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 occasionally use parentheses in scientific writing when a piece of information is related to a previous statement but not to the central story. Is it bad style in scientific writing to use pare...
A potential employer promised me a response but hasn't sent one yet, and I'd like to follow up by email. It's a potential job opportunity, and it'd be detrimental to sound too hasty or pushy. I w...
Recently I was exposed to several sources that suggest that writing one novel a month is possible: The book 2K to 10K by Rachel Aaron, "Write. Publish. Repeat", and my old statistics file that sh...
I'm currently working on a team based story with a lot of characters and am looking for ways to really make their personalities stand out from one another. When I'm writing out their character pro...
I am writing a short story and thinking of publishing it in the next month. But then, I had a doubt. What if somebody takes it, expands it and changes it a bit and makes a movie or a novel out of ...
I received data for data analysis for my Bachelor-Thesis. I still got 4 weeks left to finish the 40 pages and after having gotten all my results, my supervisor and I realized that the data that I r...
I need to write something from the perspective of a character who sees colours differently from humans, and in particular can see multiple shades of ultraviolet. This isn't unique, their entire spe...
I have an interesting plot ready, although there are a few missing blocks which I cannot develop. Story: A girl is a daughter of a druid. Druids are humans who live in the forest protecting anima...
If I'm writing a dialog and my character get interrupted and cut off in the middle of a sentence can I write half a word and put three dots? I thought it was okay to do this, but I realized that I ...
My story is about two children and one of them dies in the first chapter. I give a four page backstory of how his parents came to the town they are in now, it is unnecessary but very interesting....
I am writing a romantic short story and I don't know which type of ending suits my story better. Currently my characters fall in love but one ends up "cheating" (they were never dating or anything)...
I am at the free-writing stages of writing my high fantasy novel. I am looking at or experimenting with different methods for hooking the reader and driving their attention towards the rest of my s...
I am a bit crazy about punctuation and I have a question that I'm struggling to find a consensus on. For dialogue (especially in fiction), I always use the standard format: "I told you I wante...
I think one of the challenges I have faced the most often in writing books has been where to start. I tend to do a lot of flash forwards to jump into the action and follow it up with a chapter or t...
I spent quite some time on the website of Patreon and wasn’t able to find but two authors of German language novels (both in the fantasy genre). It seems that Patreon hasn’t got any German speaking...
I have struggled with this for a while because of how much the market has changed over the past decade. Are Query Letters still worth writing if all you have is your manuscript (no "platform"), or ...
I am writing a story with a trans character (female to male) set in the 1990's. My main character's parents are supportive from the beginning, but did transpeople have access to hormone injections ...
As a beginner, I have a frequent problem when writing: I know what I want to write, but I fail to put it in good sentences that reflect my thoughts. Often, this appears in dialogues when I try to ...
I'm describing a creature in my story, and I'm worried I'm using the word "it" too much. Is there a substitute I can use for the word? Can I keep using it? Beady eyes look back at him, inky and...
A few novels I read recently were told via dual timelines, with chapters alternating between a "current" plot and a "background" story. It felt to me as a "modern" story-telling technique, since...
Critics and writers use the term "character study" a lot, usually to describe works that are especially 'literary' such as The Remains of the Day. Despite its usage, it appears that no one really h...
I am finishing an arc of my novel, and right at the end some sudden development happens with MC, that is partially obscured from the reader. They can guess at what it is, but it is a sudden change ...
To clarify: There are two parts to the book (or I might split them into separate books), one with my main protagonist, and the second is a prequel, showing the protagonist's father's story. Bot...
Now, to clarify ahead of time; I'm quite aware that compelling doesn't necessary equal sympathetic and vice versa. That being said, here is the dilemma. There's a character that I intend to write ...
Where could I look, or what could I search for, in order to find sites that allow user based publishing of erotic stories online? The only site I currently know of is literotica.com. I am not try...
