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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When you write in a modern day setting, you research the culture, climate, location and history of that setting. You can do the same for historical fiction or low-fantasy settings based on real pla...
My story (novella?) starts in media res, in the middle of the conflict that will set the rest of the story in motion. Currently I am "scene-cutting" between that event and some earlier events that...
I am a long time Dungeon Master of Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder. My games run in a custom world of my own making. However, I utilise a lot of the traditional lore and races of D&D. I'm ...
I have been intending to create a book for toddlers with basic scientific notions in it. Most books for this target readership that I have seen present whatever content in the form of a story, quit...
I'm planning for my next podcast to do an episode-by-episode tv show analysis. (Actually two are in development, but they'll be about different shows.) I'll be the main researcher/outline-assembl...
Our documentation set includes some diagrams where text is integral and can't be handled in callouts, like flowcharts and entity relationship diagrams. Our documentation is translated, so these di...
I sometimes post photos on my blog, like when I'm blogging about food. I've been shrinking the huge pictures my phone takes down to a size that fits more reasonably in a browser window -- my brows...
I recently saw a contest for writing flash fiction - the contest rules were that it had to be under 100 words long. I thought "Hey, that's cool! I'll give it a shot." So I sat down, and tried to s...
I work (with a team) on a large documentation set for a complex software product. We publish HTML and have built-in search (plus, of course, there's Google). The doc set has a glossary, which pre...
We use a BNF style to convey syntax for SQL statements. For a (fictitious) example: CREATE PARSER [schema.]function [WITH [LANGUAGE='language'] [, MODE='[FENCED | UNFENCED]' [, STUF...
My team uses MadCap Flare to produce a large body of documentation (thousands of topics). The source is "Flare HTML", HTML with some Flare additions (for variables, admonitions, snippets, and so o...
We use doxygen to generate API (reference) documentation for our code. We have a small Java API and a large C++ API. The usual tool of choice for Java APIs is Javadoc, but doxygen can do both and...
I have asked a question like this before in Workplace, but this time is only about diagrams specifically, and on formal work generally. Some answers in there say that I can use the Venn diagram if ...
I am one of several authors on a fairly new shared blog. The blog has a mix of serialized and one-shot posts. Because it's a new blog (2.5 months, ~30 posts so far), there is quite a variety of p...
Programmers can write comments in code that can be automatically turned into API documentation (like Javadoc). All I have to do is add some comments explaining what a class or method does and what...
My team uses MadCap Flare for documentation and we have an editor on the team. When a writer is ready, we assemble a review package in Flare and send it to the editor, and she makes changes and se...
The reference documentation for an application programming interface (API) is, in modern systems, usually generated from the code itself automatically. For example, for Java interfaces a typical t...
In technical documentation, sometimes the tool's automatic hyphenation makes a bad break in the middle of a term, like the name of an environment variable or function. In these cases I would rathe...
Not long ago I read a novel set in the near future (mid-21st century). My suspension of disbelief was totally fine with time travel, an implanted "universal translator" of sorts, major medical adv...
Each of our software releases is accompanied by a set of release notes, which include short descriptions of the following: new features, important or breaking changes to old features, and important...
Back when rocks were soft and the world wide web hadn't yet been invented, I worked on a college newspaper that, I was told, followed the same patterns as professional papers. (That is, the skills...
Over on another site we're talking about taking some of our content (on a particular theme) and re-packaging it as a printable PDF. (The primary use case is paper.) This wouldn't be a straight du...
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 ...
Our ~1500-page documentation set contains numerous screen shots and related graphics (schematics, flow diagrams, etc). Sometimes the user interface changes and we have to update all the affected g...
It would be nice to be a member of an online community of people who are knowledgeable about writing, willing to directly help eachother in a format such as Q&A (like here on SE), but also enga...
In my exploration of story structure, I have encountered some conflicting advice. In some instances, it has been suggested that the midpoint of a story represents the moment that the protagonist s...
I have a story in mind which I am confident will fit a three-act structure very well. However, I am uncertain about the exposition that I have been writing, as it feels a bit stifled, almost as tho...
A friend wrote an article. She was an employee of a medium-sized national non-profit organization (in the US). The article was published and was sold at a very affordable cost by the organization...
Question: Is there a resource that categorizes existing fiction works by themes based on the authors' demographics (e.g. gender, age, historical period, geographical location, etc...)? For instanc...
I sometimes write poetry. The creative process for the first draft can be summarized in these steps: I first choose a global structure (e.g. a ballad, a sonnet, a free-stanza-but-fixed-verse, etc...
I have read a couple romance books at most and so don’t claim to have very much experience with romance and clichés. But here are the ones I can think of: Something happens to make them hate eac...
We all have seen at least one of these clickbaits (or some variation thereof): "single mom discovers the meaning of life with a simple trick" or "billionaires don't want you to know this...
I am looking for the representative references on writing style in English that would pre-date Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (possibly in the period between 1750 - 2000). I would like to...
I gave my latest book to my favorite beta readers, and they liked it except for the very ending, i.e. the last 20 pages, which they thought fell short and a bit rushed. I therefore decided to try a...
Inspired by this question: Is there a need for better software for writers? I have an IDE¹ related question about software that can assist writers. Is there a tool to (easily) turn technical wri...
I've noticed a lot of platforms (blogs and such) list how long they estimate for a specific essay/post/article to take for the average reader. How is this calculated? I always read fast, so I c...
I was listening to an older episode (2012) of "The Audacity to Podcast", where the host is talking with a copyright/IP Lawyer: https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/tap077-copyright-laws-for-bloggers-an...
Situation: 5 year comic book series (by my spouse; I do marketing, website, etc) 4 issues a year (in theory...it's been slower) Issues are available as e-comic only Every 4 issues is collected in...
I'm not expecting $$ for any of my podcasts -- I think The Audacity to Podcast guy had a great explanation when he said the reason to Podcast is PROFIT: Publicity, Relationships, Opportunities, Fun...
As I understand it, when considering the Three-Act Structure, the first half of Act One prior to the Inciting Incident is used to show the reader the 'Ordinary World'. In the story I am working on...
For my pathfinder game I write session updates after each session. I have previously asked about How to write exciting updates? This question is about the planning phase for writing these updates. ...
I ask as somebody who loves Writing Excuses (https://writingexcuses.com), and relies on the podcast heavily as an educational resource. My writing ambitions are well aligned with their stated scope...
This is inspired by a few things that have been breaking my immersion when reading Worm. The main protagonist is a teen, and most chapters are first-person POV, so grammatical casualness fits. I ...
As somewhat of a follow-up to my previous question: How to create a consistent feel for character names in a fantasy setting? Once I have named the characters in a given setting, how do I create p...
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'm writing a scene in which four characters play a high-stakes poker game. So far my narrator has been an omniscient third person, who just does not wish to enter into the characters' heads. I st...
What punctuation is missing from English that might solve your writing issues? People may be able to come up with established ones that meet your criteria, such as the /s to indicate "that last...
Recently while doing some world-building for a role-playing game with a friend we were seriously struggling with naming character consistently. By consistently I mean make the names feel as though...
I am trying to create documentation for an application, and it's for end users who use keyboard (not mouse) and a screen reader. Some of our conventions require us to always use the full phrase ...
(I searched combined tags for publishing & poetry, and only found a few older questions, detailed below.) So - Spring 2019 - where do poets publish now? Is it all self-publish, have the few m...
