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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How can I smooth the transitions in this text? I feel like the POVs are changed quite a lot which makes it fairly confusing for readers to understand. To elucidate your points, please feel free t...
I love accessibility, so any show that is 100% scripted, my script = the transcript, and I'm happy to share it. For podcasts with a cohost, there's no easy transcription software, and fiverr is ac...
I was recently updating some of my Stack Exchange profiles and I remembered how much I hate writing about myself. It isn't just Stack Exchange profiles either. It's resume cover letters. It's colle...
Consider the following text: Tania is in her living room, in the summer. She looks to the window and the street in front of her house, then she realized how dry and parched they are, this ma...
Writing. There comes a time in my daily routine. I get a striking idea. A topic to write in my blog. A pondering about a specific event that happened hours ago. As a working professional (not as a...
I'm using online sources for an essay for my DE History course, and we're required to use in-text citations when we quote or paraphrase sources, with the format of author-page number, like (Johnson...
I'm writing a scene in which four characters play a high-stakes poker game. So far my narrator has been an omniscient third person, who just does not wish to enter into the characters' heads. I st...
I am interested in writing a story about real life events, but changing it in such a way to make it a fiction novel. Question is, do I need permission from someone to make a character based on them...
What punctuation is missing from English that might solve your writing issues? People may be able to come up with established ones that meet your criteria, such as the /s to indicate "that last...
Recently while doing some world-building for a role-playing game with a friend we were seriously struggling with naming character consistently. By consistently I mean make the names feel as though...
I am writing a science fiction story (actually a screenplay for a film, but I imagine that for the purposes of this question the same rules apply) and I have been told that it isn't really science ...
I am a master's student, and English is not my native language. To review and edit my thesis in English, I need an online reliable English proofreading and editing service. What do you suggest...
In How to write strong female characters, Standback says that the best way to write a strong female character is to make her uniquely female, the type of character that can not possibly be male and...
I am playing around with cover art ideas and have some that are quite interesting. I have added a brief tag line, not quite a subtitle, to the cover to indicate the genre. Frankly, the artistic pho...
Be it Mowgli and balu singing Bare Necessities or Enrique singing Somebody's Me, each song (or poem) has their way of being sung. Were such songs written after selection of musical note, tone, and ...
Is Sentence A an acceptable and clear way of shortening Sentence B? Sentence A: A firm outperforms (underperforms) the industry when expression (1) results in a positive (negative) value. S...
Writing my memoirs. I would like an opinion on how best to include 4 pages of letters/fax/emails. How about a 20-page composition? as addendum/exhibit? Too long to include in manuscript? Thanks for...
I have read couple of submission guidelines and publisher notes that pays on the "word" unit for descriptive essays, articles and lists. (For ex, 2₹/word). Then there are different guidelines for p...
I'm identifying my target audience based on the experiment explained in the Snowflake Method book. The narrator describes it as follows: “Now I want you to imagine that you’ve published your no...
I have two versions of a pivotal scene in my novel (both already written). My SP is a rather impulsive young woman who is learning to be a bit less of a hothead. She saves the MC by literally taki...
I have found a company called Writer’s Relief. Their service is to write compelling submission and query letters to genre appropriate agents and publishers. They ask for a synopsis, fifteen pages ...
In a lot of books, at the beginning, the authors include quotes from poetry or songs that are relevant to the theme of their story or to their characters' situations. Obviously I would have to ask...
I am trying to create documentation for an application, and it's for end users who use keyboard (not mouse) and a screen reader. Some of our conventions require us to always use the full phrase ...
I am translating a religious book from language A to language B and have hired a student worker to help me. He is a native speaker of language A but does not speak language B at all. What I ask him...
In my plot, there are these 2 characters who were originally close to each other. However, they had an argument and broke up. In the end of the book, though, they get back together again. What I ne...
I have two female characters, one who is lesbian, and the other bisexual. However, I am male. So not only am I to write the opposite gender, which I actually feel more comfortable doing, for some o...
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... .....
This is about a father who returns after a particularly long journey. Typically, he's not available very often anyway, but he deeply cares about his daughter. He also fails at behaving like a fathe...
(I searched combined tags for publishing & poetry, and only found a few older questions, detailed below.) So - Spring 2019 - where do poets publish now? Is it all self-publish, have the few m...
Is poetry always a solo endeavor? TV scriptwriting is classically done in a Writer's Room, where the show-runner outlines the main plot/character beats for a season, they and senior writers break ...
Like most kids, I went through the All Poetry Must Rhyme phase. Then a little later in school, rhyme was less essential (especially in English, a less rhyme-compatible language than many other ...
Sometimes in the process of writing dialogue, I wish to insert a joke in the exchange. I could copy an existing joke, or I could come up with one. The latter option seems preferable if I could tie ...
The fanfic I'm writing is so that I may get into the swing of literature. A test story if you might like in the Mass Effect Universe. Please prepare for a long text because there's a lot of trivia ...
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...
I have two characters, the male being sort of a jerk, but lightening up later in the story, and the female is...very hateful. But a person who read the first chapter asked me if they were going to ...
Sure, I understand the characters, but that's because I've been thinking about them. But how do I transfer that knowledge to the reader without taking the time and space to flesh them out further?...
Essentially, I want to change: Managing a lot of people is a very difficult problem to: Lot of people, difficult problem I understand that when you shorten a title, it will become more vagu...
I’m starting to write a fiction novel. A friend of mine works in publishing and she thinks the plot for my book is great but I’m not sure how to start. I know a lot of the details and I’ve thought ...
I have four poetry books and two nonfiction books I have self-published but now I have removed them from the web so I can traditionally publish them. Is there anything I need to do? Can I keep usi...
I am writing a movie where a character has an interview with a news reporter. The scenes segues into a character profile of the interviewee that features a voice over from the interviewer. How woul...
Suppose A is a famous historical character with a known history of emotional attachment with a particular set of people. If I would want to write a fictional story about character A that might invo...
Many writers eventually come to a point in their writing where they don't know what to write. They have a certain status or state of affairs that the narration has reached and another state that th...
My novel is about a girl who is the heir to the throne of Helheim, the Norse world of the dead, but in order to claim the throne she has to pass a 3 part trial. I’m having a hard time coming up wi...
With the surge of audiobooks popularity and the dramatization of fiction and non-fiction recitations, do authors plan for their books to publish their work as audiobooks too? Additionally, if an a...
As an addendum to this question, I have written a children's picturebook, and as I understand it, the process of sending off a manuscript and getting it reviewed is expected to take 3-6 months (I a...
I'm having trouble describing a fist bump explosion in my story. I can't just say "they did a fist bump explosion," because everyone may not know exactly what that looks like. Googling doesn't re...
I'm currently reading a sci-fi book that has over a dozen characters. The author had written dialog for two different characters using the same odd idiom in two separate chapters so far. I cannot s...
Okay, so two women are in a bar and I'm telling the story from one of the women's POV. Two guys come in and the women are watching/listening to them from a distance. They don't know their names or ...
When describing the physical features of my more important characters, I often don't add much. I of course describe important features, especially if they will be relevant in the story. For example...
I'm currently thinking of writing a murder mystery series with three books that I am planning it's called Tailor Shop Mysteries and I have three titles and my family in willing to help me with the ...
