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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Unless a better writer can dissuade me I am minded to say no. The 'essential' 'conflict' is cultural. It is part of the western 'Human Condition' - Eastern cultures have stories without conflict. ...
By definition, melodrama is a clearly exaggerated drama, in which the characters' actions, reactions and speeches are intentionally very exaggerated. However, through my readings here on Writers SE...
I've been advised to sharpen my sidekick from an "intriguing second tier" character to the delegate for the readers. Is there a tried and tested formula succinctly captured somewhere? I'm looking t...
I am capable of dreaming up interesting settings and even placing things in a world, but I have trouble dreaming up characters and plot. Example: my first aborted attempt at a steampunk story ended...
I have a story that is primarily told from one POV character (third-person limited). However, plotted within this story are a few chapters from other characters. Most of my multiple-POV research r...
In a novel I've been writing, I begin by introducing a character and describing her history and personality from a third-person perspective. Now, I want to start talking about a different characte...
I love creating characters and my plots generally focus greatly on their inner conflicts and their relationships with other characters (my experience has almost exclusively been writing romance). T...
I know this is similar to How to Handle a Character When She Is Lying About Her Name but the situation is slightly different in where my problem lies. I have a character who is introduced as Tabat...
I've been writing for a while now, and everyday I feel I'm getting more serious about it. But the quality of my fiction stories are straightforward and blah. I notice I'm not using enough descript...
The Seraphinians is a writeup and attempt to document issues with a movement within the Orthodox Church. They are the people who say you have to believe in Protestant fundamentalism's Young Earth C...
There are some people who have read some of my book so far and they think it is childish and then some say it's somewhat morbid. What are your views on what each of those terms means?
My work has Validation Engineers I, Validation Engineers II, Compliance Consultant I, Compliance Consultant II, etc. When discussing more than one person, do you write Validation Engineers II, Val...
I have this chimera-type character whose name is Ryu, but at this point I think it best to change his name. But I've already grown used to his name, and I've written it all over my book pages. Is i...
My question is rather simple. In fact, it's in the title and requires almost no explanation. We can see throughout literature the use of names and title. For example in Of Mice and Men we can obse...
Background Woohoo! I literally just finished right now my masterpiece trilogy that I have worked on for what seems like, ages... I'm a bit vexed as to where I should write 'the end'. The epilogu...
I've been starting something really interesting lately, which is writing each of my main character's back story before writing the main book (If anyone is having the dreaded block or is looking for...
(Sorry if this isn't the best title.) I've been writing for about 6 months now. And everything I write I feel as if it isn't good enough, or it was just a bad chapter, sentence, or even choice of ...
I've found this website and could see huge number of poets and poetesses in it. Does anybody know about it? I would like to know more about this website.
I'm writing a story where a secondary story-line (it's about a companion of the main character) is basically about a fire mage and an ice mage. It fits well in the story and the fire/ice elements a...
Found myself in a bit of a logical pickle in regard to the below piece: The number nine growled sleepily from around the corner that morning, the night’s virgin snow crunching beneath its multi...
Okay, so I have a weak motivation for a god character whose son (whom he tried to prevent his birth) seems like he is an apt tool to be used for a plot that will only be brought into fruition about...
I have a collection of original short stories, all of which have been published in English in literary magazines. A French translator friend recently translated the stories into French (I speak Fre...
I see that the 3 Act structure can be applied over almost any story, from Hamlet to Mulholland Drive, from The Matrix to Rocky. Story structures like 3 Acts, or 4-5 Acts, always feature a Character...
In other words, is it strange/confusing to do this? For the next few seconds, I watched Aiko read the letter with her lips agape---lips that steadily curled up into a smile. A contagious one....
I find myself writing "Then, ..." a lot. Example: As soon as she found my letter---or rather, Kiyoshi's---she widened her slitted eyes and pressed the letter against her chest. Then, as tho...
I am an editor having difficulties dealing with the representative of an author's literary estate about an unpublished manuscript by a deceased author. We have a polite (and friendly) disagreement...
I'm at a crossroads to figure out the better plan of action. I've heard you should always try to finish the rough draft, but...are there exceptions? I'm wondering if any readers here ran into this,...
I have roughly 30 speaking characters; about ten speak often enough that their voices should be well defined. I have compiled, from web sources, various considerations when building distinct charac...
I'm writing a letter from the future to my dear friends, posing as the child they're about to have. The main aim of the letter is to be amusing, but also to give some perspective (you don't need to...
I'm looking specifically into the written medium (NOT screenwriting) and the death of an important friendly character. It's supposed to be a scene to make the reader scream "please, don't", not "y...
In hard-SF the writer has to adapt to the world and its limitation. Under normal circumstances, this shouldn't a problem, as you can always make something great, even with the limitations. Howeve...
I'm starting to work through some ideas with a book I want to write. The protagonist is computer science genius that finds flaws and breaks through the security of several major companies. I'm not ...
Normally this sort of thing is easier than actually writing the piece for me but this time I can't get anywhere with the overall structure of the story: I want a character to win a great victory, ...
If let's say one wants to portray a villain in a novel that suffers from insanity/psychosis as he has literally lost his grip on reality and is kind of living in his own world, what are the things ...
Proposition: Stories are information packets aimed to "entertain" people, and just like every other form of communication, they have: A basic and lasting knowledge for interpreting the informatio...
I write fiction, I guess you could say experimental fiction, but I just feel I am more of a stylist. Every story of mine that's been accepted was taken as is. Now, for the first time, I am dealing ...
I have a question on linkers and connectors. I'm from Spain, so I learnt English at school and all my English teachers have told me throughout secondary school that we always have to use linkers t...
I have googled this question several times but I'm just not clear on the answers I'm getting. For example, I know that screenplays/plays/books such as A Streetcar Named Desire, Enough Said, The Spa...
He is one of two supporting characters that die in my screenplay. My wife says I shouldn’t make him black if he’s going to die. Would it be politically incorrect?
So I'm writing a story and there is a character that is a male that I want to name Artemis. The reason, simply put, is that he has a sister with a name I really like that is TECHNICALLY a boy's nam...
I have a few questions about the page numbering of the last few pages of my book. I have a section with further resources. It contains one page with information about a site and three more pages ...
I have trouble coming up with fantasy names. I've used random name generators but they weren't very helpful. Is there a website that would have fantasy names or Norse, or Celtic names?
Every writer knows the rule: Avoid clichés like the plague! Wait I can't say that, it is a cliché. Let me try again, I hate to beat a dead horse but... No that won't work either. If you have ever ...
I want to write a religion similar to Christianity but with God represented as feminine. It is meant to highlight the differences between the sexes and emphasise traits associated with women over m...
I’ve written a plot for a long story. But it’s not easy for anybody to review because my characters’ dialogue and goals are all over the place, it’s often usually mixed up and I struggle to structu...
I see sentence fragments all the time in online scripts, so I assume it’s okay. But there are a number of articles emphasizing the importance of grammar in screenwriting. So, which ones is it? ...
I often get confused in writing about whether or not something is showing or telling. For example, if my character wears a mask through which he can’t see, and I as the all-knowing narrator/writer ...
I’m writing a non linear drama and my question is: do I have to notate what will be seen literally in the film, like age differences and such because the film won’t require much if any scene cues l...
I have this organization in my working book called NOVA. And it means National Occupation Variation Association. they basically take people from their homes and families and force them to work o...
