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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Dr.House, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Han Solo, and so on, and so forth. Something is appealing about anti-heroes, for instance: Superman is bland, perfect and ultimately a bruh superhero, whose c...
I'm writing a book that takes place in modern day but also involves the Greek gods and goddesses and Greek mythology. Is it frowned upon to change a small part of a certain myth to make it fit into...
Does a work need to be sexually stimulating to be classified as erotica/erotic literature? Or will any book that deals extensively with human sexuality and sexual relationships be put in that genre...
I usually start writing and just let it spill out. But a couple sentences later I just cannot write. I then begin thinking of what to write next. During thinking I just kind of regret everything I ...
Irrespective of all such debates on the limitations for rationally, one may consider a decision rational when it satisfies condition X. ______ in this paper a decision is considered rational...
I want to write a short story from the perspective of a cat who wants to kill a bird that extremely annoys her. Just like Tom is trying every time to kill Jerry or do something to him. However, I d...
We know what I'm talking about. The feeling when the legal side of a story doesn't bothers us too much because we want to see Joffrey getting strangled with a string of sausages. So basically we ...
Wondering if anyone with great wisdom can help me... I have 2 problems really that have pretty much stopped me writing anything decent for a few weeks. I'm on my first ever novel and have no exper...
I have no idea what to write for this certain chapter in my book, and I don't know how to plot it out. I have a general idea that the character somehow betrays another, resulting in him being kic...
I'm a beginner writer. I have been focusing recently on giving my characters depth. Making them complex people with complex emotions and motivations. One of my characters is depressed. She's going...
As a creative writer in my free time, I sometime suffer from a lack of feedback. To get some impressions on what I've written, I either have to ask my girlfriend (who acts as a sort of beta-reader)...
I'm currently working on a piece which has characters coming and going. Basically, sometimes a side character is near the main (also point-of-view) character, and sometimes that same side character...
I've recently looked at the chat that talks about the question of referencing actual military weapons in your writing. Since I'm writing a science-fiction novel, that's not too big of a problem fo...
What are some ways to write feelings of fear, such as: losing a loved one, almost dying, getting lost, getting yelled at by your overprotective mother and almost losing someone close to you. ...
My question is, is this even realistic? She's a woman in her early twenties who specializes in torture, only working on her victims when they're tightly strapped down and confined so she can go a...
I'm writing a series, and I have two protagonists. Both are PoV characters, and both offer different viewpoints on the main conflict (an ongoing war). One is a respected general, has frequent conta...
Okay, I don't really have any friends who write. (or in general) And I wanted to know if it was too biased for my family to edit my writing. My mom likes to read my stuff and I let her fix grammar...
I've just finished the first draft of my first novella, and as I'm going through for my second revision, I'm wondering whether or not I should lengthen it to a novel. If my work is good enough to p...
I'm writing a sci-fi script for a T.V. pilot (my first) in which there is, initially, an AI (that runs a spaceship) with no avatar (that comes later). It is not a narration when that "character" sp...
To make a long story short, writing used to be a huge part of my life. I found a project that I loved and was dedicated to making it a published novel. Several beta readers reviewed later drafts an...
I just started a book, but i cant decide if its better to use the present or the past tense (written in the first person)
It happens fairly often, that when I get an idea, it seems really good. I start writing it, and midway or towards the end, or sometimes after completing the whole thing, I completely lose trust in ...
I'm an aspiring fantasy and sci-fi writer and I my goal is to write a novel that is to be the first in a series within the same setting. I'm getting to a point where I can feel "the world coming to...
I have just finished a mystery in which I have used the name of a real community organization. It's an organization that people either love or hate because it represents the upper echelon of societ...
Someone told me that the way I write is almost like I'm writing from a template, how do I break away from this? I always end up with this: Saying what the person is doing in the present tense, ment...
I'm attempting to understand how subplots work, and one aspect has me confused. I'm trying to create a process by which I can create subplots. When I create the main plot, I start with conflict - t...
I use Scrivener, and sometimes when I highlight a line or even just click the cursor, the font shrinks to tiny. When I check the font size on the computer, it hasn't changed (still size 12), but cl...
My name is Alex and I'm writing a fantasy novel. I don't know if I should use first or third person narration. First person writing is good for protagonists and important characters, but third pe...
In the slug line, how do I write a time change??? "7 years later" {then} INT. HOSPITAL - DAY Also: how do I write verbal sounds of a character that are unintelligible, etc, be they in th...
I have a really good title for this book, but I'm scared it implies the book is religious when it's really not. The title is "The Only Way To Heaven Is Up." It mostly focuses on people overcoming t...
I've devised a trilogy on an Earth-similar world experiencing Earth-similar problems. I am nearing the end of the first draft of the first novel. I am not certain how much of a bang needs to happen...
I'm in a writing group. I see repeating word-choice patterns among the fantasy writers. Example: frequent use of certain words (like 'utter,' everyone seems to use that word... ), or certain sympto...
Let's face it, I like edgy writing that borders on inflammatory. I read less for entertainment than I do for expanding my world view. I don't have to agree with the points or even like the style of...
Does anyone with experience have suggestions on how best to go back, edit, and rearrange scenes and details? You know, without me dying in the process? The whole book needs to be restructured.
I've had several people ask me why my fiction story does not have a table of contents. I never really thought about it, seeing as plenty of fiction stories do not have one either. Is a table of con...
I'm writing (to self-publish) a technical book aimed for computer-literate people with no technical background (but who want to get into the field). In the beginning, I found myself re-writing cer...
I've been writing fan fiction for 7+ years now. Recently, I went back and compared the ratings my fan fiction has received from my readers, compared to what they contained. I discovered that those ...
I have known gaps - voiceover artist, studio time, editing, distribution, but what are the unknown unknowns that I need to consider? Having read previous threads, there are some very wise answers,...
At a writer's critique group, one piece of feedback to me was: people didn't understand where I was going until the very end. They suggested stating something explicit at the very beginning so the...
How often can you employ this before it starts to seem too convenient and fake?
I've been writing fan fiction for 7+ years, in an attempt to weed out the beginner mistakes and know what works. In one of my fan fictions, the main character failed to make the right choice. The r...
I've been reading a book about how to write from the really ground up, but this book doesn't teach how to compound a chapter. I wanna write for my own blog, but I wanna do it by posting chapters. W...
So I recently had a discussion with a reader and who pointed out a significant flaw in my work that I hadn't seen. When I first started writing my series, I had a trilogy in mind - based on explor...
One feature of my world is a plant that lives in a magmaous (rather than "volcanic") cave. It photosynthesizes by absorbing infrared radiation from the magma. However, the world is roughly at a me...
Shakespeare did it, he did it quite a lot of times, but there are a few problems with it: He was a screenwriter in an age, where we couldn't afford building enough sets (or cities that don't catc...
this is my first time here. At the moment I'm writing on a little Novel and now I am at the point: My character has a hidden power ( in a World where everyone has a Unique Power, he has two). No...
So, I've been thinking about my story, and suddenly I got inspiration for the continuation of the chapter (I'm not even sure what chapter it should be). So, basically, I ended with progressing 3 ch...
Beside omniscient narrative that explains the world, what are other techniques to introduce the details of a world to the readers? (That is still part of the story) I've been thinking two things, ...
Chronologically, the story begins with the protagonist as a child and description of her world, which is important to the plot. Since I thought "girl abandoned by parents meets a man who explains ...
In my fantasy world there are other other sentient races besides humans. Some of them are "original", or at least not as common in mainstream stories. On the other hand, I have also included more t...
