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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(EDITED TO MAKE IT LESS BROAD AND MORE CLEAR). I recently asked a question about if I really need to include scientific proof for my mostly-non-scientific post-apocalyptic novel, and the best answ...
I have a text which I would like to quote. However, the particular section of the text in which I am interested cites but does not directly quote another author. Do I need an indirect citation, a...
I'm an amateur writer from the Philippines. I am writing a novelette for an international writing contest. My story is written in English, but is set here, in my country, with my POV character be...
I couldn't find anything on this one, so maybe someone has a good idea on what would be considered good practice in a scholarly context. Background For a semester project, I have to observe an on...
Is it too distracting to include a major mystery subplot(s) in a fantasy story? I mean a complete subplot or subplots that the character solves. Perhaps the examples below do not qualify as mystery...
I am not sure if this is true, but I heard there were short poems in the beginning of each chapter in Lord of the Rings. Although, this could be done fairly easily, I am wondering if there are any ...
How do I present a nameless character in a 3rd person narrative who has never known his parents? And has never had extended human interaction with anyone long enough to even be called “Boy” or “Chi...
I tried to find sales figures about printed fantasy novels and how they compare among different countries, but I couldn't find anything in that regard. I can find generic statistics about how the...
Describing mixed races in this way would be too broad. How do I say that someone is black? How do you describe somebody of two or more races? Word like mixed and biracial do not depict that perso...
Sorry if this is an ancient solved problem to ask in 2019, but I googled about this and Quora isn't really answering me. I searched for the words black and race and politically as key-words on thi...
I want to write travel story novel. My plan is to have 4 characters (2 guys and 2 girls), which decided to visit 4 European cities (probably I will choose Frankfurt - Germany, Reykjavík - Iceland,...
So, in my post-apocalyptic novel, the world was caught up in an international war (basically WWIII), and all the world's nuclear superpowers launched their warheads and killed much of the global po...
I've read that writers and editors are often paid on a per-word basis. Then I did a search about the cost of translating a literary work into a different language and I've found varying information...
Let's say that a novel consists of three parts: introduction, climax and conclusion. Is it ok if the conclusion is much shorter than the climax. For example, can the introduction be 20% of the nove...
Let's say I am writing a fantasy book where magic users doesn't use something called "magic", but use something called "Hermetic". Where in the book should we redefine (give a new definition to the...
I have been working on a story for several years. The manuscript is now currently longer than 1,000 notebook pages (roughly 615 pages in print by my calculations) and it’s only a third of the way t...
As a writer, I sometimes have trouble seeing a project to the end. Sometimes it is because I reach an impasse. Sometimes it is because I choose to scrap it for whatever personal reason. And sometim...
I've seen a few visual novels on Steam and Kickstarter that mentioned how many words they already contain and what they are planning for the final amount. The problem is: I have no idea how those n...
I have been struggling to write a book on my 14 years research. I have used Microsoft Word exclusively, but I have a problem that the book uses lots of pictures, sometimes six per page and this is ...
I am guessing there are many options, but I would like to know how the industry does it and which methods are the most popular. I am writing a short novel with 3 other friends and we haven't yet di...
I have this Paragraph and I was wondering if it's possible to do what is underlined in the figure (RED), or if you know how to do this in another way, let me know. Basically the "DOM.Element" is a ...
People usually use a musical sheet to tell how a song should be sung, but when you read a lyric you have no idea how a song should be sung without having the musical sheet in front of you, so is th...
How does one write a story for a story-based videogame. Is it done in the form of a screenplay? Is it written as any normal prose? Is it written as documentation that goes with the other early desi...
Is there a way to make sure that what we write sounds consistent with the style adopted by the majority of editors? I am not sure how people do it, but almost all articles seems to have been writte...
I understand that a prologue is meant to open up a story and introduce characters, themes, and the world to my audience. It is not supposed to be a long length of text. At the same time, I find my ...
I've edited the question for clarity following some unexpected comments in the first answer. I submitted my latest novel to a handful of agents, and had a request for a full manuscript. On almost...
In the writing practises guides, it is usually mentioned that use of ellipsis is a bad practice. But I have come across certain usages in professional writing. To give an example; In the novel ...
A while ago, I started writing a short story for a competition. It was supposed to be about four girls in a shared student apartment. The plan was to have everyone conflict with everyone until they...
This may seem like a silly question (it definitely feels like it has one of those answers that I already know, but just can't dig up). And maybe this isn't the right place for it, but I am asking f...
I know it normally takes several months to get an agent and then a contract. But are there any shortcuts, any particular companies that one can submit to directly and get a much faster evaluation? ...
I recently came to know that wordpress.com and wordpress.org are two different platforms for publishing. But despite browsing on various links I am not able to fully understand the actual differenc...
In my story, I will have a hero begin a journey. It will be the underdog story as well as good-vs-evil story. Think Frodo vs Sauron for massive oversimplification. Except in my story the hero becom...
We all know some common symbolism: For instance, red stands for anger, blood, and violence. The cross stands for martyrdom and sacrifice. Common symbols are easy to notice, but what if you decided ...
Premise: I believe that breaking genre expectations can alienate readers. If you go into a book expecting one thing and get another thing out of it - especially if that other thing is the complete ...
This is something of a companion question to How does one write from a minority culture? A question on cultural references I have recently had a somewhat unpleasant experience reading Naomi Novik'...
What should a character interview contain to be successful where the goals are: characters with strong voice who are established with a distinct 'personhood' (?) and are generally interesting to fo...
I've come across a problem with one of the main characters in my book. The "heroine" of my story starts out as an apathetic self-absorbed hacker, who seeks adrenaline thrills to find meaning in her...
If you use an old expression like "by a many", do you need to make it consistent and use old expressions throughout the poem, or is it ok to just use it in one verse or sentence? “The spring is...
I drafted a book two years ago that I'm now polishing to publish. When I drafted it, for speed's sake, I named one of my primary characters after an old school friend who I'm still in contact with ...
We all have seen the headlines: "Touching Moment Where Autistic Boy is Asked to Prom", "Watch This Child With Downs Win Her Heat During a Swim Competition", etc., that are touching at first glance,...
I'm writing a work which is bookended by a frame story with an unreliable narrator. How do I prevent confusion for the reader when the frame narrator interjects? In the framed story, the character...
Too often, when people make a story about genocide committed by a fascist government, the story often devolves into a Nazi Germany cliché, especially when the story is set in a modern or futuristic...
End-of-line hyphenation is the process of breaking words between lines to create more consistency across a text block. (source) A long word is broken across a line-break by means of a hyphen. It he...
I was wondering if there were other uses for metaphors other than forming an allegory and for stylistic effect, that is, adding more flair to a description that would be otherwise dull. I've done s...
Can one legally include a reference to, or an appearance of, a character from an existing work of fiction? How much of that character can be used? What makes this permitted or forbidden under US la...
My friends talk about a few phrases in a book we read recently, as personification. I don't understand what it is. What is personification?
If someone asks me to be a beta-reviewer for a book and I had to write a feedback for it, how should I organize the text, what do I need to do to not offend the author and give constructive feedbac...
I was thinking about writing about the Holocaust, but I am not sure if it's a good idea since I am not sure if people would feel offended if I exaggerate certain events or facts even if it makes th...
Let there be a character. Let the character's name be, for example, Alexander. Now, Alexander's parents call him 'Sasha'. His friends call him 'Xander'. His girlfriend calls him 'Alex'. In formal ...
This is a followup question to What language shall they sing in? I'm writing a middle-grade novel in English with time-traveling kids from 1995 America who go to Ancient Egypt to join the Exodus. ...
