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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As the title says, I'm looking for advice on how to handle changes of scene from one character to another, each in different places, but experiencing the same event. This story is about a bushfire...
I'm currently developing a fictional species set in a fantasy world, and I want to name it, but I don't want it to sound too... scientific? For example, our scientific name is Homo sapiens, but we ...
I'm just getting into writing and while reading about it I've found a lot of topics which claim that reactive protagonists are generally frowned upon. Reactive: Acting in response to a situatio...
Umberto Eco, E. T. A. Hoffmann and others have pretended (in the introduction to the story) to have found and edited obscure old manuscripts. In my view this added to the charm of their writings. ...
My main character gets shot and survives. One thing that bothers me is a character who is injured and keeps going like the energizer bunny. I try to set up for a rapid recovery, mentioning traini...
I have a problem writing my alt-history story. It's a story about basically World War I. Yet, I wish not to convey ideas of the time, like how which country was bad, which country was good. Indeed,...
I am a non-native English user and whenever I write something is it better that I use simple words or some rare and seldomly used words? I mean native-speakers should surely understand basic Englis...
Is there any books out there that details old spells and potions?
This setting' world is populated by witch covens that function as both royal houses and political entities. They are matriarchial, with witches had the head of families who directly control their h...
Eons ago, there was a war among gods that came close to destroying humanity and the mortal realm. Gods depend on humanity, and their destruction would inevitably hurt them as well. At the conclusio...
I have a little contradiction in my story that may well be fatal. In my high sci-fi setting, one of my main characters is an android. Let's call him Bob. Bob is efficient, cold and straight-to-th...
Protagonist-Centred Morality is when a fictional work is eager to point out when an antagonist does something immoral or distasteful but fails to acknowledge when a protagonist does the same or som...
I'm a startup copywriter, and some agencies request a CV on application to join. Should I include the name[s] of some of the agencies I already work with and which send me jobs?
It's common in stories for spectacle to build over time. Each story arc, the stakes get higher, the drama gets more intense, the villains get more dangerous, and so on. For a story with a fixed e...
I'm writing fantasy stories in different worlds which do not share any history with our own. I was thinking I wanted to move away from the classic 'all white cast' scenario in most games, by picki...
I really feel like writing, in all its forms, is a very nice way to express myself especially since I'm an introvert, but I'm afraid people would know how I think and know my thinking process and l...
If so, how? Intuitively, it would seem like being skilled in one automatically entails being skilled in the other. Why is that not necessarily the case?
In one of my stories, I have a character who is a bit of a smart ass, always cracking jokes at the expense of others and sometimes even himself. I often get inspired by things I find on the interne...
In my trilogy, the protagonist and deuteragonist share a mental link, allowing them to communicate with each other telepathically. A side effect of this telepathy is that they enable the duo to obs...
I'm currently writing a novel with 3-4 character POVs in it - two male, two female. Each have different upbringings, different cultural backgrounds, different professions, different motivators and ...
I’ve always been writing, but never wanted to write something in a world I create. I already know what direction I’ll be taking my fleshed-out characters, but I’m still wondering whether or not I s...
The main character I have in mind for a story in a fantasy setting will be in foreign lands for the entirety of the book. She will have a basic grasp of the spoken language, so her dialogue will us...
I'm a strong believer in genre being largely a thing that's used for marketing, an easy shorthand for book stores to know where to place your book and sell it better. It's also, unfortunately, a sh...
I'm writing my own fantasy novel and the way I want it to end is with the villain showing his humanity to the hero, begging for mercy, and when the hero is about to spare him the villains stabs him...
On the topic of keeping a reader engaged: Dialog is a great way to balance out a scene of description and action. Dialog allows conflict, information, reveal of character, and so on and so on. My...
My trilogy features an otherworldly monstrosity called Fenrisúlfr as it's primary antagonist, whose characterisation takes cues from Nyarlathotep, Sauron, Showa!King Ghidorah, Sutekh, Makuta Terida...
In my story, I have found myself in somewhat of a pickle: Although the hero is more than powerful enough to defeat a villain (which is your typical 'Dark Lord’) I don't think my protagonist is read...
Edit: I looked at What are some ways to get to know your characters? and while I noticed similarities, I think that question asks in broader terms about what tools can be used for developing charac...
I want to write a short story from the perspective of a cat who wants to kill a bird that extremely annoys her. Just like Tom is trying every time to kill Jerry or do something to him. However, I d...
As a creative writer in my free time, I sometime suffer from a lack of feedback. To get some impressions on what I've written, I either have to ask my girlfriend (who acts as a sort of beta-reader)...
My question is, is this even realistic? She's a woman in her early twenties who specializes in torture, only working on her victims when they're tightly strapped down and confined so she can go a...
I'm writing a story where my two main characters have been merged together so that they share a single body. They spend a lot of time discussing things and arguing on what actions to take. This has...
I've decided that this novel would work best as a first person POV, and I generally wouldn't like to give that up. However, toward the end of the book, there's a series of scenes where the main cha...
One of my secondary characters is going to play an important part, more important than at present, in the story. Is it OK to introduce him, make the reader love him, and then leave him behind til ...
I'm writing a story where the main character makes and detonates bombs. The character could be considered a terrorist. I want to portray the character as an expert, but I don't know a way to obtain...
In writing, particularly writing dialogue or speech-like prose, it is custom to use the punctuation to indicate the tone of the speech. As such, one often uses an exclamation point on a standard s...
What is the best way to begin a slow burn friendship to relationship? I'm no good at these types of things and was wondering what people liked reading so that its not terrible and/or unrealistic. I...
I notice in a lot of media there is a strong emphasis on the greatness of evil characters. They can often end up more popular than the good guys in the book or on the show, and overshadow everyone ...
“Check this out, Daichi.” Kiyoshi waved the letter at me. “From a girl.” [I looked at it.] A rabbit sticker sealed the manila envelope. Graceful handwritten words read: To Kiyoshi. Th...
Is it possible to interleave a story with some context and with the first persons thoughts and feelings without distracting, confusing or boring the reader? Content wise, i think the essay-ish pie...
I'm working on a matriarchal setting in which sex is viewed less stringently than our world. It is more acceptable, even expected, for women to be experienced in these matters. I am going for an in...
I want to write a story featuring two main characters--Al and Bob. In the beginning, Al, the paragon, will be a kind, friendly, competent and well-liked, whereas Bob, the protagonist, is unliked,...
In a school setting, what is a way to allude that a school is full of students, without making new characters or overusing pre-existing ones? A school is the main setting of a book. The main and s...
I want to be a writer, but I have struggled with Schizoaffective Disorder for quite some time. Some of the symptoms of the disorder are amotivation and trouble with initiation (Getting things start...
I am choosing between two sentences: We display the values of X in Table 1. The values of X are displayed in Table 1. The first is more action-oriented, the second is more passive but focuses o...
I’m writing on my master thesis/dissertation and performed Chi-square tests to my check for statistical significance. I'll present the results of these tests in a table. Now I’m wondering if I sho...
Are there resources (books, blogs...) which describe proven techniques to obtain certain effects? For example: you will obtain this effect if you use the first person, effective ways to describe fe...
I am unofficially "fixing up" a video game through modding. The game's Big Reveal is that the game world is actually a simulation, that the characters and population are all AIs, and that the vill...
To explain how the RPG forum works: Somebody proposes a Story setting in which the world, rules, possibilities, and so on are described. Then the interested players gather and create their charact...
I'm writing my first undergraduate research paper for computer science and I think my lack of experience is starting to get on my supervisor's nerves. I've written a program that collects video met...
