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’ve read the other questions on this topic but the answers seem contradictory and somewhat opinion-based. Some posters have said you ‘don't want to risk the wrath of corporate lawyers’ (or tradema...
Inspired by GGx's question Will traditional publishers force you to remove brands? I would probably not want to mention a brand name of a small brand in my work: a small brand might not want to be...
I'm considering writing a fantasy novel. While I'm striving to make the world as original as I can, and not rely on many of the popular fantasy tropes, for the purposes of this question you can ass...
I'd like to write a story and I have plenty of elements for it, up to and including a set of locations, characters and events, as well as some loose sequence for those. This is still a planning ph...
I often have trouble deciding whether (or how often) to take breaks from writing, or to "double down" and try to write, and try to eliminate anything distracting me from that. I am not looking for...
Two approaches to writing: Writing about ideas that are currently 'hot' in the market (a bit like when the Hunger Games came out, many authors quickly released books which incorporated the same s...
If you've seen Avengers: Infinity War, you'll recall the line "No resurrections this time" being said in the scene just after the first (arguably second) on-screen death of a main character at the ...
What I’m doing is making a story in the medieval times and I wanted to make up a village and have my characters be there and travel around there but do I have to make everything around there in the...
I feel like I have everything except the first chapter; once the story is underway I feel like I know where to go, but I'd like some guidance in getting it all started when the reader knows nothing...
Whenever I write, I run into the problem where I have to assign human actions to subjects that, when I contemplate about it, cannot realistically perform those actions. A teacher told me years ago ...
When it comes to revising/reformatting a setting bible (for a video game) to make the setting more internally consistent and better organized, which place is the best part of a setting bible to loo...
Like how do I describe if someone is doing symbols with their hands like this? I want to describe specific hand formation but that seems like it’ll be a whole paragraph just for one second of sayin...
I have been trying very hard to create well rounded, and developed characters in my book. I have them all figured out, except, when looking back, I realized that they are all very skinny. I have a ...
I started a book and although I wanted it to be dark, will the readers find it too dark if the characters almost never win? Or are a lot of readers into that? In my book the two main characters' wh...
I have great openings with (I humbly feel) unusual and unique situations. But after the first few pages to support the beginning, bam...no plot! It stalls and don’t know where to go with it. I’v...
In my game, the player may run into deadends in the story, which causes the game to end prematurely. This can range from the player simply getting killed, another important character in the story g...
"The Great Gatsby" was told from the point of view of Gatsby's neighbor, Nick Carraway by name, with Nick using the first person. Nick gets to see a lot, but not all of Gatsby's dealings. A case in...
I've had a few 'great ideas' for books. I'm a big sci-fi fan, especially Michael Crichton. I'm not sure if that's relevant but there it is. I want to write a full length book, not a short story, a...
So, I think I might just have turned my fantasy setting into a Saturday morning cartoon. I just, don't want people to die within the world. There are monsters, with unlimited reserves of course: zo...
I plan to write an alternate history story that eventually leads to Texas taking up most of the area that otherwise would have been the USA. It starts with the European side of things, in particula...
I've heard this term thrown around sometimes in a derisive way (obviously), and usually not just to refer to Saw movies. I don't remember who it was, but I remember someone saying how the movie "Lo...
I am writing a book that begins with the protagonist having amnesia (cliché, I know). At first, I wrote it in the first person jumping from one character to another, however I had to write a whole ...
This is a really weird question, but, for me this matters because English is not my first language. Whenever I read these famous novels, the authors use words which have really deep meanings and w...
So I am writing a story that is in my head for millions of years already and it is finally progressing. I like how things going for a first draft and I am pretty happy to get things going. But lat...
I have a problem when it comes to writing (blog posts, stories and novels). It might just be me, but maybe other people have experienced it too? When I come to start writing, my ideas before I sit...
This is basically a follow-up question I asked here: Scene switching and how to do it? I always considered it normal for a chapter to have between 3000 and 5000 words. And people around here thoug...
Currently, I'm running into an issue with constructing a scene in third person in which the POV character is having a conversation with his mother. Since it's third person, I can't just be like "Mo...
I am an (aspiring) fiction writer. I write prose. However, every so often, I run into a need for poetry. I might need a prophecy, or a ritual blessing, or a character might be serenading another, o...
I'm midway through a Masters in Creative Writing. My tutor recently told me (something like): each character deserves a chance to be liked by the reader. I didn't want people to like the particula...
I'm writing a novel about an obsessive character who is bothering the people around him but just will not or cannot accept that a change must come. When is the most effective time (or if not - the...
There just isn't information about this on the internet (at least that I could find), so I'm here. A few specific questions: how many team members should there be? Should they all be main characte...
Some of my fiction sci fi characters are ESP sensitive and the term is used a lot. Capitalized ESP stands out in my sentences like yelling so I am using esp,lower case. Is that acceptable? Will a p...
So, I have this idea of writing a novel set in the future. Not the far future but a few decades away from today. Could you please give me an advice for that. The reason that I am asking this is tha...
In the second book of my trilogy, do I need to repeat everything about the main characters' appearance from the last book, or can I just mention a few key things?
I'm writing a war sci-fi novel. At the start of the novel, my MC really wants to get into a particular unit, let's call it Space-Marines. His struggle through the training serves to showcase his hi...
I am writing a story where the character is reading a writing from someone in Europe during 1348. The thing is I don't know how a person from that time would speak or write. The line they are read...
This is a problem I usually come across with my stories. I often worry about whether the plotlines I introduce are realistic or not, and it's usually something that can't be solved with a simple Go...
A geek today is quite likely to reference the pop culture of 30 years ago: "Do or do not, there is no try", "Beam me up, Scotty" and "Ground control to Major Tom" are easily and commonly recognisab...
The main character, while playing an MMO, was teleported to another world in her avatar along with all of the NPC's in her guild. As her reaction, she sent scouts around the area in order to discov...
I am writing a side story called, The Afterglow of Jovian, which mainly takes place sometime during the final stages of the main story. Here's a brief gist of the main story to give some context, ...
Looking at the function of the beginning of a novel, it is clear that it should hook the reader and draw him or her into the story. Different techniques for achieving the hook have been described, ...
I am a new author and I want to mention names of people who helped during my writing. Can I include Acknowledgement page in a novel? I looked in many novels by famous authors and they don't seem t...
What do I need to do, as an Indian writer, if I want to make British or Americans the main characters in my book, and make the whole story revolve around them in any other country? In general, is ...
For those of you who are unfamiliar with TV Tropes lingo, a Complete Monster is the worst kind of villain imaginable: one that is evil to the core and has little to no redeeming traits whatsoever. ...
I have a psychological oddity when it comes to my own writing (particularly fiction, and particularly longer work). Obviously it may just be a personal problem, but perhaps other people have simil...
I'm looking for software or markup/markdown based tools for organising anthologies selected from a large number of short pieces of writing. In this case it's poems, but the content of the individua...
Is it okay to have two characters who had an argument to patch things up offscreen, or do readers explicitly need to see how they made up? None of the two characters in question are the protagonis...
I'm currently writing a story which so far is going well, but I reached a point in the story where I don't know how to proceed. When a character is talking, I write their dialogue just like this: ...
Many short story competitions, at least in Israel, set a theme and a word count: up to 2500 words, 2000-5000 words, etc. I often find myself starting short stories for such competitions, and hittin...
The book Slapping the Table in Amazement: A Ming Dynasty Story Collection is: [...] the unabridged English translation of the famous story collection Pai'an jingqi by Ling Mengchu (1580–1644), ...
