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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While writing blog post mostly on technical articles, I often come to dilema that does my post is too detailed for reader eventually they will skip further reading due to complexity or is it too s...
In my novel, the MC goes to a resort and at the resort, they offer two types of Buddhist meditations. Those meditations are from another book and I cannot fiddle with the meditation steps without t...
(For reference, I am queer.) In my post-apocalyptic novel and in the short story from the novel's antagonist's perspective, my MC, Eris' love interest, Caspian, has/had two mothers, Saskia and Ezr...
When someone says that writing is good or bad, better or worse, is it merely a way to talk about whether something is popular, or interesting to you? Or is there more to it than that? Compare the...
As much as I would like it, both in Worldbuilding and Writing, not every action is logical or "right". There are two types of this: Imperfect information: The character(s) lack vital informati...
The main character (which is a girl) of the first romance I'm writing would feel jealous sometimes of her love interest, but I want it to be a cute trait or even a setup for funny scenes, not a ver...
TLDR: Tips and Tricks for storyboarding a novel? For someone who can't draw well enough to do the "Draw and describe method" Hello, having read the "Storyboard a Novel?" as well as some sources ...
When I googled "The Difference between Resume and CV", the first result I bumped into was this. I am highlighting a few points that are mentioned in it below: The primary differences between a ...
We publish documentation online using HTML. For things like fixed parameter names and other code literals, we use <code> tags. My question is about styling these in tables. On our referenc...
I watched a presentation called Your First 10k Readers. It explains a marketing course that will build an audience for your book prior to release - even prior to completion. It sounds sensible and ...
I am in the process of editing a short story. It is science fiction of the "if this goes on" kind: I take a social trend I see, and paint its event horizon - a troubling future. 1984 and Fahrenheit...
I am writing a visual novel and use a fictional country in "real-world" setting. Some cases have been bothering me and I'm not sure if it's legal to write this because it might be insulting(?): ...
I always face the problem of word limit. How can I shorten a piece of writing without causing its original essence to mar? How can I be effective in doing that? Are there any general rules? For ex...
I've set up styles so that my paragraphs under level 4 headings stick together. To this end, I've set "Widow/Orphan control", "Keep with next", and "Keep lines together" for both the 4th heading st...
As somewhat of a follow-up to my previous question: How to create a consistent feel for character names in a fantasy setting? Once I have named the characters in a given setting, how do I create p...
Good time of the day, community! Hope, that my post won't irritate too much, but rather will be helpful for someone in future. I already made some progress myself (I mean some raw unfinished vers...
I joined my current company and department a few years ago. We had some documentation for processes but most people had been around for a long time and never needed it, so it was very sparse. Sinc...
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 am sorry. Its a bit longer than necessary. So as not to put one entire page here, I cut a piece of the paragraph. Ian had difficulty expressing himself, so Lavi squat down in front of him, holdin...
My protagonist uses a lot of extensive vocabulary and is quite verbose. The novel I am writing is a first-person narrative, and my protagonist is the narrator of the novel. An extensive vocabulary...
Which print-on-demand (PoD) services allow creating hardcover books of arbitrary dimensions (e.g., 115 × 157 mm)? I'm looking to print 60 copies.
I wrote a very compelling science fiction short story. I am currently writing a book about an entirely different universe, not related to this short story. I made this story rest for a long time, ...
We use Madcap Flare for our documentation, and it has an annoying property: if you happen to have the shift key down when you type a space, it inserts a non-breaking space ( ). Our docume...
Software developers don't ever work in text editors, instead they use IDEs (integrated development environments) full of code assistance tools, etc. Why don't writers use similarly advanced writin...
When writing an error prompt, should we end the sentence with a exclamation mark or a dot? I am writing an application for iPhone and I have some error prompt in my application like "Your password...
For some reason, when I find myself writing a male protagonist, I seem to default to the brooding, gritty kind of man that could easily find his place into a noir novel. Those characters are often ...
I am a woman with aspergers and writing an autistic character has always been close to my heart. Fiera Allas, a fantasy powerhouse with immense power and sword skills has always struck me as autist...
I wrote a scene that I put my heart and soul into. It was received well by most of my readers, but I'm struggling with crafting a new scene for a book I'm currently writing. Here's some comments fr...
Can we dialoguify sounds? By dialoguifying I mean turning something that shouldn't be put in quote when that something correspond to sounds into a dialogue by putting it between quotes and treating...
I'm currently writing my bachelor thesis, which will involve citing the Angular docs. Angular is a web framework developed by both community developers and employees of Google LLC (Google is the pr...
I'm writing a novel focusing on a single character POV. For many aspects, it can be considered a coming of age story; along with the usual tropes of the hero's journey, my protagonist gradually lea...
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...
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...
I am a programmer and in the middle of developing a TBS (turn based strategy) computer video game. Those kind of games have a flow of what is commonly known to gamer as 4X, that is, explore, expand...
Let's take for granted that the 3 acts structure is relevant and exists. This, of course, is an assumption. How the three acts relate with the length of the novel? In a standard book - let's say 5...
I’m confused about point of view. In my story—so far—I only reveal to the reader what the main character, a child, can see/hear. Not often, but at times, I write that the child “wondered” or he “no...
Last year, I worked for an organization that published a weekly blog on its website. The blog was also published as a newspaper column and was included in a weekly e-newsletter. One day, the owner...
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",...
I'm working on a novel of my own and, looking back at the bits of it I have so far brought into light, that almost everything in it is dialogue. Is this a bad thing? How could I fix this if it is?
In the novel I'm trying to write, I probably will have to introduce a second point of view because my initial main protagonist will be mostly unable to act after some point. Now I'm considering to ...
I'm writing a research paper in one of my math classes about the P vs NP problem. I feel the introduction to my paper sounds like a cliche. This is my intro: In the field of mathematics, there ...
I am thinking of implementing multiple ending to one of my novels and it would be done the following way: There's a scene where the main character is about to do something, but I leave it to the re...
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...
While writing a first-person singular novel, is the MC all-knowing? How do we handle plots which do not include the MC, like something happening with others but not including MC? Will it be taken a...
I want to be able to correctly categorise and identify different characters in a story, predominantly fiction. I have read a lot about different types of characters--flat, round, static, dynamic, p...
I am a discovery writer. I wrote more than 50% of my first novel's first draft. I got really confuse about some aspects of writing, so I took a break and analysed my plot. I've started developing...
I've been reading a lot of books about plot and character arcs. Most structures—and I believe this is generally good and true—require that the character come back from their journeys changed, usual...
Recently I've stumbled across China Miéville's novels. Apparently, they fit in a genre called Weird Fiction, or to be even more specific New Weird, where the "new" is used to distinguish new writer...
I am writing a book a about a normal girl investigating her friend's murder. I wanted to ask if it's possible that a normal person who is not a detective could actually solve a murder?
I'm starting a new fantasy story, and although I had a loose idea of plot, I began sculpting my characters before writing anything. Creating images of them in my head, developing their personaliti...
