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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One of the agents I intend to query to requests the first fifty pages be attached to the query email. When I formatted the first four chapters and prologue into submission format, it reached 52 pag...
I have a manuscript that I'd like to add Drop Caps to at the beginning of each chapter. I currently have it loaded into my Storyist program on my Mac-book Pro. Does anyone know how I'd go about a...
I have written a book about my math discoveries. The book is available as a PDF file and as LaTeX files published in a Git hosting under Creative Commons license. Will it increase readership of my...
I am trying to devise a short story for a 3d horror game. Here are my requirements: There must be no tangible people/creatures for the player to interact with (the player can be any sort of liv...
I have seen two similar terms, historical fiction and creative non-fiction. I'm writing some stories that are set during a real time in history, that might mention real events, real people, but tha...
I need to write an opinion, narrative of only 80 words in length. Examples: write about your fondest childhood memory/comment: homework should be banned, etc. How are short-short pieces like this...
Let's look at two characters who are generally considered to be iredeemable: The Diamond Authority (from Steven Universe): The extremely childish leaders of the race of spacefaring lesbian magical...
This answer to the question Averting Real Women Don’t Wear Dresses introduces a distinction between acts of patience and acts of daring. [...] when it comes to telling a story [...] acts of d...
The Spy is a Netflix series about Israeli spy and hero Eli Cohen. In a recent interview, Eli's widow Nadia expresses great dissatisfaction with the series: a lot of changes were made, ostensibly to...
I'm writing a story where my lead character has two forms and he swaps between them frequently. I'd like to know the advantages and disadvantages of various kinds of triggers for the transformation...
My protagonist lives with a deep lie that causes internal conflict and pain throughout the story but it basically cannot fuel any struggle to the external plot. This subconsciously motivates the ch...
In my post-apocalyptic story, the split of male and female main/supporting characters is 50/50. The girls and women in the story, Eris, Marina, and Ezrith, display very little emotion--Eris repr...
Bathos is a storytelling technique that consists in the rapid succession of 2 “moments” with conflicting tones. This trope occurs when a serious moment gets followed by a gag. One of the many, many...
In my story, the MC goes through a number of events with a common theme, each told in separate scenes. At the end of the story, he tells a friend about the things he experienced. Both the events an...
I feel like the title is worded really bad, but I seem to be unable to find a better way. I am not a native speaker. Scenario A: A character is in an exceptional state of mind (i.e. drug use etc.)...
I'm using Microsoft Word 2016 for formatting my paper. I'm trying to use different footnote numbering sequences for the title page and main body. More specifically, I want to use special characters...
If I think about the characters I came up with in my mind so far, I usually get a pretty big list: (Gyvaris (ENTJ), Martha (ENFJ), Adam (INTJ. It's hard to describe that you're constantly seeing...
Most erotica today is written by and for women, and bestselling erotica is narrated from a female point of view. The "male pornographic gaze" that sexualizes the female body has been considered off...
There is a problem as stories progress (especially in never-ending web novels) where the cast of characters keep growing. Some webnovels I follow are in the hundreds! Is there a technique for auth...
If I'm going to face down a dragon, Mob boss, evil corporation, or a demon from the 7 circles of hell or dystopian dictator, etc, it's not going to be to rescue my buddy Herbert, or cousin Jimmy. T...
Should you only use colons and full stops in dialogues? I thought about using a semi-colon in one of my dialogues, but I had second thought about it, because when we talk, we don't really different...
I find myself often being irritated at elements in situations that help characters succeed, elements which are also highly unlikely or even illogical. But often, if not more, I find myself angered ...
I admire the writing style of many other writers and I try to emulate them, but most of the time it doesn't turn out how I want it to. Is this because it's not uniquely my own style, but rather for...
I’m having issues ‘cause while I’m in the process of writing I think my style has enough length to it, but when I go back and read my work it feels extremely fast. A scene I expected to take me fif...
