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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In my plot, there are these 2 characters who were originally close to each other. However, they had an argument and broke up. In the end of the book, though, they get back together again. What I ne...
I have two female characters, one who is lesbian, and the other bisexual. However, I am male. So not only am I to write the opposite gender, which I actually feel more comfortable doing, for some o...
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 reading Wired for Story, by Lisa Cron, where she writes the following about being vague or omitting information that the reader does not know: ...being vague is never a good idea... .....
This is about a father who returns after a particularly long journey. Typically, he's not available very often anyway, but he deeply cares about his daughter. He also fails at behaving like a fathe...
(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...
Is poetry always a solo endeavor? TV scriptwriting is classically done in a Writer's Room, where the show-runner outlines the main plot/character beats for a season, they and senior writers break ...
Like most kids, I went through the All Poetry Must Rhyme phase. Then a little later in school, rhyme was less essential (especially in English, a less rhyme-compatible language than many other ...
Sometimes in the process of writing dialogue, I wish to insert a joke in the exchange. I could copy an existing joke, or I could come up with one. The latter option seems preferable if I could tie ...
I decided to give a try to the snowflake method. The idea is that you gradually expand the story from a blurb into a full draft. This question stems from the character-characterization step, but it...
The fanfic I'm writing is so that I may get into the swing of literature. A test story if you might like in the Mass Effect Universe. Please prepare for a long text because there's a lot of trivia ...
My first question on the site was How do I stop using 'the' to start sentences so much? , One of the answers said: I would suggest reading more English poetry to pick up some techniques. I co...
I have two characters, the male being sort of a jerk, but lightening up later in the story, and the female is...very hateful. But a person who read the first chapter asked me if they were going to ...
Sure, I understand the characters, but that's because I've been thinking about them. But how do I transfer that knowledge to the reader without taking the time and space to flesh them out further?...
My MC is in a dark line of work. He is an assassin. He is also someone with lines he does not cross. He has been duped or coerced to do things he would not, but still holds to some standards. I wa...
The "not like other girls" trope is pretty common in young adult fiction, arguably misogynistic, and usually applied to a female protagonist or love interest. Attempts to make a female character s...
Essentially, I want to change: Managing a lot of people is a very difficult problem to: Lot of people, difficult problem I understand that when you shorten a title, it will become more vagu...
In novels, when the PoV follows a particular character, is pretty common that we get to hear his/her thoughts. Sometimes, those thoughts take the form of questions that the character ask himself: ...
I’m starting to write a fiction novel. A friend of mine works in publishing and she thinks the plot for my book is great but I’m not sure how to start. I know a lot of the details and I’ve thought ...
I have four poetry books and two nonfiction books I have self-published but now I have removed them from the web so I can traditionally publish them. Is there anything I need to do? Can I keep usi...
I am writing a movie where a character has an interview with a news reporter. The scenes segues into a character profile of the interviewee that features a voice over from the interviewer. How woul...
Suppose A is a famous historical character with a known history of emotional attachment with a particular set of people. If I would want to write a fictional story about character A that might invo...
Many writers eventually come to a point in their writing where they don't know what to write. They have a certain status or state of affairs that the narration has reached and another state that th...
Can we change the meaning of a well established symbol and use the newly defined symbol in our writing? If so how do we go about doing so? It am not talking about using a symbol in the context of ...
My novel is about a girl who is the heir to the throne of Helheim, the Norse world of the dead, but in order to claim the throne she has to pass a 3 part trial. I’m having a hard time coming up wi...
With the surge of audiobooks popularity and the dramatization of fiction and non-fiction recitations, do authors plan for their books to publish their work as audiobooks too? Additionally, if an a...
As an addendum to this question, I have written a children's picturebook, and as I understand it, the process of sending off a manuscript and getting it reviewed is expected to take 3-6 months (I a...
Considering the "story structure" proposed by Robert McKee; like: A story is a large structure composed by acts which are composed by sequences which are composed by scenes, which are composed by...
For a few of my imaginary worlds, my characters write letters to each other. These letters are never intended to be surfaced in the main story, they are my exploration of the characters' feelings a...
We produce a large HTML documentation set with the conventional two-pane view: expandable table of contents on the left, selected topic on the right. When you select a topic, if it has subtopics --...
I'm having trouble describing a fist bump explosion in my story. I can't just say "they did a fist bump explosion," because everyone may not know exactly what that looks like. Googling doesn't re...
I'm currently reading a sci-fi book that has over a dozen characters. The author had written dialog for two different characters using the same odd idiom in two separate chapters so far. I cannot s...
I will have to write a story arc where the main characters will be trapped in a town during a siege. What are the key points I should address / display to make the siege interesting for readers? T...
Okay, so two women are in a bar and I'm telling the story from one of the women's POV. Two guys come in and the women are watching/listening to them from a distance. They don't know their names or ...
When describing the physical features of my more important characters, I often don't add much. I of course describe important features, especially if they will be relevant in the story. For example...
I'm currently thinking of writing a murder mystery series with three books that I am planning it's called Tailor Shop Mysteries and I have three titles and my family in willing to help me with the ...
A beta reader of sorts (cousin) mentioned he thought my MC2 rather brutal in her capture of MC1 - though justified. I have her dupe him into surrendering (believing himself outnumbered and outgun...
Question : When writing my screenplay, I frequently find the urge to describe a character's emotion. However, I have read somewhere (I forget where) that this should be left to the actor to some ex...
The protagonist sets out on a journey to reach a goal. But the further he gets into the story, the clearer he understands that the odds aren't in his favor. He experiences loss, frustration, anger,...
This is in a professional email. I'm quoting from a business document that was sent to the person that I'm writing the email to. I need to clarify something, and to do so I need to quote from a se...
Goal: To publish a blogpost 2 times/month (from once in 4 months) Currently: 300 blog posts in drafts/unfinished. I even have three 20k word unfinished novellas gathering dust. (Over 5 years of ca...
I read a very interesting novel or book about aliens accidentally discovering humans and finding out how dangerous they are, where the galaxy got scared of humans and their potential to wipe out al...
Our church had to stay baroque and afloat not b-roke and awash. baroque and broke wordplay here: not sure how to write out bahroke meaning broke
I'm writing a screenplay that incorporates various news shots. I plan to use various news shots as expositions. My story takes place in the future, and I want various news shots that display the to...
Just a scene I pictured- (Character receives a syringe in the chest but doesn't feel the after pain until a moment later) Ex: Johnny begins to feel a burning like sensation in his chest that's mor...
I was invited to participate in an anthology of essays about a tv show. I chose an episode based on the Wikipedia summary (since it had been so long since I had watched it), but after I watched it...
English is a language invented by humans, for humans. Which means some words don't fit well when you're writing about characters who aren't human. For example: Suppose I write "The demon tiptoed a...
I'm working on a novel which is based on a true story. I first thought of writing from the heroine's POV, but later changed my mind and introduced a pet in the plot as the narrator of the story. Wh...
There is a character in every story. Special One. It becomes the center of the story. i.e. the Main character. The author takes special care of them. Provides them wise thinking. Good luck. A cha...
Our software documentation set (for a SQL analytics database platform) is large, because SQL and databases have many pieces. Often a single statement, function, or feature will be highly related to...
