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 have read any essay making tips and they said that the thesis statement is key to the thesis. So I tried to make one based on a question. So assume question like this: Overpopulation of urban a...
So, my 11-year son has just written his first literature work yesterday: A short fantasy story about werewolves in a forest chased by a group of courageous men. Half-full of mistakes of all kinds, ...
How to make a cool character who is really unmanly? The guy is bad at leadership, lacks endurance and strength while also being kind of a coward and having quite feminine facial features.
So, my dilemma is as follows. I have a romance project with the MC trying to choose between two women who he cares for very much. Each has broken his heart, but are willing to make amends and provi...
Ok, so I currently have a visual novel (For those who do not know, it's a video game that's almost all story. The character may have a few choices in the matter, but most of it is about watching th...
Let's say you have a scene that contains nudity. There are many ways to do it wrong and have it just be a pervy scene, but there are also ways to make it "tasteful" in a way where it's slightly les...
I'm not sure if I would "officially" classify as a discovery writer, but I usually write very freely. I get a bunch of ideas, write them down and try to put them together to create a compelling sto...
I want to add a perverted character to my story (don't ask why), a bit like Master Roshi from Dragon Ball or Minoru Mineta from My Hero Academia. However, I want to make them more sympathetic and g...
When you have your audience go through your work, whether it's written fiction, a movie, a video game or whatever, you want them to ask themselves certain questions, which you want to answer as the...
I am holding a book (novel) which I wish to cite, and I believe it has a typo. I do not know whether the typo was a spelling mistake in the original manuscript, or introduced during print. Other ed...
In course of joining a friend of mine during her NaNoWriMo escapades, I tried myself at actually writing a story set in a world I'm building. I've found there are certain rules when writing a nove...
If I have a big universe that I need to set up, with lots of characters, lots of locations, magic rules, technology, government rules, is it okay to introduce and explain all of this at the beginni...
In my book I've made up a card game where I've already thought out the rules. Now I want some of the characters playing this game. My questions are: Should the reader know the rules? If I want t...
At the start of a game, you sometimes have some character explaining things to you, the player, instead of the character, telling them to press A to do this and that. Paper Mario I think even makes...
Imagine I write a work of fiction, which is larger than 10.000 words (short story), but smaller than 80.000 words (novel). The external genre is thriller, the internal one -- disillusionment plot. ...
My story is told from the perspective of different satellites that are creating a narrative. There are over ten of these narrators. I'm wondering if this might appear confusing for readers if the v...
For the most part, my story is told from the main character's perspective. However, there are a few scenes that I would like to write that really don't require the main character to be there. I cou...
I had this idea for a story/novel that I was very excited about, but also very worried about. The idea had a plot where the character development plot and themes all grow and go together, something...
My main character is injured, having been shot earlier. This injury renders him much slower to respond and reduces his agility. Because of this, two of his colleagues are with him to protect him. ...
So, I have a novel idea where the lead characters (seven in total), all have to be introduced in the first scene in my novel. I've already started with a basic idea, but I wanted to know if anyone ...
A character I'm writing about is a girl of 15, daughter of a nobleman, unable to walk due to having contracted Polio when she was 5. Being quite intelligent, she attracts some useful attention, and...
So, most of my main protagonists are female, and the usual him/her doesn't work when dealing with multiple females (or males, for that matter.) So, how would I make dialogue flow without mentioning...
Style is a manner of address, an honorific that comes with a noble title. For example, HM Elizabeth II is addressed "Your Majesty". In a fantasy setting that does not pretend to be Europe, I have ...
Intrigue (any kind, really, but royal courts were particularly known for it) is a series of setups that lead to a pay-off. For example, a handkerchief moved from one room to another, a word whisper...
I don't know if this is out of the scope of this website. I'm a student in software engineering deparment and I am supposed to make a project for a course during the semester. The first step of it ...
Within the setting of my personal project (a hard science fiction) I need to be able to describe movement in zero-G extensively. Because I wish to write a whole narrative involving very little gra...
For a computer game, I'd like to create a frame story. Much like in X-Files, it should provide a setting for the individual levels/quests/substories while leaving lots of room for the individual pa...
I'm looking for ways to build early reader investment in an unlikable character who "learns better," but not until fairly late in the book. In particular, I'm writing a first-person middle-grade n...
This is kind of an alternate take on my other recent question, as well as the inverse problem to this question. I've been told by more than one beta reader that there's a specific chapter where th...
One of the four forms of love Greek philosophy recognised, Philia is usually translated as "brotherly love". It is the love between true friends. It was considered a "higher form" of love than Eros...
i'm writing a book where the protagonist is a musician, it's a novel, and in those books I think of drawing a scene where his passion is listening to him. What's the best way to insert a scene like...
In casual conversation, it is perfectly fine to end a sentence with a preposition. How many job applications did you apply to? The grammatically correct way is supposed to be: To how many jo...
I'd like to write a story, in the third-person perspective, centering on a character who changes her name several times in the course of the story. She uses her birth name for the first couple of ...
I've noticed that I use a lot of exclamation marks when my characters are talking. They appear a lot in action scenes. Is there any rule of thumb when using exclamation marks?
I noticed a verbal tic in my writing: He looked surprised He looked confused He looked abashed Sometimes twice in a row: The prince looked abashed. “I- I thought I was being pol...
I'm attempting to write a novel, an historical fiction with a small fantasy component (time travel through a portal). The travelers (main characters) are a young couple from the late 23rd Century ...
I’m writing a book and these first 20 pages are mostly just action so my question is if a book is like mad max fury road, (almost nothing but action) will it be annoying or not be exciting anymore ...
Yesterday I asked a question about writing a female character who has agency. Much to my surprise, it was well-received and generated a lot of great discussion. In reading that discussion, howeve...
I’m trying to write my first novel and I have come across an issue which I feel like it could change the whole story/flow. Originally it wouldn’t have mattered if I wrote in the third person but I ...
Here I came upon an argument about whether a particular grouping is a genre, or a marketing term. Which made me wonder - what is genre? How strict is this taxonomy, and what purpose does it serve? ...
I have been writing for awhile and decided to write a memoir, except I can’t seem to write anything but poetry. However, I don’t know for sure if poetry is the proper term. My work uses cuss words,...
Over the past couple of days, I've asked questions about writing female characters with agency, and writing female characters as a male writer. Both have sparked some interesting, and for me infor...
Fanfiction is somewhat of an uncharted territory, which few actual writers/critics take serious note of or are very enthusiastic about. It has been long asked and established whether publishing fan...
I suppose this is more of a question of if its even necessary, but I'll just assume it is. I am currently writing an outline for a fantasy story, and I don't know how to deal with distance. It's un...
I'm writing a fantasy story set in an imaginary world. For the first time, I'm giving geographical information and... I don't really know how to give it, actually. My alpha reader told me it was ha...
Would it be possible? It strikes me as impossible but I am still curious to know what you think.
I've written a 3rd grade level (8-9 years old) children's book that takes about 25 minutes to read out loud. I read it to a 3rd grade class, with a few posters for illustrations, and it actually s...
I am posting a new question because the previous one was answered as "Is the child able to read a book this long?" I really wanted to know "Is an adult willing to read this long?" From cursory r...
Is it better for first person POV to be treated in the same way as third person POV meaning that the POV person withholds opinions? (So the reader can form them?) Or is it okay to establish conflic...
I try to avoid repeating the prosaic "he said", "she said" structure as much as possible when writing dialogue. But I think overload of complex descriptors "he articulated", "he intoned" is defini...
