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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Arguments, discussions, disagreements In my script I have a lot of "arguments" – loose definition: long discussions where characters disagree about what to do. These arguments don't escalate to ...
When I have some personal problems in relationships or there are worrying issues about life in general and I am really upset about the situation, in order to “solve it”, or efficiently think about ...
I'm currently writing a story which started out as a short story but kept growing, until I discovered it would work well as a visual novel. I have all of the possible endings in mind, but for now I...
Let's say you decide to claim that time is absolute and not relative as Einstein said. Can you still use a title like "Einstein's time", "Relativity of time", "The geometry of time", "Time dilatati...
A caesura is a slight pause that's important in poetry, because for example alexandrines require a caesura in the middle. But the question is where can we put them. I know that we tend to put the...
Science Fiction is a "big tent" genre, and we all know it when we see it. Even if we argue about the specific tropes – and what might make something lean heavily towards another classification (sci...
I have given multiple things I have written to a friend of mine, who is something of a writer himself, to get feedback on them from him. One of these was a piece of mystery-style fiction, and the ...
I have a blog with long, analytic articles. Because of their nature, they don't really attract much clicks. However, once people distill it thoroughly, many of them express that the articles are in...
Does a script usually have to come out like a play? Or, there should be a difference?
In a fantasy series that I’ve been working on for some time now, there is a character that I’ve always kind of seen as not having sexual or romantic attraction. Originally, I did have a love intere...
I'm developing a story with the following basic plot: At the start, my main character's motivating question is "Where is my brother?" As the story progresses, other problems and motivations get i...
My legal name is Barbara but I have gone by Babs since I was in the 4th grade. I have written a children's book and wanted to list my name as Barbara (Babs) but my editor said that it might not ap...
The main character (which is a girl) of the first romance I'm writing would feel jealous sometimes of her love interest, but I want it to be a cute trait or even a setup for funny scenes, not a ver...
A section of a story I am writing is being told in third person from the perspective of a character who does not know anything about herself due to amnesia. The reader is also unaware of anything r...
I am rather a very amateur writer, who is trying to write a thriller/fiction novel for a class, and I find myself absolutely dumbfounded as to how to write into my story the action of a character r...
What I mean by "high and mighty" (though I realise this term does not exactly paint anyone in a nice light) are characters who know their worth and know themselves to be better than numerous other ...
I have the same teacher for both a Journaling autobiographical class and a fictional writing class. While I expected to have to write about my personal life with one, she seems determined to have m...
Not strictly a writing question but this touches on some issues that some writers may face, and I thought maybe someone here may be able to help. I used to be a freelance web designer, moved away ...
About 1/3 of the way through my story the main antagonist "wins" and is able to completely remake the world of the story into his notion of an ideal world. The "new" world shares some elements wit...
I've always struggled writing about myself, but I need to apply for a program and the application has a lot of very broad but personal questions like, Tell us why you would be a good leader Exp...
So I usually use stackexchange as a last resort, but I'm completely stumped. If this question is inappropriate here, I will gladly delete it. None of my teachers say that anything is wrong with my...
For example, in the lines: Say what good really is a life, When so thoroughly deprived of joy Is my restless mind, Hurting constantly, in a dreadful strife? When it needs so many lies, ...
I know there is a name for this kind of "writing", but I just can't think of it at the moment. Basically, most of my notes are endlessly long ramblings that can go from one place to another in a he...
I have some material for a "world" (more fantasy than sci-fi at this point). I've noodled around with this world off-and-on for ages but have never had a story to put in the world. I have some brie...
In my latest short story I'm playing around with common gender misconceptions. It's set in a near future society were men have disappeared, and all roles are taken up by women. The theme is played ...
It is generally taken that if I tell you a joke, then have it explain why it's funny - it's not probably not funny. I continually return to one of my own short pieces. If I submit it I believe it ...
I'm working on a post-apocalypse novel set all over the world. I'm fairly flexible on where some of the events take place, but there are often specific requirements on the look, layout, general reg...
I love accessibility, so any show that is 100% scripted, my script = the transcript, and I'm happy to share it. For podcasts with a cohost, there's no easy transcription software, and fiverr is ac...
I have been looking for a word that rhymes with post with similar meaning to a school. But I go to thesaurus.com, sounding the words on my head for results under "school" and none rhyme. I then tr...
How would a story flow if I made the secondary characters solely for the purpose of showing the reader how the main character has grown though the years? I'm thinking a 10 year span right now. They...
In my current project my goal is to go for the following narrative style within scenes: Show only what the POV-Char can see, hear,... sense. Show their emotional reaction (through body-feelings, ...
I am writing a short story that describes a dream that I had as a child. I wrote a first rough draft and had my girlfriend read it to give me some feedback. One thing she criticized is my writing s...
I put work into making up my own names for spells. However, I feel like they come across as childish when I read over my writing This was also my impression when re-reading Harry Potter. It really...
Basically, I am writing a story and I want to know if the characters are diverse enough or too diverse. If I just state the characters' races, sexualities, etc, it might seem forced but I didn't re...
There are some words and phrases in my manuscript that I think are used in America. However, a beta reader tells me my character sounds British. Are there any online sources I can use to check the ...
I’m a beginner writer planning on learning how to write webcomics. My main one is an adventure/fantasy webcomic and the other is a card battle webcomic (I draw a lot of inspiration from anime and m...
I am in the process of editing a short story. It is science fiction of the "if this goes on" kind: I take a social trend I see, and paint its event horizon - a troubling future. 1984 and Fahrenheit...
I have been struggling to write a book on my 14 years research. I have used Microsoft Word exclusively, but I have a problem that the book uses lots of pictures, sometimes six per page and this is ...
I want to say that the author uses Character A's "character development" to explore Character B. In other words, the author builds on the personality of A to exemplify the nature of B. What is an...
I have heard many times that you should always keep the sentence length to the minimum as possible, as it makes reading easy, fast and more important understandable to readers. I'm wondering: What...
I was seriously wondering if it's a problem to use the antecedent, which is "Mr Spooner", after the possessive pronoun "his". Also, I am wondering if we can use "his" without ever using an antecede...
I have my first draft more-or-less complete, and I've been working on editing it now. There is one big problem: I hate editing I find editing to be so draining. I'll open up a chapter to edit and ...
I am writing a book mostly about the history of my local airport. This will include the changes from the earliest airlines and airports til today. What I want to know, for example, I write about th...
This is a sort of follow up to my previous question. It is generally understood that covers matter a great deal in terms of getting people to click on a fiction eBook and check out its blurb and co...
Imagine a fantasy story in which there once was a very powerful evil divine being, but it was defeated long before the beginning of the story. For the story it is very important that it was defeate...
I've come across podcasts and internet articles about self-publishing in which they basically say that books with fantastic covers and interesting blurbs tend to sell lots of copies even if the act...
I've heard the term "white paper" used in many situations. I've been asked before to write white papers on different subjects, though I've never successfully completed one. I've read many different...
I'm identifying my target audience based on the experiment explained in the Snowflake Method book. The narrator describes it as follows: “Now I want you to imagine that you’ve published your no...
So the problem I am having is that the protagonist of the novel I am writing is having a confrontation with another character, who starts panicking. Instead of saying "panic dripped from his face",...
A substitution cipher is a method used in cryptography to encrypt the meaning of a text. In the most common form, a substitution cipher changes every letter in the target text with another, making...