The novel I'm writing is third-person limited POV in style. This means that the narration's coverage is limited to what the POV character can observe, think, feel, while others' thoughts, feelings,...
I'm writing a novel which has alternating point of views; odd chapters are from an angsty, neglected twelve/thirteen-year-old girl who's struggling with belongingness, puberty, and parental confusi...
One of the central characters in my novel, at the back of my mind looks like Benedict Cumberbatch. So while writing the story I have explicitly written that he looks like Benedict. It was also help...
What are different ways I can write a dialogue where a character is introducing himself to a woman in a professional setting? I don't want to write explicitly like this, "Hello Miss Emily, my ...
So, I'm likely finished with my idea in form of a novel, but now comes the difficult part with the rewriting. That's when I thought: What are the general Stages of writing? Of course I know the O...
Is there any established way of reporting approximated degrees of freedom (be it Satterthwaite or Kenward–Roger) for mixed-effects model in psychology (APA 6 ed.)? Specifically, is rounding to who...
I'm a strong believer in books/novels being as long as they need to be; if it turns out short, don't try to pad it out, and if it's long... unless there's chaff to cut out, it's long for a reason. ...
While writing a novel which is a story told of what happened in the past, I am facing two different ways to present information. For an e.g., I can write the story in the following two different ...
I am getting some feedback on my writing but one of the questions that come back is that the readers are not sure about the setting. White the story was marked as fantasy, nothing fantastic had hap...
Some stories feature random events that bring about drastic change either to the characters or to the setting. A lottery draw, some gotcha that grants a special skill. Most of the times I find on...
If I am writing a book, and my primary goal is creating a strong emotion in the reader, should I be able to 'feel' that emotion in the outline phase? My goal as an author is creating a strong emot...
I don't often experience writer's block these days. Instead I struggle with a different sort of impediment in my writing: I call it Possibility Paralysis. I have to quickly acknowledge that this i...
Would it be boring/unrealistic/silly/cliché if most characters only had this main motivation for most of a story: saving humanity/their country/their familly/themselves. The setting is medieval fa...
I'm currently writing my first novel and as a particularly young person, I have no clue on how to send my book to a publisher or how I can self promote it online. I know that Wattpad is one option,...
While writing my story this has come up in my mind a lot. I have been planning and foreshadowing this major plottwist near the end of my story. But the effects of it might change my world utterly ...
Presumably, like all trite sayings, it's a bit of an exaggeration since a story has to be at least interesting. (I mean, it would take amazing talent to write simply about someone sleeping and make...
I am currently working on writing a fantasy novel centered around pre-Columbian America, but I am at the moment unsure as to where in America to focus my story. I am considering either the Lakotans...
I'm new to narrative writing and especially have trouble with dialogue. I too often am using the word well to start a character's sentence after receiving some information to then ask a question ab...
The following is from Japanese philosopher and thinker Toshihiko Izutsu's book The Concept of Belief in Islamic Theology (1965, page 146): But what he wants to emphasize is that shar‘a can be a...
I've been writing an autobiography about sexual abuse that happened to me throughout my childhood. The abuser was the dad of a famous singer. Once I was old enough (18) to leave home and file charg...
I'm trying to understand the technical difference between DITA and S1000D. Yes, I know, the common wisdom is that if you need documentation for helicopter or submarine, you should use S1000D, and ...
Seeking comp titles for my WIP. Can you recommend books that meet one or more of these criteria? Soft sci-fi Space setting with fantasy feel Speculative fiction about species that has advanced te...
Characters in movies ‘28 Days Later’, ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ made terrible impulsive choices that cost other characters their lives, but if it weren’t for any of those choices...
I mean are the most famous authors usually trade-published or are there some self-published others that are very well known?
How do you keep writing no matter what’s going on around you? How do you avoid the distractions of social media, that dishwasher that needs unloading, that wash that needs putting on, that cup of ...
