getting a new keyboard. I write upwards of 7,000 ...
I've got an all persons fictitious disclaimer similar to the one mentioned at All persons fictitious disclaimer — ideas regarding modification? but where should I place it? Bear in mind, this is a...
My objective is Victorian-style tea-drinking "upper class" lady characters. (It's more of a writing challenge.) Does anyone have any useful resources or tips for creating such a character? Persona...
Links are useful to add additional information or second meaning or special flavour to certain words. This is especially useful for informal texts. Example: [Some programs](wiki://Metasploit_Proje...
A publishing contract is generally a contract between a publisher and an author; a collaboration seems to add an additional party to the agreement. I would like to know what kind of complications t...
I'm writing feature articles and trying to adhere to AP style, but I'm not sure how to attribute a source. I'm familiar with academic citation (APA, MLA), but have never done this in journalism. W...
Almost all online writing workshops/classes/programs websites have scores of testimonials from students. It is very difficult to understand whether these really are students or paid testimonials. S...
In many cases, I understand and appreciate what the person is writing (in each sentence), but have little to say in response, even if I really like what the person is saying. So when I have little ...
I keep hearing the word "beat" in Writers.SE, as in "... break your scene into beats" from this question. What is a beat? How is it different from a scene?
I tend to burn out developing my stories before they even reach the page, so I'm taking some advice to plan a novel. I didn't quite follow the advice to the letter; I used an idea that had been rol...
I was starting to leave a comment on this excellent question when I realized I had come up with a second question which was equally intriguing. If you're writing a story where 95% of the communic...
When I lay out a plot consisting of interwoven threads, one of the most annoying things is to manage effectively the factual, logical consistency of the whole. In order to be more effective and di...
Sometimes, I get confused as I add more and more ideas and scenes in a plot, is there any way of arranging these?
I have a longer work that took me a lot of effort to get through, and the moment I finished it, my life went crazy. That was about 6 months ago, and in the intervening time I haven't been able to ...
I'm writing a fantasy story about whether a teacher should be fired or not over teaching competency; most of the story revolves around the politics and the procedural process of the decision. So m...
I buy quite a lot of literature, mostly of academic nature. One thing I have noticed is that books by American authors always tend to be more explicit and contain more examples, regarding whatever ...
Also, why has it spawned an award for bad writing?
Cormac McCarthy's style is worthy of a topic all its own. I've read all his books. Hasn't written a bad one, though some owe more or less of a debt to Faulkner. Anyway, to the point: he doesn't use...
I keep hearing about literary fiction, and how it is so much better than genre fiction. What exactly is literary fiction?
If one character is using sign language and lip reading while the other is speaking normally, how do you represent the lines of the former? Quotations with "he signed" attribution or italics? E.g. ...
One for the creative writers, although I suppose a lateral shift might put it within reach of journalists/technical writers. As authors we all want to write, I would imagine: Something that many...
I am writing my thesis and now wonder whether I should typeset index and glossary as an appendix or after them. There's no department-level accepted writing style, so my adviser's opinion might be...
