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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I'm wondering if there's a technical writing term for when an author uses purposefully misspelled words to mimic the sound of the speaker? This has the effect of "forcing" the reader to hear the d...
I'm stuck on a POV question in a short story I'm writing. The entire story is written in 3rd Person, but not omniscient - I guess it's either "distant limited" or "deep" (I'm not sure exactly the d...
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...
My first question on the site was How do I stop using 'the' to start sentences so much? , One of the answers said: I would suggest reading more English poetry to pick up some techniques. I co...
Does a script usually have to come out like a play? Or, there should be a difference?
Something I talk about with friends when planning and sharing our projects & media we like is titles - and specifically my disdain for one-word titles. They seem to be more than dominant in mul...
I wrote a passage where one of my characters heard beats, (i.e., the sound) then he found the beating object and, when he held it in his hand, it started throbbing like a heart, (i.e., the feeling)...
There are some words and phrases in my manuscript that I think are used in America. However, a beta reader tells me my character sounds British. Are there any online sources I can use to check the ...
This question is about genre and reader expectations. I'm not trying to change my story to fit a mainstream genre. I have already taken steps to broaden it's appeal, but it's too late to create an ...
When a piece of writing has a quoted sentence followed by a dialogue tag, the sentence is usually ended with a comma (inside the quotation marks) and the dialogue tag is in sentence case, like this...
I'm well into the third act of my novel and I'm introducing a new character that will play a part in the ending and an even bigger part in the roughly sketched sequel I have in mind. Now, I'm pre...
"The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry" comes from Robert Burns's To a Mouse. It is a commonly used expression, though the "mice and men" part is often omitted nowadays. In fact, not ever...
My novel starts with the three heroes joining a cattle drive. When they talk among themselves, it's obvious that they have some kind of hidden agenda. We'll learn more about thier secret mission ov...
I've always struggled writing about myself, but I need to apply for a program and the application has a lot of very broad but personal questions like, Tell us why you would be a good leader Exp...
In a story I am about to write the best friend of the protagonist is a good, caring and benevolent person, lets call him John. The antagonist is not really a bad person but because of the circumsta...
I found this interesting figure of speech called spoonerism. Here's the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism Now, I have been wondering if spoonerism can be used in a non-humoristic ...
How do we follow up a description within a descriptive text with another description? Let's say you mention A and B in the first sentence, and then follow up with a long description of B, how do yo...
I'm currently writing a report where I have a table stating certain parameter values and their errors. Obviously I want the report to look nice, but since the errors of certain parameters vary by o...
I am reviewing a computer science submission to an academic conference. The authors use "randvar" instead of "random variable" (as well as "logvar" instead of "logical variable"). I am wondering i...
I am wondering if we can use footnotes to describe technologies used in a science-fiction novel instead of describing it by switching from an omniscient POV, that describes everything in a poetic w...
I recently asked a question about my current project for a serialised e-story and was informed by the stalwarts that my format was not new. I contrast my own techniques with many of those being pro...
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 wrote a science fiction book in which, Alien species comes on earth and they meet with Dr. Stephen Hawking. Is it legal to use his name for the book?
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 ...
In the short passage I am writing, the starting point is that one character is being held at gunpoint, and the end point is that she now holds the gun, having disarmed the opponent. The idea is t...
I am interested in how to write compelling schemes, large-scale strategies and tactics etc. There are lots of fictional stories where the characters are amazing strategists, or incredibly intellig...
In the modern world, english is a well-estabilished technical and scientific language. Some terms have become so commonly used that they are accepted in my native tongue (words like "computer", "PC...
I've got another chapter title question. In the first chapter of my story, a significant secondary character is introduced, and I think it makes sense to use the character's name as the chapter ti...
The Situation: I am writing a short story. My POV character is listening to another person having a telephone conversation. The POV character only hears the one person speaking and not the response...
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...
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 wondering if how we name a version of a spacecraft differs from how we name a version of a software. For software, I usually see things like "2.0.32.32" or something like that and sometimes th...
I was writing the other day and I used the word "ubiquitous". While I don't think "ubiquitous" is the most egregious example of "Using Big Words To Sound Intelligent", and would be perfectly acce...
Do authors still get paid royalties for their old works? For example, If I decided to buy a copy of the "Odessa File" by Frederick Forsyth or "Kane and Abel" by Jeffery Archer, do the authors get p...
I have been intending to create a book for toddlers with basic scientific notions in it. Most books for this target readership that I have seen present whatever content in the form of a story, quit...
How do you show the softer side of a rough person without loosing the gruffness? I have a character that was the antagonist in one story and will be the protagonist in another where he will fall i...
I am working with an author, whose approach is to write her text, approximately divided by indicators where she wants the breaks to be, with the idea that later she and I would improve the breaks a...
Two people are dating, and one of them wants to tell the other they are humble, which they genuinely are. But I don't want it to seem like they're bragging or showing off about it. In normal conv...
So, I was doing a writing excersie, I came up with, to help me with sentence structuring and developing my style. One thing, I ran into, however, was that I couldn't describe pain very well. Th...
Question: Is there a resource that categorizes existing fiction works by themes based on the authors' demographics (e.g. gender, age, historical period, geographical location, etc...)? For instanc...
I couldn't find anything on this one, so maybe someone has a good idea on what would be considered good practice in a scholarly context. Background For a semester project, I have to observe an on...
I'm reading Wired for Story, by Lisa Cron, where she writes the following about being vague or omitting information that the reader does not know: ...being vague is never a good idea... .....
I have a blog with long, analytic articles. Because of their nature, they don't really attract much clicks. However, once people distill it thoroughly, many of them express that the articles are in...
Too often, when people make a story about genocide committed by a fascist government, the story often devolves into a Nazi Germany cliché, especially when the story is set in a modern or futuristic...
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...
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/The_Edge_of_Dawn_(Seasons_of_Warfare) The following is the short version of "The Edge of Dawn". Reach for my hand, I'll soar away Into the dawn ...
It would be nice to be a member of an online community of people who are knowledgeable about writing, willing to directly help eachother in a format such as Q&A (like here on SE), but also enga...
Our documentation set includes some diagrams, such as entity relationship diagrams and flowcharts, where text is integral and cannot reasonably be handled in callouts. Our documentation is translat...
Right now I'm writing a novel in which I use the changing perspectives of two main characters with limited information each to slowly unveil the whole plot to the reader. Both use the past tense a...
I along with my guide wrote a research publication, which had to be sent to a journal for the purpose of review. My professor wrote the cover letter of the paper as follows: Dear Editor in Chie...
