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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When I use dialogue within the stories I write I have a bad habit of writing dialogue after dialogue without indication as to who is talking. An example is when I do this in a story “Arden! Dar...
I kind of like the style of writing the thoughts and feelings of many of the characters, most of which aren't the protagonist. The problem arises when some of these characters are hiding a certai...
I sometime express my personality too much in my more creative fiction. When I get going, I include slang words and phrases that sound fascinating and are comprehensible to me, but may not be inter...
Think action movie. Think two heavily-armed men - one chasing the other over rooftops, down through buildings and into the mean streets of a crowded city. Think big guns, explosions and other loud ...
How do news companies find out that the government plans to pass a law in a couple of years, or that the president is about to sign an executive order? Do they contact the government workers and a...
I’m considering writing a piece of business fiction to discuss some agile and testing principles. Given the wide number of books in this area it seems most appropriate to have characters discover t...
I'm trying to write a shriek, something like "AHHHHH!" or "AAAAH!". However, I don't really want to use all caps and repeated letters. Does anyone know any other techniques of showing a scream oc...
Will I get sued or something if I just mention/ reference something like that?
Might be a bit nitpicky - but I really want to get the formatting correct - especially because this is one of the first lines in the script. The screen name is: ArgyleMan29 Like this? JACK: Onlin...
I'm currently struggling to write the first portion of my science fiction story that involves two characters traveling, and I was wondering if you guys had any writing resources to recommend. My go...
A mystery with 3 subplots I'm writing a branching mystery novel. It's more Raymond Chandler than Agatha Christie: the mystery is a driver-of-plot rather than a puzzle for the reader to solve. Foll...
Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy is when the audience is put off by the incredibly dark nature of a fictional work and won't care what happens next, lose interest or want all the characters to die ...
I’m looking to eventually share my book online for others to read. I was paging through Wattpad and it just isn’t necessarily the place I’d like my work to be. Just reading through a few random sto...
Good day, I have the following sentence: Nowadays to reach the mass audience, you don't have to rely on traditional media. Instead, you can embrace social networks such as live video strea...
Should I use a series of shots for this? (context- Joe previously raged in his room - knocking things over) INT. JOE’S ROOM Joe stands up the nightstand. Plugs in the lamp. Takes the alarm cl...
My story takes place in a city during a hard winter: streets are covered with snow, the wind is blowing, the river is frozen. I describe all the setting in the very first scene. My character leaves...
There's this device that I'm writing about which can be used to transform objects. It can transform anything into anything. This is in the fictional future where people learned to modify our real...
Character POV My interactive novel has Old Cop, Young Cop protagonists with different skillsets, backgrounds, observation of details, etc. The POV switches between them using 3rd-person limited. B...
So, I'm writing a novella about this guy named Peter, who is an actor living in LA. In the fall, he comes back to his hometown, a small town in New Jersey, after a gap of three years. He has a larg...
I have a friend who for various reasons does not have access to the Internet. We communicate by snail mail. He has written a paper about a scientific topic. His paper claims that the mainstream vi...
For example, would you say this section of copy has too many "I's" or even "my's"? I woke in a daze. A drug induced daze. I recognized it instantly, the feeling of being disconnected from ...
I am in the middle of writing a book but I have serious writer's block any tips on how to combat this? I am only able to write poetry but it isn't as deep and meaningful as it used to be.
I'm working on a science fiction universe in which time travel exists, in a very limited form, but it's useless, at least it's the intention that it be useless. To that end time travel, on the rare...
How do I describe an accidental kiss between the two main characters? I want to make it so they got caught up in the situation and that both of them apologise to each other after that, like a ki...
This is a random example but would it be bad if I said something like this when the book is set in a historical setting: “Edwards sword was black and shiny like a brand new car” is it not ok? Shoul...
Writing historical novels takes time and motivation to research and study if you want to write something valuable and serious. Why are so many so-called "historical novels" with very little histori...
I am writing a book about an amnesia patient. I do not know much about amnesia, which is quite shameful, but I want to know how to write this book in a way that does not make it cliché. My protag...
In 2015 I wrote the first two thirds of a novel (as part of NaNoWriMo). I stopped at that point because I had written the 50,000 words required for the 'competition' but the story is not yet comple...
I frequently have the problem of starting a story with an idea—either one recently conceived or one held in mind for months, even years—only to find it bland or boring after a day or so and abandon...
So I'm trying to write a story about a vampire couple who are on a quest, to become human again, it is set in a medieval style era. It is somewhat of a romance but I don't want it to be too cliche...
I am an aspiring author who wants to write a novel and have it published. Problem is that I am disabled and receive benefits, so I can't receive royalties because the income stream is unpredictabl...
I'm writing a report on a java program for school. Should I put a pagebreak after the table of contents so as to start the new chapter in a new page?
I hope my question is not off the site's topics. When writing one or two premise sentences for a story, may the premise sentences be in the first POV or third POV, or either POV may be used? Do t...
Dialogue is my favorite thing to write. I tend to use a lot of dialogue in my writing, which sometimes results in long, talky passages -- a bit similar to this question about breaking up exposition...
There’s a Quadbike going down a hill, the two people on the quad are talking, but you can’t see their mouths move. You know it’s them talking as you saw them talk before and know their voices... m...
How should I approach plotting a compelling story, i.e. one aimed at changing the way people think and behave (rather than just being "art for art's sake")? I want to write a novel or collection o...
A couple of months ago, a professor asked me to help him do some research i.e. take a research assistance position online. I was supposed to begin last week, but he has not reached out yet, and at ...
I don't think that I've ever read a book about a character was sat down and explained to them that they are magic, supernatural, etc. Every time I've read a book, they only discover they are magic,...
I'm looking to create a few short stories that are in a shared universe of sorts and I'm curious whether or not I need to have a definitive ending to a story. I'm thinking that the "end" would be m...
I have had half a dozen iterations with Amazon, and am still not seeing a clue. My Kindle collection, including C.J.S. Hayward: The Complete Works, is by physical construction converted from submi...
Could a writer make up his own rules, for a monarchy he created, in a world of his own making? My question is whether I can completely disregard the rules and regulations of real-life monarchies,...
When writing in 1st person POV, if your story's universe or your main character uses made up values of measurement or doesn't have a term for something like eyeliner or traffic lights, how do you c...
In my game, you have a companion with you, who offers you assistance in combat. During gameplay, the companion basically acts like an activated ability, where he becomes a human shield and absorbs ...
After reading the book Of Mice and Men from John Steinbeck, I realised that I saw this typical combination of a small bright guy with a big strong not so bright guy in many movies... Ex: The dalton...
The answers provided here are quite helpful, but they don't address a particular concern that I have. What if I'm not in the US? Where do I pay tax? Do I have to pay tax in the US and in my home co...
I have multiple characters who do things... over and over again, in different timelines. But I have no idea how to reveal this to the reader. Any suggestions?
Alright, I can't figure out how to write a scene. I have a character that has never revealed the fact that she can turn into animals, not even to her family. If the character is planning to tell he...
So, we established that we can lose many more valuable things other than our life, and to make stakes out of them effectively, we have to make it nothing personal. One thing we haven't discussed i...
I am writing a thesis and I frequently find my self using the phrase 'is that'. For example: "The other feature that has been neglected is that the expert system would ..." I have been told that ...
