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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Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin. Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read (Great Courses) (2013). p. 124. Listen to the stri...
A companion question for How much description is necessary, how much description is too much? I close my eyes, I can visualise my MC's bedroom (for example) in tiniest detail: the accent wallpaper...
While I tend to agree with the writer & publishing guru, Dean Wesley Smith, that agents are usually a liability and that it is wrong for writers to hand over their royalties to them, I am not s...
I heard that people who appreciate dark humor are more intelligent on average. I also read the following: Willinger and her team said their findings suggested black humour processing is a “c...
Would this small paragraph in my short story be considered as imagery? (Rose is looking for a painting) Rose and Mr. Howard stepped inside. There were cobwebs everywhere. Lots and lots of old...
I recently decided to make a long delayed return to a genre where I had early publishing success, upper-level picture books. Given that I now have school-aged children, I have a number of stories ...
I translate fanfiction stories from Russian into English as a hobby and I'm a bit confused about tenses. In Russian, it's normal to mix past and present tenses in generally past narration, but I re...
I'm taking a writing course and the biggest challenge I'm facing is figuring out my audience — particularly for something I have written where I didn't have an audience in mind. Some topics or styl...
I am an author who wrote a biography on a singer. I want to turn the book into a screenplay. Do I have to get permission from the singer to do this?
I am writing a story set after an apocalyptic event that has left only 0.1% of the world population intact. I originally wrote a zombie-like apocalypse but simplified it to a plague-like disease, a...
(For reference, I am not white. I've asked another question about race here). So I'm pretty far into writing my dystopian novel and I was reading over what I had. Something that helps me when I ...
I've been tasked with drafting the text for a memorial plaque dedicated to group X. Group X was big, diverse, and had several hundred years of rich history. Amount of space I have is 2-3 sentences....
"The ship sailed through the billowing winds and the petulant waves." Is it redundant? Because, if I say billowing, the reader would probably think petulant waves is too redundant. What do you...
So far, I've only written one short story but I wish to write a novella. I'm worried, however, about the enormous work of marketing and contacting agents and publishers. I just want to focus on my ...
I have story ideas that involve civil wars or revolutions happening while a character is travelling. I was wondering what would be the advantages and disadvantages of setting such a story in a made...
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 am not an American English native (I'm actually a German native speaker) but, when I write, I use the American style of words predominantly. However, I always use aluminium instead of aluminum, f...
My novel is written in the third person. When changing POV between different scenes (or chapters), is it OK if the parts for different POV characters use different tenses: some - the past tense, an...
I'm currently writing a book about a government that designs its citizens' DNA and assigns them each to a job or purpose in life best suited to improve the society as a whole. My main character doe...
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...
What are the properties a generic main character from a character-driven/psychological novel should have? E.g. relations, motives, personality, knowledge.
My MC is going through boot camp. Physically and mentally, he goes from high-school boy to soldier prepared for combat. Along the way there's struggles, there's new friendships formed, there's the ...
If I write a page about a current pop star that talks about what they're doing, that is a fact such as dedicating themselves to Satan or involved in witchcraft, can I be sued by them even though it...
NECESSARY INFORMATION Recently I saw someone on the internet say that Revenge Of The Sith was so powerful because of an effect called "Emotional Projection." This means that when you see the movie...
I have been looking through various books with a dungeon being the main character. Regardless of the book, however, the character had to gain a physical body in order to forward the plot, which I ...
I'm writing a Star Wars fanfiction because I wanted to practice my writing on something I love, and I decided to make a character named Alexander Ray Rullero. He's not the main character, as in he ...
(Question about my hacker (hacking??) novel.) Just an FYI, I am a woman. Edward is a cyber spy and works with an organization named Vox Populi to curate and release all data online, especially t...
I'm formatting a play using Pages on macOS. I cannot figure out how to get character names to be associated with their dialogue. I'm formatting like [centered] JOHN [\centered] Yes, that’s me...
I have a low quantity book project that will need a book sized A3 with 1000-1500 pages. Is there a print on demand provider out there that could possibly handle that?
The idea is simple: we intend to publish a puzzle book that contains a difficult enigma. The first one to solve this enigma will win a prize (i.e., $10.000). Some obvious rules: The solution need...
Edit: After reading the question I've asked again and the answers I've gotten, I feel I should say that the descriptions of the characters here are definitely the bare basic. There is a full word d...
I did an install of Scrivener Version: 1.9.9.0 - 03 Oct 2018 on a Windows 10 computer. In the paste, I know I used to be able to copy formatted text from any source and paste it as plain text into...
I am considering uploading a trio of related short stories to Dropbox as a quick way to share them with potential beta readers. Before I actually link them elsewhere, I feel I should have at least ...
I belong to a terrific critique group (writing group) that has dealt with a lot of attrition. We started with 6 people and currently have 4, one who joined after the first month or two. We also h...
So, for all of you who post your stories online, you may know my pain. For those who don't, I'd like to post some of my writing online on sites such as Deviantart and Wattpad. However, I've been r...
Within narration in past tense, should a statement of a universally true fact be in past tense or in present tense? For example, in the short text: It was late afternoon in Zubrin. The air was ...
Sometimes job listings use slashes and hyphens in the title of the job to specify specialties or other job characteristics. For instance, here are two listings on stack exchange: Data Scientist - D...
I am contemplating writing a fictional character [nerd] who speaks in a pop culture references. I appreciate this question somewhat overlaps Referencing modern pop culture in science fiction The ...
In a story I'm working on, I'm adding a side character to travel with the two main characters because I realized I didn't have very much planned for actually showing who the main characters are and...
In my novel, the protagonist is divorced and moves from London to another city in Britain. The setting is 2013. The protagonist is depressed and stressed out; in real life, such a person would see...
I'm going to submit a request for a Library of Congress Preassigned Control Number (PCN). One of the questions on the form is: Is this title intended for children or young adults? Because of ...
I am confused about what should I add in the place of conference in the Chicago manual of style? Place of the publisher or the location of the conference? I just want to cite the conference paper...
My previous question was "Are paragraph spacing used for emphasis?" and that got me thinking even deeper about emphasizing. I'd like to emphasize to create tension and make the reader continue rea...
I am writing a story and I have these 3 sentences that elaborate on the ending of a first page. This way the reader will continue to read my story. My question is, am I allowed to place paragraph ...
I have recently joined a real-time chat-based roleplay group. Most of the people seem to be sticking to 100 to 250 words when it comes to making their posts, but sometimes I get overly descriptive ...
I understand that short sentences are a way to build tension. Do long sentences have a defined emotional impact in fiction writing?
At the moment I'm writing my master-thesis in the area of information systems. Because I developed some code to demonstrate my approach, I also mention some software tools in my proof-of-concept se...
Last year, I completed a heavily researched 95,000-word novel about an emerging pandemic that targets primarily children. I am a former scientist and current nurse and wanted to do teaching about w...
So I've got a bit: Alta blinked. She pushed on, smiling, “—the argument. When the argument succeeds, which I still don’t fully deem, even after that—it looks to me like you’ve still got to do a...
My brother wrote and it was published in 2003. Not a novel but it was published and can find even in amazon.He has never recieved 1 penny. he asked me many times to find out what I could His name a...