Lately I've been thinking that I don't know of a single novel that has illustrations in it. I've tried finding out the reason why, and came across an article published in The Guardian in 2011, but ...
How do we distinguish how a character pronounces a word and how it is spelled in a dialogue? For example, some people pronounce words in a different way than they should, how do you show that in a ...
I paid an illustrator to do the art for my picture book and I now own the artwork. Am I then allowed to submit to agents as an author/illustrator? How does this work?
Recently we have seen multiple questions on various aspects of political correctness. They have sparked some measure of disagreement, which is what I wanted to examine here. To what extent should ...
If you look up the exact definition for "pyromancy" or "necromancy" they refer to divination using fire and the dead, respectively. However, if you were to ask a layperson what those words mean, t...
Characters (and people) get angry at all sorts of things that might not make sense to the outside observer: Marty McFly and the word "chicken," words that are terrible slurs to one population but t...
I used the name Primus and Primes for my book and these are from the transformers universe. My concept is totally different. Is this a copyright infringement? I introduced a secret society named ...
In the ever swinging tone of a novel, one may wish to show a moment of peace amidst all the chaos. In my novel it happens a few times, most notably when characters are travelling across vast natura...
This question is about hiding from the reader the fact that I am skipping some steps. Worse, perhaps, I don't want to show them, and I may have no clue or intention of figuring out how these steps ...
How does a person get an entry on Britannica, Encyclopedia.com etc. ? The person has a Wikipedia page and news references. Thanks!
Imagine a fantasy hero with a 'time reset' ability like the protagonists of Groundhog Day or Edge of Tomorrow: they can 'rewind time' up to a few hours, resetting their own physical state and the r...
At one point in my story, the characters are addressed by a god. In the ensuing dialogue, this god has a more archaic way of speaking, but even so, I'm wondering if it might be a good idea to visua...
Note: This question deals exclusively with personal stakes (what the character could lose). It does not deal with public stakes (what the world of the novel could lose). In my mind, there are t...
Following the answer of @Cyn and my comment (on Doubt about a particular point of view on how to do character creation ): I would like to know more about how to "know" more about a true alived char...
It's not so much that I dislike my real name, but I have a few issues that make me uncomfortable with using it. This is mainly due to the fact that it's quite unique, and while that is an advantag...
I wrote a novel and it is Science fiction based novel. Almost every close friend of mine read the novel and none of them gave a negative response. What are the possibilities that I need to assume, ...
I know a lot of books do it (Harry Potter, LOTR, Wheel of Time). It's even part of the "Hero's Journey". However, my book starts with the "inciting incidient" i.e. my main charatcer begins her firs...
One of the most common pieces of writing advice I hear is that you should write frequently and often. Writing regular entries in a diary should fit this criteria, but I'm hesistant to call my years...
I'm writing a story about a little girl who got bit by an unknown snake species and is being treated for it. Out of the 3 snakebite victims, this little girl seems to have the best prognosis. Here ...
I'm currently in the middle of writing several fantasy books and, even though I'm not done with any of them, I can't stop thinking about how my name will appear on my books once they are finished. ...
I have a hard time coming up with original worlds and plots, but I need a portfolio of original work. Any thoughts on how to come up with ideas?
My book is about a sleepy Devon village and is a compilation of tales that feature over thirty characters. They weave in and out of each other's stories, in the pub, Post Office and village shop et...
Suppose I would like to create a text adventure game, but my imagination is not sufficient for creating a whole game. But there are fiction books (in the public domain) that are very imaginative an...
The plot in my story revolves around a certain ability of the MC that is normally not available, unless the circumstances are just right. Therefore, it is not mentioned in the story as a solution t...
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...
In my novel, Matt's girlfriend Ella gets kidnapped and Matt is held responsible by the kidnappers. As it wasn't for ransom but as a revenge of something Matt did. And then Matt storms into my MC's...
