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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Note, this might be off topic and belong on World Building SE? I have always been far more interested with building the world my stories take place in than the stories themselves. I will spend lar...
I wonder what the proper way of writing this question is: What do the data show? What does the data show?
I'm new to writing and I'm still young (preteen young). I want some advice on writing and help. How am I gonna start my book? What is the best way to begin writing a book?
One reading Harry Potter (and I'm sure they are in other books as well) will notice that J. K. Rowling utilizes several custom fonts, most commonly in letters and handwriting. There is the Hagrid f...
I've been writing for four years without knowledge of the three act structure. When I discovered it about a year ago, I therefore had no room for it in my writing process, mainly because I had diff...
I am making this question with the assumption in mind that specific genres attract certain types of people. How can I determine the target audience based off of genre alone? I'm looking for the r...
This question may seem rather broad based on the title, so allow me to elaborate. I am a self-taught author. I learned how to write, what works and what doesn't, all that good stuff. What I did n...
I wasn't entirely sure how to phrase the title, so if a better way to put it occurs to anyone, please feel free to edit it. Here's the situation: the goal of a novel is to get the main character ...
Note: I define 'setting' as where and when a novel takes place, as well as what the genre entails. It is the background to the picture of the story. I realize there are a lot of factors that cont...
My proofreader recently revealed to me the following, which I was wholly unaware of: ...when a number/code/serial or whatever is said in dialogue, you write the whole thing out... I had writ...
When referring to an apartment block? Should it be: Block D, or block D?
I am more of a fiction writer, so writing essays or nonfiction doesn't come as naturally to me. The need does occasionally arise, however. I normally wouldn't have much trouble with it, except that...
A novel that has a theme - that is, something to say, a message - has a weight to it that a novel without a theme cannot achieve. I'm sure there are those that might disagree with this, but I belie...
Okay, I'm not sure if they are "rules" or "grammatical", but here they go: After a while our necks began to ache, so we sat on the rest chairs behind (us). I liked it here. The air was fresh ...
I am a beginner, would like to know if I can start a short story calling my main character "he" and then introduce his name later. If so when is a good time to do this?
TL;DR: How do you approach to writing? What part of the work do you enjoy the most? And how do you keep the motivation up? I often ask myself if I really like to write. I mean, I have a lot of i...
I'm currently writing a fantasy novel and its my first piece of work. My chapters currently range from 500 to 3350 words. Is this too much of a dramatic change? Should I go back and pad out some of...
I've been playing with the idea of writing a sci-fi story that would resemble those written roughly 50-100 years back: Things we normally would laugh out of court today, like Jules Verne's moon tri...
Sometimes it seems desirable to pack a lot of interrelated information into a single sentence, but such sentences can lack clarity or seem tiring. For example, the following sentence seems to leav...
This question is very similar to this one. However, I felt it was different enough, and I also did not find an answer. In the tale I am currently writing, a girl, whose parents have both been lon...
My novel has a lot of fighting scenes. It's natural since its about a war. The problem is that people don't read books for fighting scenes. Numerous fighting scenes is just bad writing. J.R.R. Tol...
I have spent a lot of time reading graphic-novels and watching television series, most of which were anime. Now that I have reached the point where I'm ready to begin writing, I feel drawn to the f...
I'd like to properly punctuate one of my characters being stopped in speech, followed by a sentence that explains that the character didn't have time to finish. It's going to be something like thi...
In my style of writing, I often find that I lapse into relating what happens or has happened, usually via short, choppy, dead sentences. As far as I can tell, this is because the scene I am writing...
It is my understanding that novels should generally start right off with the protagonist. The story is about the protagonist, after all, not something else (This obviously changes a bit if the PoV ...
I have some dialogue between two people (a clerk and a person called John Doe). I want the clerk to say to John: "You're John Doe. Still." So I've punctuated it like this: "You're John Doe. ...
I have short story that is three pages and a paragraph. It's based off a short story by one of my favorite authors in order to learn their prose. Three pages seems a bit short. I think the length o...
This question is similar to this one. However, it is different based on what I am looking for. I know what inner conflict is, and I know why I need it. I have tons of examples, and I can usually ...
Recent events have compelled me to study inner conflicts. Having arrived at this decision, I turned to one of my favorite books in an attempt to identify said conflict. However, upon opening Harry ...
My assumption here is that a novel set in the current time and world seems more realistic to a reader than a novel with a fictional setting. The reader has the ability to say, "that could be true."...
Example: I groaned. Why was I doing this? I guess I was afraid of losing him. Like it or not, he was my only guide right now. Does it sound strange since the tense temporarily changes to th...
I am writing a fictional novel. It is set in many fictional places and the book will have it's own set of rules of physics. However, I feel that if I lose the sense of realism too much there will b...
I am an aspiring author. I've often heard that you have to keep your 'target audience' in mind. It makes sense - certain genres attract certain crowds. Well... I want my books to reach as many peop...
I am an aspiring author, but I intend to start publishing soon. I have several ideas for potential books; however, they are all series. I am hesitant about starting my writing with a series. What i...
Can you use real-world languages in a fantasy world? For example, in the fantasy world Nuvo there are witches who speak “Russian”. Since this fantasy world has no relation to the real world, or to...
I need to make a character, who is agnostic of electricity, electromagnetic fields, and any modern age theories, refer to electromagnetic phenomena. Ancient cultures, like greeks, chinese, were so...
I've been asked to write a story as an assignment. It should have as the main male character an unusually smart, clever, insightful and thoughtful guy who is somewhat reserved and mysterious. The p...
I am writing a fantasy book based in the present day New Orleans, LA area and I was wondering how authors create real setting homes for their fictional characters. I've tried putting my fictional c...
I am going through a difficult time in my life and, as a keen amateur writer I’m seriously considering writing about my experience. My motivation is two fold, firstly I believe it will help me, but...
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 writing a novel that includes occasional words or phrases in another language. If I use a footnote to provide a loose translation of the word and that same word appears once or twice more on t...
Increasingly often, if you Google for a recipe your search results will be full of long, image-rich blog posts that, somewhere in there, have the actual recipe you were looking for. Many of these ...
Second Edit -- to try to expand the scope BEYOND W.SE and to cover any CreativeCommons work, not just here. Deleted part about the badges. -- Edit -- to clarify it's not quite a BLOG, more a portf...
I'm writing a story that has a medical condition as a central plot point, and now I have questions to ask a doctor. The problem is, I don't know one. I could make up the details, but I feel like ...
I've been thinking about my story for a while now and the problem I've run into is that I'm not sure how to start it. It isn't that I can't think of how to start it, I actually have a million ideas...
The protagonist in my autobiographical novel is a girl on spiritual adventures. I have the idea of her looks in my mind, but I don't want to dedicate words to explicitly express her looks, so is it...
How should one split up the work between two people? Should one write the even-numbered chapters and the other the odd-numbered? Does each person tell the story from the point of view of a differen...
What guidelines and language should be used to write a polite reminder email. Ideally I would like it to be: Respectful Not too formal In particular I am thinking in terms of business, and comm...
When you are writing a story that is set in a fantasy world (maybe our world with just one made-up element, or a completely different world), what is a good way to come up with names for species th...
I have a world (well universe since the main focus of the shared world has the ability for space travel) that I am working on some books on however I believe its really large enough that I can open...
