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)
For my Pathfinder campaign I write an update each session which I share with my players. The goal for these updates is: Provide a brief recap of the previous session Get people excited for the ne...
My tendency when writing is to give every character a name. Even the most minor ones. It says something about a nobleman when he knows every guard and stablehand by name, and it's something I want....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_count#In_fiction This Wikipedia page tells you under which classification a fictional work falls under depending on its length, so we have 3 I am most interested...
Possibly related questions: Should I add racism in my book's world or have my world have no racism? Is accurate human nature required for good writing, even in fantasy scenarios, or with fictiona...
In one of my novels (it's a middle grade fantasy novel) the chapters average around 2,000 words. But the final climactic chapter is currently almost 7,000 words. I am considering splitting it into ...
My story has a group of five refugees traveling across the kingdom. One of them is preachy and pretty much useless (unused to physical labor, trying to convert the heathens in the group). She's dri...
Context I am currently working on a fantasy novel in which one of the main characters is a nobleman and scholar, studying exotic languages as part of his higher education and translating documents...
I'm a chef. I'm also a writer. It's inevitable that I would want to write a cookbook. In fact I've probably started a dozen that I just never got around to finishing. Partly because I'm not sure ho...
The amount of research I'm doing for my novel is staggering. To the point where my spouse says I need to write a companion book (or a blog) just talking about the research! Sometimes I research f...
In my planned novel the main character is essentially from a less technologically advanced society and is learning about the "civilized world" beyond their village. He has above average intelligenc...
I am a long time Dungeon Master of Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder. My games run in a custom world of my own making. However, I utilise a lot of the traditional lore and races of D&D. I'm ...
A lot of people use Google's n-gram to see if something is idiomatic, but for a lot of non-native English speakers even that doesn't really help, so what would you suggest non-native speakers to do...
I've never written for anything other than personal enjoyment or for a predefined context before. I have ideas and partial drafts for several books and want to finish at least one this year. My co...
Is there a way to have comments in different colours, in Microsoft Word, Open Office Writer, or Libre Office? (I am currently using Open Office, and I'm happy with it, but I am open to making the s...
https://dgrayman.fandom.com/wiki/Innocence Well, I always thought that the name Innocence in D.Gray-Man never made much sense. It's not explained anywhere why it's called that, so I always thought...
I am writing a story these days and I want to introduce a character who is similar to a king. This character is introduced with heavy announcements by his minions who scream out words of admiration...
So the problem I am having is that the protagonist of the novel I am writing is having a confrontation with another character, who starts panicking. Instead of saying "panic dripped from his face",...
Joe is the worst. Nobody likes him, not even the so-called friends he teams up with at school, filling other students with terror. He's sarcastic, nasty, and a bit of a racist, and especially ant...
A recent question got me thinking about how to criticize poetry well and I realized I am not very good at it. I can do themes, and that's about it. And I'm not even sure that should be covered unle...
Whatever subject I am researching for my story, the common recommendation is "talk to the relevant professionals". If I need medical information, talk to a doctor. If I need information about the m...
I just had this sentence off my head: A crown of fire spread through the country consuming everything on its way. What I mean by empty metaphor is a metaphor that doesn't really have any me...
I'm writing a villanelle as a school project and one of my lines is too short. Can somebody give me tips on how to extend the line?
I'm writing a novel, and the plotline has military terminology and insignias. The basic plot is that there are two continents in my world: one capitalist and allegorically like the US and NATO, and...
So, I thankfully own a video-game history book which I anticipate using to write, rather, a Christian, family-friendly account of this subject. To be clear, I'm not going to be rephrasing from the...
This is inspired by this question, but taking it in a non-fiction direction: Is there a benefit to publishing non-fiction ebooks on Amazon as opposed to just putting them on your blog? Let's assu...
Christian culture is dominant. Thus, even without being Christian myself, I can recognise, understand and appreciate references that are within that culture, like the Pietà: Sam sat propped aga...
We all do it. We do it quite often. Some of us too often, to the chagrin of the mods who have to clean up after us. Many people out there have autocomments but I try not to. I find them impersonal ...
I currently spend a good deal of time over at Code Review and I would love to improve the quality of the reviews I write. Can you give me any insight into the structure or approach you use when wri...
I'm writing a middle-grade novel in English. I have time-traveling kids from 1995 America who go to Ancient Egypt to join the Exodus. None of the kids speak anything but English (aside from a few...
At least 40% of the characters in my novel appear for only 2-3 chapters and I don't really have the chance to develop them. Is this too many? How can you determine you have too many characters appe...
In my visual novel (an interactive, narrative-based video-game), I have a detective character who decides whether he believes interviewees controlled by the player. The detective doesn't explain ...
Second Edit -- to try to expand the scope BEYOND W.SE and to cover any CreativeCommons work, not just here. Deleted part about the badges. -- Edit -- to clarify it's not quite a BLOG, more a portf...
What are the considerations one has to take into account when writing a play, that are imposed by the format of a play, a.k.a by the fact that it is played on stage? For example, in Shakespeare's ...
What are the best ways you find to get out of your own habitual thought patterns, personality, dispositions, and culture when writing characters? For example, we are all familiar with the Myers-B...
European dictatorships left a profound cultural footprint in the local culture, to the point that a certain vocabulary, a certain manner of writing, and even a certain manner of speaking is evocati...
I have heard there can be an allegory inside another allegory (mise en abyme), but what about 2 concurrent allegories (at the same time) and how do you insure that people don't get confused by the ...
I would like to followup on this excellent question which outlined differences among works for children, middle-grade, and young-adult. What are some clear differences in theme/story between child...
I am seriously wondering how to go about writing dialogues for characters whose native language isn't English and who aren't very fluent in English. It's very hard, because people have different le...
During an in-class activity for my AP Lang class, each student did a cold read of a piece they chose, then all the students provided critique out loud and written on their own copy of the author's ...
I find it very hard sometimes to describe a scenery, especially when the features are very bland, like you describe a city where all of the buildings are tall and look about the same or a plain wit...
I'm a self-taught programmer which means I started writing software by sitting down at an IDE and hammering out some code. When my decisions ultimately coded me into a corner I would refactor and r...
I am writing a science-fiction short story where there are a lot of pseudoscientific ideas being dealt constantly. I was wondering how to reduce the absurdity of some of those ideas using literary...
There is a prince. (Or some other person of high rank.) And there is that prince's good friend, who, naturally, holds a somewhat lower rank. There are two ways I could show the close relationship ...
There are different types of time travel (they have different rules and constraints) throughout literature, so I was wondering if you could list some of them here, and which ones are best for drivi...
I am a happy user of an Underwood 5, an old typewriter from the beginning of the XX century. I use it to type letters, short stories, greeting cards, and labels. I am now planning to try and type...
The line between science fiction and fantasy is often blurred. And that's okay. Genre is often more about marketing than anything else. As a general rule though: SciFi has science and technology...
I have three characters, who are supposed to be good friends. Athos, Aramis, and Porthos, if you wish. Instead, I have two characters who share a strong Frodo-Sam relationship, and the third guy, w...
My book was published by a now defunct publisher. They returned my records to me (locked, and I could not open any of the documents) and I've since re-published my title under my own name. Howeve...
