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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For a fiction story of mine (probably fantasy, if I had to categorize it), I've set it in a world that is in some ways similar to Earth, and in other ways very dissimilar from Earth. In place of ...
This question is strongly related to this one: Balance between character's point of views However, that question is asking about balancing POVs in general, whereas this one is about potentially su...
Sometimes (as an intelligent species, and therefore creative, speculative about reality and so on...) we want to experience some situations which aren't possible at all. Then as a writer you can cr...
I'm careful with the phrasing of this question as it is dangerously close to be opinion based. Everyone has their preference regarding the amount of description they expect to find in a work of fic...
Is it possible to introduce evil characters (be identified as evil) before the action (the crimes committed by the characters) takes place?
Is there a "right" way to interpret a novel? If so, how do we make sure our novel is interpreted correctly? I have been told that there's no way of interpreting the true meaning of a book written b...
One of the characters in my book feels the need to protect a woman she barely knows and later on it will be revealed that they have a magical which causes the character in question to want to prote...
How fast a magazine pays is a function of several factors like their response time for stories they accept, their payment policy (eg., paying on acceptance as opposed to paying after publication), ...
In the point-of-view culture in my story, all of the women in priestly families have two-syllable names beginning with vowels. (There are reasons for this, but they're completely tangential to my q...
I need to write an opinion, narrative of only 80 words in length. Examples: write about your fondest childhood memory/comment: homework should be banned, etc. How are short-short pieces like this...
My question is simple: do writers need a business bank account? Or can they use a regular account for saving and declaring tax on their earnings? Further, do writers need to declares themselves a...
Lately I've been thinking that I don't know of a single novel that has illustrations in it. I've tried finding out the reason why, and came across an article published in The Guardian in 2011, but ...
When answering questions on Stack Exchange, some of us challenge the assumptions of the author. These frame challenges can often be quite popular answers. This popularity, however, can simply be a ...
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...
What makes a battle scene tense and visceral is the immediate danger and the fast-paced action and reaction. For that, the human soldier needs to be on the battlefield, in the action. Here's the p...
In my novel, the protagonist is depressed. In the story which is in my mind... The autumn leaves were falling as I was sitting alone and Gary Jules' "Mad World" was ringing in my iPod. The s...
So I'm wondering if this supporting character, who I use for exposition purposes, can be made more vital in some way. When does a supporting character become necessary for the plot? What criteria d...
In my post-apocalyptic novel, my MC Eris is severely traumatized by the death of her family at her own hands. Because of this, she has extreme aversion to social interaction and even physical cont...
Let's say you have a scene that contains nudity. There are many ways to do it wrong and have it just be a pervy scene, but there are also ways to make it "tasteful" in a way where it's slightly les...
In the short passage I am writing, the starting point is that one character is being held at gunpoint, and the end point is that she now holds the gun, having disarmed the opponent. The idea is t...
In my story, 12 year old Ruth has visions from another place and time which lead her to gather a group of kids for a quest. She is told there will be 18 kids, but she can only find 17 with the spe...
I constantly see reviews of people criticizing how it feels like "whiplash" when going from something like a death scene to someone cracking a joke, and I agree, but I don't know why I agree. I ju...
For as long as I can remember, my teachers have taught me never to use first person in an essay. Yet, some of the examples we read in classes, or older writings we have to annotate, are written in...
I am preparing to publish a technical book on programming that contains figures and charts (like, compiler, linker, ASCII table, keywords list) created by myself by taking references from many sour...
I have in mind a character who is the protagonist's trusted ally throughout the story, but it is revealed at the end that he was the primary antagonist for most of it. This kind of thing has, of c...
My MC is a famous singer/songwriter who is bad at writing lyrics. Her goal is to write commercially successful, deep, serious songs. How do I design the character arc in relation to this goal? Also...
I'll admit I haven't read the books, but I've seen in subtitles and other things that knights in Game of Thrones are addressed as "Ser". It seems to me that fantasy works like this have similaritie...
Disclaimer: Also works for guys, if you have the problem, but genderbent. So, in my plots, I typically have a "tough girl" character in my thing. She's confident and upfront, and is stubborn to th...
As I already mentioned in my previous question, I'm writing a novel with personages both that I created and some already created by others (well, I wrote that when I was younger and now I just digi...
I've just started noticing this word a lot in books. Something about it rubs me the wrong way. For example, I read a book where the following happened I stumbled to the ground and hit my head. ...
I have been cautioned against blending: Traditional fantasy elements Such as magic systems and exotic, less plausible creatures (on a scientific level - magic tends to explain away these beasts...
How do we distinguish how a character pronounces a word and how it is spelled in a dialogue? For example, some people pronounce words in a different way than they should, how do you show that in a ...
I can not recall the book, but one of Isaac Asimov's novels ends with an article on muon-catalyzed fusion. I remember that because it was so impressive to find out that such a thing was real. I've...
Characters (and people) get angry at all sorts of things that might not make sense to the outside observer: Marty McFly and the word "chicken," words that are terrible slurs to one population but t...
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...
Someone told me that it's incorrect or outdated punctuation to put a comma after "said" in dialogue tags such as the following (from an old book we're reprinting): “I shouldn’t wonder if you co...
Sometimes in the process of writing dialogue, I wish to insert a joke in the exchange. I could copy an existing joke, or I could come up with one. The latter option seems preferable if I could tie ...
When posting an excerpt of my book on a critiquing site, someone commented on my use of "hahaha" inside the dialogue instead of just having a laughing verb after or before it. They said it took the...
I mean exactly this. Writing needs focus, to some extent. Even if you may fall into a state were words flow naturally on the keyboard almost without effort, you still have to reach that condition....
There is something I find myself doing often while writing, and I don't even know what to call it, but I would like to know if its good practice. It happens when I'm writing from a third-person per...
I have a scene where a character is applying to be released from prison pending trial. I want an arbitrary / unfair reason for the judge to dislike him. It has to be something that is not justified...
Is Sentence A an acceptable and clear way of shortening Sentence B? Sentence A: A firm outperforms (underperforms) the industry when expression (1) results in a positive (negative) value. S...
In many works of genre-fiction (I'm talking mainly about fantasy and sci-fi, but others genres can apply), and across many forms of media, the main characters ends up being special in some ways. M...
I’ve heard from some authors that setting your book at a low price without making it clear that it is a sales/giveaway price tends to devalue your work and makes people assume that it is of low qua...
I have three variations of the same storyline and cannot decide which one I want to write: erotic story turning dark and dangerous A young adult man and woman fall in love. It is the woman's fir...
Basically I’m wondering whether it’s totally weird or if people wouldn’t give much thought to it. I’ll use Zootopia as an example. If the main characters (a fox and a rabbit) were in a relationship...
How do you transcribe a dialogue when abbreviations are used? For example, when people uses acronyms like FBI or abbreviations like a.m., do we just write them as we write them when they're in a d...
What should a character interview contain to be successful where the goals are: characters with strong voice who are established with a distinct 'personhood' (?) and are generally interesting to fo...
(By 'chapter timestamp' I mean the text at the beginning of a chapter indicating when it is taking place). Here is a basic summary of the story so you understand what I'm working with: A man name...
