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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Proposition: Stories are information packets aimed to "entertain" people, and just like every other form of communication, they have: A basic and lasting knowledge for interpreting the informatio...
Under normal circumstances, it's obvious that the original writer would be in control of the canon, but what about when the IP-owner is deceased or no longer participating in their industry? This a...
If let's say one wants to portray a villain in a novel that suffers from insanity/psychosis as he has literally lost his grip on reality and is kind of living in his own world, what are the things ...
Normally this sort of thing is easier than actually writing the piece for me but this time I can't get anywhere with the overall structure of the story: I want a character to win a great victory, ...
I'm starting to work through some ideas with a book I want to write. The protagonist is computer science genius that finds flaws and breaks through the security of several major companies. I'm not ...
I want to write a fantasy novel, but there are a few issues that I have with the way that I should write it. One of my questions lies in the problem of how I, the narrator/book-writer, can inform m...
I'm looking specifically into the written medium (NOT screenwriting) and the death of an important friendly character. It's supposed to be a scene to make the reader scream "please, don't", not "y...
The protagonist of my story is an all-powerful do gooder superhuman. She is like Wonder Woman and Amélie merged and She could literally get things done by thinking about them. She was raised by a s...
In my Crime/Mystery/Drama screenplay, there’s a seemingly random doodle at the bottom of a mysterious note. The random doodle looks like a three eyed stick man with a hat. It is drawn with only li...
My question is if you run into characterization vs. plot conflicts, or unlikeable characters, do you do major changes to your characters to fit the plot or do you make major changes to your pl...
Trying to create a character with the ability to generate, and manipulate electricity. He's going to be an antihero. Saving people but killing the ones who inflict suffering and chaos. But I'm just...
I have developed a sci-fi/fantasy mixed universe with many characters, good amount of background lore and I have a plot for at least two different stories each for a single/multi novel length. So f...
I'm writing a letter from the future to my dear friends, posing as the child they're about to have. The main aim of the letter is to be amusing, but also to give some perspective (you don't need to...
How do I slow down the pace of my story? And please refrain from answering with "add more descriptions," because I'm already aware of that technique :). I'd like to see if there are even more ways ...
Do I start by describing each character before they speak? Each one of these characters are important. One of them is the lead. So, their descriptions are going to be a little chunky. I’m just a...
I have roughly 30 speaking characters; about ten speak often enough that their voices should be well defined. I have compiled, from web sources, various considerations when building distinct charac...
I have a character profile for every major character in my story. However, I'm having trouble organizing this profile: I don't know how to handle changes to my character as he goes through the stor...
I'm at a crossroads to figure out the better plan of action. I've heard you should always try to finish the rough draft, but...are there exceptions? I'm wondering if any readers here ran into this,...
I am adding vampires to my high fantasy world. These are not twilight vampires, they are more like the vampires from underworld or vampire the masquerade. I need to make them better fighters agains...
More accurately, how can one write a story that spans across a good deal of time, but is not so much lengthy in its contents to match that time?
I'm trying to have a dialogue where one character says something to the lines of "You're being really hard on yourself. You're only human." That line doesn't feel right when dealing with an anthro...
I'm writing a conversation between some no-good thievin' teens, and one of them has stolen a wallet, which has turned out to be that of an FBI member. They converse, written in indirect speech, wh...
Edit: I'm confused what I need to ask so this question can be taken off hold. I'm looking for help on writing descriptive language. (it no longer flows freely in my mind like it did in the past.)...
I'm writing my first novel, and I'm using a style that seems fine to me, but I'm not positive I'm punctuating correctly. I hate overusing dialog tags. I like the technique of sometimes avoiding th...
Good afternoon. Could I use the brand name 'Imodium' as a title for my short story?
This is not a question about slang, but about swearing and word creation. I have a character who uses swear words, and this is part of his voice. I do not use real swear words. I want the sense of...
When it comes to citing text from someone else's work, the rule is to provide a proper citation and source. Once you do that, you're off the hook. But when it comes to copying images it seems to be...
I think this sentence is awkwardly worded: Do(es) you/your company add job questions on job applications currently? I think it should say: Do you or your company currently add job questions on j...
What are some words that can help me vividly describe a motorcycle accident as if it was being seen by the reader? What are some words that can describe that crash, with such detail that the reader...
Should we use present tense or future tense when writing an article? I know this question will be off topic if I asked without example. So I will add an example: You should use a very clean fo...
For each line of dialog, I have three pieces of text: the dialog itself, and two things I call Subtext1 and Subtext2 for now. Dialog: Self-explanatory, the only thing actually "visible" to the rea...
Just out of curiousity, how do people figure out the reason their work is not accepted? I tried submitting my work to a newspaper but the editor rejected it with a brief message. How do people get ...
I know many stories have characters unexpectedly fall in love, so how can I do the same? In some stories it's quite obvious, like the boy annoys the girl, they eventually fall for each other. How c...
Many of us have written/ are interested in writing a book. However, I've seen that all books, whether digital or printed, contain a legal disclaimer and some kind of copyright notice. Something lik...
I keep trying to figure out how long the first draft has to be if the essay is 300 words long. Please respond if you know!
In one of my wanderings through the interwebs, I stumbled upon the idea that "neutral stories are boring". A neutral story is a story that doesn't support any side, i.e. an impartial story that jus...
To me, it sounds fine to say "She wore a black shirt and red skirt", without the indefinite article before "red skirt". However, in "She wore a black shirt and red skirt revealing slim legs", I wo...
I was just wondering if anybody had some tips on how to avoid repetitively describing characters' actions in the same way? Here is an example which I'm struggling to reform, mostly because I keep u...
I am writing a critical analysis of an article involving a "rule". Every time the authors mention the word "rule", it is in quotations. Would it be correct to also include "rule" in quotations ever...
I'm asking this because I haven't yet come across a similar discussion on the internet or anywhere else. My design scheme for my debut novel is to title major sections within the chapters. These a...
I noticed it in many poems that the verses do not contain words according to proper grammar rules. I was told that poets are allowed to do that to incorporate the rhyming words. For example, in th...
Since I've begun to attempt this thing called writing, proper writing not coming up with tales and bits to amuse little kids, I've had this doubt. What are the differences, if any real ones, betwe...
I read many articles on-line, but cannot understand where to draw the line between expository and argumentative writing. According to many articles, expository writing presents information. Argumen...
I have some theories that I've contrived, some are philosophical, others are logical or physical, and some are just jokes about life told in a theory format. But I'd like to use some of these theor...
So I wrote this article on my own, and shared it between my friends via online, but I did not want anyone to use it for any monetary reasons, such as publishing it into a book and selling it. Is th...
How do I describe the sound of a low growl in a low technological culture context? All that comes to mind as possible descriptions are the sounds of rolling logs, or the wheels of a wagon. Note...
When I write I usually only want to tell the reader the important stuff, but that tends to be a small scene every couple of hours. Too much of the time, the scene is only a page or so. That leads t...
I've just released a fiction novel last year. Unfortunately, I have found several grammatical errors within the manuscript. In addition, I've also extended a few of the 'lacking' chapters of the st...
Back in highschool in the 90s we had an assignment to write an extra chapter for a book. After some discussion the teacher told us that under no circumstances can we kill the protagonist as the boo...
How do I avoid being wordy? Do you know of any exercises or something similar to help with that? I feel, when reading my own writing, that I use "expensive" language, as we say in Portuguese, wa...
