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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No abstinence-only-until-marriage program has been shown to help teens delay the initiation of sex or to protect themselves when they do initiate sex. This is directly taken from advocates fo...
I want to write a fiction TV series inspired by a true love story between a star and his fans except that I'm going to represent the fans as an actual female character and make it a romantic series...
I read The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker (yes, it was so heavy that I had to cut into two books just to be able to carry it around) and I just can't believe that the number of plots we ha...
I know the logic behind volcano openings and why they’re problematic (they set the expectation that that level of action and excitement will continue; they’re a hard act to follow; they make a prom...
My triller has an Antagonist who is classified as a sociopath and narcissist. He becomes infatuated with my MC who is an Ex-Army sergeant making a living in close protection services. He sees that ...
When I get an idea from something, it feels like sometimes an abstract, inexplicable intuition leads to a concrete visualization (and a chain of logic), and sometimes it's the visualization and the...
The wizard slid the application over to the goblin. "I'm afraid, Mister Barnes, we cannot accept your letter of resignation at present. You are simply too ugly to qualify for an exit scheme...
In an academic writing course some years ago I remember being told that when writing, for instance, a journal article in English, one should usually avoid structuring one's text with the help of ex...
I have two sentences: In general, the better the equipment, the higher quality of production you will end up with. We choose our equipment very carefully. To link them together, I have to use t...
I have a question, part subjective, part common sense I think... The conjunction of experience of some writers can be helpful for me. How you know if the story is balanced? ...I mean,how you know ...
I'm kind of having trouble with portraying one of my main character's English speaking foreign friend. My character and the country he is in don't really use English as the language they communicat...
My editor returned to me with her initial critique of my novel, saying some characters were too similar, and that they had the same likes and dislikes and flaws. The characters she mentioned were ...
I'm trying to follow query guidelines that include a query letter, proposal, outline, author bio, and sample chapters. What is the 'proposal' part of the query letter? I have not been able to find...
In a story I'm writing, the villain has his motives for his attitudes. However, he is very mentally disturbed, which makes the logic of his motives be kind of illogic to other people (including the...
I’ve been working on a first draft of a project since January and have been steadily working on it for hours a day every day since then. Basically spending all of my free time on the project. Now...
How do you write out the second build up without killing the essence of the masterpiece? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Medias Res?
As I am applying for an internship in research labs writing a cover letter is the most important part while applying. I have gone through many websites regarding this, but I can't find the perfec...
I have self-published a paperback and Kindle version of a book on Amazon KDP. For the paperback, I got a free ISBN from KDP. My question is, can I also publish a free e-book version somewhere else,...
I've been toying around with the idea of writing a novel. The story revolves around two characters, one male and one female, and the perspective will shift between them. One of the central ideas...
I have so many great ideas! I've completed several stories in my head but i've never put any to paper. How do I start? How do you start?
I'm trying to refine a name for my main character and characters in general but I will be focusing on my MC for the example of this question. My question is: What criteria would make a name hard fo...
When should a writer kill their protagonist off? Inspired by a question about character lifetime and another about what makes the death of a character satisfying for the reader, I have begun to wo...
I have recently discovered that the plot and cast of characters of my novel is so unbelievably complex that I am the only one who can actually understand it. I have too many characters, with too ma...
I write as a hobby and so my works are pretty amateur, but I still try to keep my writing as legitimate and proper as I can. My novel is about how a teenage boy (who is notorious for being a bad de...
I've been planning a story that follows two characters. At the end, one character (let's call him Joe) goes back in time and appears at the start of the book. I intend to explore themes of determi...
In my novel, the character is sitting in a café sipping coffee, and she is watching a busy street of people rushing towards London underground after the office hours. I want to express the thoughts...
I have repeatedly come across the comment that experienced writers are able to put their topic sentence anywhere in a paragraph, but I wonder what that looks like and how they are able to do this. ...
My question is: How much can one deviate from the topic sentence before transitioning to a second paragraph becomes a better idea? For example, if a topic sentence consists of an assertion, then ...
On another site, I wrote a critical review of a book that featured a "King Frederic II" of France who reigned between 1777-1819. I pointed out that this was a particularly unfortunate time to confu...
There are sometimes moments in works of fiction where the author needs to convey something to the reader without ambiguity. Let's say the situations around the characters get so weird that the auth...
I've always loved to write. Granted I haven't been writing very much these days because of university but I want to publish a book one day. I want to keep writing as a hobby because I want to do mo...
My recollection is that when I started reading romance novels in the 1980s, the majority (perhaps 60%) were written in the third person. This included some "young adult" romances with characters in...
Star Wars IV: We never really get to know Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen, and so when they're burned to a crisp, little pieces of human toast, it's horrific but yeah OK. Not as horrific as if we saw Obi ...
When I study the style of Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and other authors, I find that they use very simple language and simple words. But when I look at present day authors, such as Stephenie ...
I wonder if you write descriptions in a screenplay the same way you write in a novel. For example, I see writers describe the physical effects of the emotion of anger rather than just saying 'angry...
I'm writing a book, and in the appendix I explain many of my inspirations. I reference many books like so: This part was inspired by John Smith's famous book Famous Book. However, I realized ...
So I am writing a story where the magic system is based off of personality traits of the individual. I would like to base it off of something like the Big Five model or the Myers-Briggs model or ev...
Which internet platforms can be used to write something like a diary? I am writing on blogger.com, and write at all because: I really enjoy writing, since I can do this for hours I like to quick...
I am seeking suggestions to improve my "dry" writing style. I recently submitted a manuscript that was intended to be a review article on a particular scientific topic in the field of biomedical s...
I'm a staff writer on a site that puts lots of emphasis on SEO. To that end, they have an SEO editor come back in to our posts after publication. The editor changes things like the abstract of th...
Time and time again, I have been told that my unfounded focus on description distracts from the main story line. I mostly write stories in English, which doesn't happen to be my first language bu...
I'm working on a magic system that works with weaving types of power. The most commonly used power source is a magical code. I'm trying to base this code off of latex. LaTeX is a math code that is ...
I searched on the FAQs on WattPadd, it doesn't mention anything about short writings, or poems, so my question is, Can we write short poems, stories on WattPad apart from their promoted way of crea...
I'm an engineer. At my company, engineers seem to spend a lot of time reviewing technical documentation written by people who work in different offices and time zones. Part of the reason we spend...
I asked this question in World-Building but it seems better fit for Writing. I ask for a few reasons. Despite the specific arguments against speculative fiction within Quranic tradition and protes...
This is more or less a follow up to a question I had previously asked. Reading British writers from the last 19th century, like Bram Stoker, and the early 20th century, like Bertrand Russell, Winst...
https://genius.com/Rob-zombie-never-gonna-stop- Yeah, I'm on Durango number 95 Take me to the home, kick boots and ultra live See heaven flash a horror show Knock it nice and smooth step back a...
What are the guidelines on using questions in dialog (between ignorant characters) to expose setting and backstory? A few exchanges between my characters seem to fall flat. I'm trying to sort out...
As I understand it, a thesis is some point to be sustained by argument or proof. I've been asked to write a report on a class project, and the rubric says that I need a "thesis statement". However...
I'm creating a magic system where the "magic" comes from "Higher Beings" as a source. Besides the "obvious praying to the gods," can anyone tell me of any other methods for accessing magic from a "...
