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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The comparison to the celebrity ends with the name. For example, there is a story about Jack and his dog. Jack decides to name his dog Elvis because he's an Elvis fan and is listening to Jail Hou...
For example, can I say this if my book is written in US English (in non-dialog): The car was going at least 140 kilometers per hour! Or should I convert them to miles or what have you? It's ...
Something I have been thinking about recently is how to write a character who is an artificial intelligence and not have him feel human. Specifically an AI who is designed to think faster and bette...
I think that it fits better in certain books to use the local measurement system, but is there a rule about this? Are some books more tolerant to change than others, like fantasy novels? Or does i...
I have been interested in writing a litrpg book with the skill systems functioning as a path system that progresses on one direction as you work hard and each skill will have a rank that determines...
DISCLAIMER: This probably not the ideal StackExchange site for this question, but it was the closest one I found I have been using this name, "MikePendragonXD" online for a few years now. It repre...
Example: Jane digs in the flowerbed for her ring. Moves to the yard. I’ve seen this a bunch of times, but it still feels sort of wrong when I do it. I just want to know if this is “normal”. Th...
One of my characters, Mallory is a 37-year old mother who is willingly strict with her son, as repulsive as that sounds it turns out she is remorseful over her parenting decisions and her son is de...
foreword: I'm writing for a game, however it's (mostly) irrelevant to my question. Just FYI. I have three main characters in my story. One is a weak but smart child and the other two are trained m...
As I understand it, a thesis is some point to be sustained by argument or proof. I've been asked to write a report on a class project, and the rubric says that I need a "thesis statement". However...
https://genius.com/Rob-zombie-never-gonna-stop- Yeah, I'm on Durango number 95 Take me to the home, kick boots and ultra live See heaven flash a horror show Knock it nice and smooth step back a...
This is more or less a follow up to a question I had previously asked. Reading British writers from the last 19th century, like Bram Stoker, and the early 20th century, like Bertrand Russell, Winst...
I've changed a secondary character into a murderer, and it changes everything. This change also opposes my core philosophies, that life and art should strive to reach something higher - not somethi...
I searched on the FAQs on WattPadd, it doesn't mention anything about short writings, or poems, so my question is, Can we write short poems, stories on WattPad apart from their promoted way of crea...
I have the following sentence: Once they realize they have no chance of defeating you, they'll end up joining you. I feel this sentence may come across as a bit "cocky" because I would want t...
I am seeking suggestions to improve my "dry" writing style. I recently submitted a manuscript that was intended to be a review article on a particular scientific topic in the field of biomedical s...
If you are introducing a new character and a new location, both are going to be involved for a while, which description should I put first? The character becomes close friends with the protagonist ...
So I am writing a story where the magic system is based off of personality traits of the individual. I would like to base it off of something like the Big Five model or the Myers-Briggs model or ev...
I'm currently working on a book with two protagonists and switching the perspective between them. They have quite different plotlines, but actually they're the same person. English is not my first ...
In the Netherlands, convicts and persons of interest in relations to a crime have their last names truncated in published news articles – for example "John D." – but I know that this is not the cas...
Looking back on your career as a writer, what is the most fundamental piece of advice you wish you had known about – or that you had taken to heart – when you set out to become a writer? Before ...
Let's say you're writing super hero fiction. The hero of your story is struggling against the villain, but suddenly awakens a power that allows him to best the bad guy! Problem: you're unsure of h...
I'm looking for software or markup/markdown based tools for organising anthologies selected from a large number of short pieces of writing. In this case it's poems, but the content of the individua...
I'm currently writing a story which so far is going well, but I reached a point in the story where I don't know how to proceed. When a character is talking, I write their dialogue just like this: ...
I've always loved to write. Granted I haven't been writing very much these days because of university but I want to publish a book one day. I want to keep writing as a hobby because I want to do mo...
Many short story competitions, at least in Israel, set a theme and a word count: up to 2500 words, 2000-5000 words, etc. I often find myself starting short stories for such competitions, and hittin...
I'm planning out an idea for a short story. In the story, slavery didn't abruptly end but instead continued to modern day and beyond. The structure of the story will be similar to The Last Question...
I have this scene in my novel that I'm trying to write. There is this character who is on the boat, rowing. I don't know how to describe the sound of the oar touching the water as he paddles. The ...
Here is the latest version of this question, except that I believe that I have identified a key issue. Someone who read Chapters 1-3 of one of my novels (and then stopped), asked me, "why is there ...
I have repeatedly come across the comment that experienced writers are able to put their topic sentence anywhere in a paragraph, but I wonder what that looks like and how they are able to do this. ...
If the villain of your story is a member of a certain group, how do you keep the story from being offensive to members of that group? For example, one of the villain in my book is a WWII veteran. ...
In the second book of my trilogy, do I need to repeat everything about the main characters' appearance from the last book, or can I just mention a few key things?
In my novel, the character is sitting in a café sipping coffee, and she is watching a busy street of people rushing towards London underground after the office hours. I want to express the thoughts...
I am currently writing a novel where the main character will be far more powerful than most of the people in the world and I am worried that I will end up losing sight of what I am writing and star...
I've been planning a story that follows two characters. At the end, one character (let's call him Joe) goes back in time and appears at the start of the book. I intend to explore themes of determi...
I'm not asking for an exact figure, but I just want a rough idea of how well the people here have done. (I know the definition of successful varies, so I'm just going to use successful as a term fo...
Currently I'm writing my dissertation and I'm using IEEE to reference books in Bibliography. Some of my work includes text like this: [...]There are different vendors and open source software w...
In my story, the main character gets help from / saved by two complete strangers. They don't tell the mc who they are or what they are doing, they just helped the mc out of kindness and disappear j...
Do you use a question mark in hand when you use a colon, if yes how? I Will Fix Any Error Or Bug is the title of the service. Should I place the order in: I Will Fix Any Error Or Bug Sho...
I need to know the correct way to quote a song lyric on a stone that is to be placed in a memorial garden. The first part of the song is in quotation because that's the way it's written in the ac...
This image was found on a University of Hawaii Cinematic & Digital Narrative Production course and the professor found the image on Google search. Although the plot structure is not unique, t...
When you say a character shook their head, does that mean they nodded, as in "yes", or they shook it sideways, signifying the answer is "no?"
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a lot of short stories describing fictional things and places directly to the reader (like The Library of Babel). For instance, let's see one excerpt of Decline and Fall o...
Why this Question is Being asked In a previous question it was suggested that I write a treatment to assist with revising & cutting. A treatment is essentially a multi-page, spoilerific summar...
In America at least, Haiku are commonly taught to students as poems having 5, 7, then 5 syllables, when in actuality, they have a structure of 5, 7, then 5 on. The NaHaiWriMo site explains what an ...
I've been writing a book that has a fair share of geometric diagrams and equations. However, I am unable to make use of a computer for this and have been maintaining a journal where I manually draw...
I've been having some trouble with the ending of my current story, and I've decided that the best way to deal with those issues is to include a major twist. Due to the nature of this twist, I'm not...
I'm thinking about a YA dystopian novel and have planned it quite thoroughly. However, when I look back, the antagonists tend to always be a few steps ahead of my protagonist, and my protagonist is...
I'm starting my story with my protagonist found (by the police), bleeding at a crime scene. When he wakes up, he has no recollection i.e. he's lost his memory. He's interrogated by two Inspectors,...
