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.
Filters (None)
I have heard many times that you should always keep the sentence length to the minimum as possible, as it makes reading easy, fast and more important understandable to readers. I'm wondering: What...
In a comment to my post here, Cyn mentions wishing to avoid implying that the characters might all die, because she's writing for a mid-grade audience. Which made me wonder. I remember reading Th...
In my story, 12 year old Ruth has visions from another place and time which lead her to gather a group of kids for a quest. She is told there will be 18 kids, but she can only find 17 with the spe...
There is something I find myself doing often while writing, and I don't even know what to call it, but I would like to know if its good practice. It happens when I'm writing from a third-person per...
I'm an undergraduate student of psychology. My teachers assign writing assignments from time to time, and usually require some minimum of cited sources in APA format (as expected). When I start wr...
Does it get too confusing if you include the narrator’s short story that she is writing within the body of her main story?
Let's say I have a character in my story simply called "Slime Monster". With every instance of these two words, I want both words to be capitalized and to be corrected as a pair, so if I mistype it...
I have seen many blog post authors who tend to write a short teaser to present to the reader and keep them keen on reading more about the topic. Some bloggers tend to write a teaser with respect to...
I'm thinking of starting a blog. I'm confused about whether giving a moral in each blog post is a good idea or not. Will it sound like a lecture to my readers? Will they see it as monotonous and ev...
I try to write on various Q&A sites, but now I am thinking about having my own blog website. The main thing is that I don't know exactly what my niche topics would be for blogs. I write on vari...
I've heard and read from many vlogger and blogger authors that an aspiring writer should have his own webpage as early as possible. Being published or not doesn't come to it. Now, if I created a w...
My wife is the first one who reads my writings, and I'd like to keep her in the dark until I have a solid draft to show her. But I need a second set of eyes with my plot too. If I showed her my plo...
My story is set in the US. Would it be believable to the reader if I deviated from the norm that is also supported by demographic data? How many of the following deviations can I get away with? ...
We use Madcap Flare for a large documentation set, with HTML output. (Flare source is a very HTML-y XML with some Flare-specific additions.) We use git for source control and new work is done on ...
I'm Jewish. My middle-grade fantasy novel is very Jewish. Most of my characters are either Jews or converts/future converts or people with at least one Jewish grandparent. But some are not. My ...
In my interactive novel, I'm trying to keep the word count between choice prompts fairly short and consistent, but that means sometimes breaking up longer text into a few sections…. I've been usi...
There are occasions where you basically just start a chapter with a short descriptive passage and go straight to dialogues, so in those situations I am not sure how to deal with acronyms in dialogu...
I have a scene in a upcoming novel where two people play a game of chess, and I realized how difficult it was to describe it. The problem is due to the fact that there are many pieces and you can't...
In my sci-fi novel, some people have the ability to talk via telepathy so how do we distinguish telepathy from other types of communication? I would like to do it, because it's not the same, and I ...
I had a few experiences with what-if style brainstorming technique. In those exercises, I found I got lost in minute details. I'd like to know if this is a good price to pay for the thought pouring...
I was seriously wondering if it's a problem to use the antecedent, which is "Mr Spooner", after the possessive pronoun "his". Also, I am wondering if we can use "his" without ever using an antecede...
My story is broken into 8 sections. Sections 1 and 2 take place simultaneously, in two different worlds. The other 6 continue in a linear fashion (switching back & forth between the two worlds ...
I am planning to write a book about a life of a person. However, the protagonist is a black person. The main plot is not about ethnicity things, but where the plot happens I have to talk about some...
One of my main character's traits is that she has some superstitious beliefs. That trait is not essential to the MC, but everyone in the era of my story is. I'm contemplating a plot point near the ...
I have been communicating with three PoD companies. I was considering the first, it has been in business for years and provides a certain number of copies to the author, the rest are sold from th...
In the IT industry, we often write a lot of technical documentation meant for internal use only. Those documents are often stored in an internal wiki and accessed when the need arises. The conten...
Short-stories are a nice format to write. If you have been an aspiring writer for at least one year, it's quite probabile that you've got at least three short stories drafted out, sitting in some d...
I found this interesting figure of speech called spoonerism. Here's the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism Now, I have been wondering if spoonerism can be used in a non-humoristic ...
I'm writing a story that I'd like younger readers to pick up. I and they know and understand that some situations are far better expressed with one f-word than a thousand milder ones. I'm keeping m...
A blogger with the name of Glen C. Strathy said the following: The first and most important element of any plot is the Story Goal or Problem. This is the organizing idea around which the enti...
I am a new writer. My work is focused on real people. I ask a series of questions and go from there. Its all about their personal journeys with health. I like to capture the feeling of what people ...
I often feel that we fall into a trap of believing that we must provide a driving goal for a main character at the outset. And yet, as I look at compelling fiction, main characters do not have the ...
I'm reading KM Weiland's Creating Character Arcs. In it, she lists: Questions to Ask About the Thing the Character Wants and the Thing the Character Needs How is the Lie holding your ch...
There are rules to writing and we often talk about them here. But sometimes a good writer will break the rules. And to be honest some of my favorite pieces of writing are from when this is done wel...
If there is a gun on the mantelpiece in the Act 1, then in Act 2, that gun must be fired. Background I'm a big believer in Chekhov's Gun. I try not to do anything or introduce any new plot po...
I ask mostly out of curiosity. Obviously, a proper cookbook would involve real ingredients and not fantasy creatures. There's such a cookbook for Skyrim and Lord of the Rings. What I am curious abo...
I am about 3/4 finished with the first "volume" of a novel I desire to serialize. Not for the money really, though I won't lie that it'd be nice, but more for the fact I can get my name out there. ...
I am not sure how to best handle this, do we skip over a part of the dialogue? When a person is cut, he can resume, but it's not the same thing for a TV. Anyway, here's an example: The TV blur...
This is an offshoot from a comment exchange on an unrelated question. What to submit when asked for "sample chapters"? I know a large percentage of traditionally published fiction authors, especi...
I need to speak at the unveiling of a memorial plaque (this one, incidentally). I have an idea of what I want to say, and how I want to arrange it. My struggle is with the opening. I have spoken ...
I am wondering if we can use footnotes to describe technologies used in a science-fiction novel instead of describing it by switching from an omniscient POV, that describes everything in a poetic w...
I have two POV (3rd person limited) characters and they start the story as complete strangers and far apart. They don't meet for some time and they have very different experiences. Now I want them...
I use Ulysses 15 for my writing. The tool has a robust global search but, to my knowledge, it does not provide a replace function (only the sheet search has a "find and replace" function). Does an...
"The consequences of every act are included in the act itself".. What does this actually mean??
According to this wikipedia article, Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern. The same link also ...
I want to write a very short book of 100 pages. I want to put into it what I've suffered throughout my life: Hardships, failures, disappointments.... as an inspiration that, despite hardships, I su...
In my post-apocalyptic novel, my protagonist is not necessarily "good", and although the antagonist is an honest and kind person, my protagonist perceives her as "evil". My antagonist is the leade...
I missed my chance to write for About.Com when it was TheMiningCom and now it's DotDash and seems to be under different rules. Suite101 has become Suite.io (blocked from my work, so that's all I k...
I've heard the term "white paper" used in many situations. I've been asked before to write white papers on different subjects, though I've never successfully completed one. I've read many different...
For a submission (to a grant program, competition, agent, or publisher) that asks for sample chapters, which chapters do you choose? For example, a grant program for unfinished works I'm intereste...
