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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Is anyone aware of a plugin for MS Word that allows me to keep my documents in a git repository (gitlab compatibility would be even better)? I'm aware that git diffs won't be very meaningful, merge...
In context, a guy and a girl have a date, and in restaurant, they are having this moment, where girl feeds guy with "Say 'Ah!'". What is the best way to describe this motion from the guy's perspec...
For the most part, my story is told from the main character's perspective. However, there are a few scenes that I would like to write that really don't require the main character to be there. I cou...
So far, I've been learning rules and guidelines for plotting a good story from John Truby's excellent "The Anatomy of Story". Truby structures plot using 22 steps (a summary here). Among them, th...
My main character gets shot and survives. One thing that bothers me is a character who is injured and keeps going like the energizer bunny. I try to set up for a rapid recovery, mentioning traini...
If you are starting a freelance product description writing business, do you generalize or specialize? In other words, do you offer writing in an area like "product descriptions for tech companies"...
Umberto Eco, E. T. A. Hoffmann and others have pretended (in the introduction to the story) to have found and edited obscure old manuscripts. In my view this added to the charm of their writings. ...
I don't know if this is out of the scope of this website. I'm a student in software engineering deparment and I am supposed to make a project for a course during the semester. The first step of it ...
The government of this (fantasy) world is made up of a small group, randomly chosen at birth and representing maybe 0.5% of the population. The group are tutored in their homes with their families ...
Would it be possible? It strikes me as impossible but I am still curious to know what you think.
Yesterday I asked a question about writing a female character who has agency. Much to my surprise, it was well-received and generated a lot of great discussion. In reading that discussion, howeve...
I'm attempting to write a novel, an historical fiction with a small fantasy component (time travel through a portal). The travelers (main characters) are a young couple from the late 23rd Century ...
If, for example, someone said : "How are you today?", how would you go about "translating" this into sounding like they were talking with a full-mouth? Like, phonetically.
Following APA style - Do I report my results in the dissertation using the variables I'm researching or their operationalizations? For example, which is style is correct: The correlation between...
The main plot follows the MC while travelling through the world trying to rescue his family. While doing this however, he must overcome a lot of difficulties. These are subplots focused on other ch...
The preface of Introduction to Algorithms mentions that In this, the third edition, we have once again updated the entire book. The changes cover a broad spectrum, including new chapters, revis...
I am working on my upcoming book's blurb. One of my characters is a leader inspired by Hitler. I have mentioned him as "Hitler like leader". But this seems weak in my blurb. What can I write to c...
A vampire has been sleeping under a castle in Austria for centuries. But now the castle became a tourist attraction. It's really annoying. And the taste of the blood of the people on the region did...
My MC is focused on his profession; barely giving his personal life a thought. His last serious romantic relationship with a woman was when he was 22. Time for that later, he believes. Retire at 45...
I am currently working on a fiction book and my characters work for a company that in real life has been out of business for 30 years, but in my fiction book there is an alternate scenario and it h...
I know most readers don't like prologues, so I've tried to make it as simple as possible. I write the following knowing fully well how weird it’ll make me look. — A.B.G. A.B.G. Is the fi...
I am working on a technical book teaching users how to analyse data using geographic information systems. I would like to use data from an open source data portal such as open source fire departmen...
Please help me understand various approaches towards developing an essay about issues of society (like women's empowerment, child education, sanitation, Global Warming, etc.). Specifically, I want...
I will be appearing for the SAT with essay next month. However I am confused about one thing- are we allowed to use abbreviations like "we're" (we are) and "it's" (it is) in the essay section? Will...
So I wrote a short text recently in which the character has a very strong political opinion (anti-LGBTQ), which in addition is totally different to my own opinion. Now, I wanted to make the charact...
Take the following short story. Let's imagine that it's an important even that should be reported on. One day, Little Red Riding Hood’s mother said to her, “Take this basket of goodies to yo...
So I'm building a character who works in a particular field of science and I found an e-mail for a scientist on the internet and emailed him. I described how I'm writing a sci-fi story and gave him...
I recently read this answer, which suggested that an author's first novel will be rejected, and the publisher will instead get the author to write the novel they want to publish, assuming they feel...
I want to write a male, corporate working, character who is always cheerful and smiling, no matter whatever the situation he is in. As a result, reading his thoughts or motives is almost impossible...
I'm working on a story-heavy game with lots of different paths the player can choose from. Many times, players might also have to replay parts of the game in certain ways to see the true ending. As...
I have no degree and I cannot afford to have one, however, I would really love to get into technical writing because I love writing and I am interested in web and software development. Right now, I...
I’ve seen it done in Harry Potter I just don’t understand when its okay to do it, like can I say something like “John walked away from the house and was now walking along the road” or not? When is ...
There is plenty of information on how to draft characters for a single story, or characters that follow an important arc throughout a (small) number of stories. Are there any techniques for design...
Two questions regarding inference and conclusion. 1: Is it true that Inference can be made from any paragraph, from any line of the text but conclusion is drawn from the entire text? 2: Why often i...
The source language in question is Standard Chinese. It is a gender-neutral language. One big thing that English speakers complain about English is the gendered pronoun, namely the third person sin...
My partner and I usually enjoy role-playing together in free-form. I was thinking perhaps we could convert one of our role-plays into a book and publish it online. I wanted to ask if there are any ...
I'm writing a book series where most of the cast are highly anthropomorphized animals (or in some cases mythological creatures). Humans still exist in this universe, but are rare (only being found ...
I have recently grown interested in the idea of writing a litRPG novel where each two days I will publish a chapter describing a single day of the main character and at the end of the day the reade...
I've noticed that my novel is missing a really strong inciting incident and I can't think of anything strong enough to suffice. The only inciting incidents I'm familiar with seeing in nearly every ...
The term is 妖精, which can be translated into English as "fairy", "elf", "goblin". As noted, the Japanese literature uses 妖精 to describe the European fairy. The English translation of 白骨精 in 西游记 (Jo...
When writing dialogue all the characters sound the same. I'm not sure I even know what giving a character a voice means, but my dialogue sucks so any advice will be greatly appreciated.
Dream twists just spoil our senses of disbelief. I can see how that can be excetuted carelessly, but if done for the need of showing what the main character wants or fears most then maybe it would ...
It's a TV episode. the heroes reach a low point where they think they're defeated, one of the characters has an idea to make things work, they follow him and it eventually leads to a combat scene, ...
The main character I have in mind for a story in a fantasy setting will be in foreign lands for the entirety of the book. She will have a basic grasp of the spoken language, so her dialogue will us...
In one of my stories, I have a character who is a bit of a smart ass, always cracking jokes at the expense of others and sometimes even himself. I often get inspired by things I find on the interne...
I occasionally use parentheses in scientific writing when a piece of information is related to a previous statement but not to the central story. Is it bad style in scientific writing to use pare...
A potential employer promised me a response but hasn't sent one yet, and I'd like to follow up by email. It's a potential job opportunity, and it'd be detrimental to sound too hasty or pushy. I w...
I am writing a short story and thinking of publishing it in the next month. But then, I had a doubt. What if somebody takes it, expands it and changes it a bit and makes a movie or a novel out of ...
I have an interesting plot ready, although there are a few missing blocks which I cannot develop. Story: A girl is a daughter of a druid. Druids are humans who live in the forest protecting anima...
If I'm writing a dialog and my character get interrupted and cut off in the middle of a sentence can I write half a word and put three dots? I thought it was okay to do this, but I realized that I ...
