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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If you read names from popular novels you feel like the names define characters. They fit perfectly to the personality of character. For an e.g. Harry Potter, Robert Langdon, Jason Bourne, etc. I ...
I come from worldbuilding.stackexchange because people suggested I post my question here: My story shall take place on Earth with the human race as the dominant species. I imagine the technologica...
I have a tendency to forget to describe character's appearance. But I always describe them, though often a little while after their introduction. So, how long after someone's introduction is "accep...
My protagonist uses a lot of extensive vocabulary and is quite verbose. The novel I am writing is a first-person narrative, and my protagonist is the narrator of the novel. An extensive vocabulary...
I have an ambitious idea of writing fantasy/erotica and turning it into a web comic (and get crazily rich, of course), for that I need a username/pen-name. I need it to be catchy and memorable fi...
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 ...
Real Women Don’t Wear Dresses is when writers portray female characters possessing traditional feminine qualities as being less desirable, competent and reliable instead of their tomboy foils. They...
For a paper that I am writing, I have encountered an issue in which one of my sources has the same last name as myself, of which in in-text citations, makes it appear as if I am citing myself. Do I...
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...
Am I allowed to use art (album covers) in my book? If not what sort of permission would I have to obtain? The album covers are not in the public domain.
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...
After a couple iterations I came up with the "skeleton" or summary of my story. I have read many places and guides saying "if it's not advancing the story and can be removed without affecting it, ...
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...
I am having trouble understanding why authors use multiple version of a character's name in the same story. I feel it can make it harder to follow the story. Why do writers sometimes write the sam...
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...
My mc poses some strange shadow powers which he tries to hide and in one quest he met his enemy who also has these powers. They both end up fighting each other and the mc slows her down and escapes...
I'm currently writing my bachelor thesis, which will involve citing the Angular docs. Angular is a web framework developed by both community developers and employees of Google LLC (Google is the pr...
I'm writing historical fiction which is set in ancient China. My MC is a historical figure who really did go into battle as a woman. Women in the ancient world were abused and mistreated. Males sl...
I struggle with forming full-fledged ideas. I'll come up with a snippet of an idea, have a hard time fleshing the idea out, and then lose interest before the idea becomes an actual story concept. ...
How can I write blog posts that are SEO (search engine optimization) friendly? I know there is lots of content available out there, but I want to know how to start writing the post as SEO friendly.
How do we write a movie script with a view towards establishing all of the visual symbolisms and how they should be interpreted? Often, movie scripts often only have dialogues and some very brief ...
I'm writing a formal document for my company where it'll be shared and used by a number of teams. Unfortunately, we don't have any official standard style guide to follow, so I've attempted to be a...
I'm of the opinion that a story should stand on its own; any worldbuilding that is necessary for the plot and story to function should be part of the story. However, at the same time, the world I w...
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'm going to write a book based on a true story. I want to know if for a book cover I could use real photos of the people who were in that story. They are dead but their pictures are published on ...
Problem I'm writing a play that includes a number of minor characters who only exist for a scene or two. They are defined by their personality traits, not by their professions, and their names are...
Ok, so the hook for my novel is a quote from the future that my protagonist will eventually say. But I need a way for my novel to go back to present tense. In what way can I smooth my novel back to...
I'm writing 2 stories simultaneously. The first one spans 17 years. The second picks up where the first left off... but only about 25% of the way in. The sequel seems to work best if I introduce ...
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 ...
My name is Ana Novkovic and I'm about to start writing and all that. I really really don't like my last name Novkovic. It's so hard to pronounce and I worry it would just distract readers and not l...
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...
I'm working on a branching narrative kind of story, and the entire story focuses on the reader uncovering a mystery in the house that they're in. There's only one ending where they survive. In th...
I like telling stories, but I don't care so much for reading them. It's not for me. But the number one advice to become a better author is to read a lot. Is there anything else I can do? EDIT: ...
Should we avoid "nonsensical" or "unclear" metaphors? I am not sure if this is a case of "nonsensical" or "unclear" metaphor, but sometimes you have certain phrases that doesn't seem to be suited f...
I'm writing a script that involves an interview with a person a la 60 minutes or Behind the Music. I'm a little confused if the "fill pieces" should be formatted as "recorded" or "prerecorded" in i...
This can get... confusing, which is why I tend to avoid it, but sometimes, I really want it there. “What?!” [said Character B.] I laughed, giving her a minute to process my words. “You’re get...
I’m currently writing a story and one of my characters is a butterfly. In one of the scenes, she manages to run away from a bunch of hungry lizards and hides into a flower; let’s say a Zinnia. Wh...
What would you write when referring to a fictional character in a non-fiction work? e.g. Tom Sawyer is a boy, he has no parents, he goes on adventures or Tom Sawyer was a boy, he had no parents, he...
For the last several months, I've had a a professional assignment writing an ongoing series for a well-known website. It was repurposed from a book I wasn't able to sell to a publisher. It's been ...
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...
I amended some of my chapters so that they're more intriguing and engaging for my readers. But there's one particular chapter in which one of my beta-readers stated, "It's intriguing, but it doesn'...
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 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 have an ambiguous script situation, 2 co-protagonists begin gaslighting the MC. They each have ulterior motives which they don't say. The reader is intended to infer the lies through contradictor...
I am getting ready to release my first fictional novel. At the moment I have zero web presence (besides E-mail accounts). I am considering using Amazon's Kindle Direct. Before releasing should I ...
In my novel, I have a scene at home which changes to scene at the office which is completely different. I have written it in a way that in a line or two the reader will understand the scene is chan...
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...
In my story the protagonist hears, in a temple ceremony, the reading of a religious/mythological text. Now in the actual story, I don't need the text itself (the role of the text in context, and th...
This is my first time writing a novel. In my novel, there is a part of the married life of my protagonist who is a woman. I don't have any experience of married life so I have taken inspiration fro...
I am considering writing a "history" of the Morlocks (based on the characters in the H. G. Wells novel). Question: Is this allowed, or do I need permission from his descendants?
