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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There are a couple questions out there on How to ask a smart question and the FAQ has its own tips, but lets assume you know how to ask what you want. From a purely writing perspective, most of the...
I have recently joined the Puzzling.SE site and I am excited to ask few puzzles there. However, I am stuck, rather confused as to how a puzzle qualifies as good and precise. I want to ensure its cl...
I'm boring and just use Word and Excel for writing my novel and keeping track of stuff. I've tried a couple others, including Scrivener and Evernote, but never got into it. I like the idea of spe...
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...
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'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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
In Word, if the cursor is in a part of the text that has some style applied to it, such as Title, the format will be highlighted in the ribbon to let you know: Scrivener, however, is lazy, and do...
I'm planning to create a game. It won't be the first game I've created (or even released), but it will be my first game with any story to speak of. I'm still very much in the planning phase of the...
In many books novels or other forms of fictional writing, the reader is introduced to a so called 'chosen one'. This character or being is of higher power or in general, of different nature than ot...
I was wondering if there is a rule or advice in which order to name my characters. For example, if I want to tell that Bob, John and Rob entered the room should I just name them in random order o...
I'm writing a YA fantasy novel in my free time that I plan to illustrate myself. Most if not all named characters will have their 'picture' presented to the reader as soon as they are introduced. ...
Let's say you're writing super hero fiction. The hero of your story is struggling against the villain, but suddenly awakens a power that allows him to best the bad guy! Problem: you're unsure of h...
I'm in the middle of my first draft for my novel, and I can't seem to properly convey to my audience the image I'm trying to describe. That's what I want to show my readers, but it's coming acro...
In Word it's quite easy to stop the CApitalization OF THe FIrst TWo LEtters, but I cannot figure out how to do it on Scrivener. How would I auto-correct this error?
I have this scene in my novel that I'm trying to write. There is this character who is on the boat, rowing. I don't know how to describe the sound of the oar touching the water as he paddles. The ...
Is there any software for making non-linear story or dialogues? I tried MS Word/Google Docs but that's not good for dialogues. In one complicated dialogue I wrote in Google Drawings, it looks like ...
I am currently writing a novel where the main character will be far more powerful than most of the people in the world and I am worried that I will end up losing sight of what I am writing and star...
I'm writing a storyline for a game where the forces of evil have humanity cornered. Truly everything seems lost, that is, until our main character decides to step in. Let's call him Bob. The Chosen...
I am currently writing a character that represents Lust and is a demonic entity... but to tone it down for a YA audience. I thought of trying to make them "Love-based" instead, but I always envis...
There is much advice out there on "how to write a killer opening line". Usually these blog posts or how-to-write book chapters list examples of first sentences from recognized masterworks or group ...
I am writing a 3000 word essay entitled 'Challenges and opportunities of future Civil Aviation'. For the essay, I have taken two aspects of the future of civil aviation in supersonic flight and bio...
This is not quite the same question as Writing Diversity because it's not my intention to focus too much on diversity for my story, nor am I struggling with new ways to represent more cultures/mino...
I'm increasingly having to write User Guides as part of my job and I need routes to make this into a more interesting exercise. Hence, I was actually looking for something completely different whe...
Let’s say I’ve created an outline, have explored my characters properly, and have properly broken down each scene to an appropriate level of detail. I know the story, I know the pacing, and I know ...
I've written about 15k words of my story now and the plot is developing nicely. Perhaps a bit too nicely. I have about a dozen of named characters which all have something interesting to do in th...
I got into trouble last year for submitting an assignment (Masters in Creative Writing) that included a story that sprinkled elements of humour (think Despicable Me) into a gritty and frankly distu...
I've never seen or read Game of Thrones but I hear that the author is in the habit of killing characters off quite frequently. I have no idea what these particular characters in the series are like...
Last Christmas my sister bought me a tome called The Book of Human Emotions (by Tiffany Watt Smith). I just started reading it and it got me thinking about how a writer might arouse emotion in a re...
We are waiting on a document for a project from the client to complete. If we don't get it in 2 days we'll be unable to proceed until we do. When and how do you follow up with the client? Give a t...
I've long believed that for a novel (or any kind of fiction) to have a certain weight or power behind it, there must be a message. I've been writing this why for many years, and it's lent my fictio...
In the context of writing a fiction novel, how to make sure that readers remember several of the incidents or events or even characters that were described in earlier chapters, when the same gets r...
When I plot my own novels or analyze other works to understand their structure, I like to visualize the dynamic of the storyline(s) in a diagram. Usually I draw this by hand. A first version of su...
What are the steps that one needs to follow to become a successful poet? Well in my case, I write poems but don't have a wide audience for the feedback. So in this case what should I do? Should I ...
I have a plan to start writing blog posts and some marketing copy for my freelance solo business site. I am wondering about how I should write, say, a blog article. Should I first write it in my ...
I have been interested in writing a litrpg book with the skill systems functioning as a path system that progresses on one direction as you work hard and each skill will have a rank that determines...
foreword: I'm writing for a game, however it's (mostly) irrelevant to my question. Just FYI. I have three main characters in my story. One is a weak but smart child and the other two are trained m...
I'm looking for a simple editor to start getting into world building and story writing which is working out fine in Microsoft Word. However, I'm finding it difficult to continue without any structu...
Where can I find (preferably free) online resources, such as How-To-Write or styleguide articles and blogs, about writing a litRPG book? LitRPG, or Literary Role Playing Game, books combine elemen...
This is about the hints that the readers should notice as the story progresses - and should definitely notice upon re-read. First off, I looked around for a bit and didn't see any questions on th...
I have completed writing a novel and have revised it many times. I am very worried that I may have made some logical mistakes, like not revealing a secret, or using different hair colour for same c...
Recently, I am working on writing a review about a book and I wanted to know how I can check my grammer mistakes. In other words: how can I write a paragraph or essay in a right way without any gra...
