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 write fiction set in 18th-century England and America. Obviously, they speak English, and equally obviously, they speak it very differently than we do today. For example, I need to know which con...
A lot of my favorite writers use ellipses, in both narration and dialogue. I know the rules for them, and how they are broken (somewhat) for fiction. The problem I have is that when I vacillate bet...
I've asked dozens and dozens of people similar questions, but I am interested to hear the response from SE. At the time of the 20th century, a time with some of the greatest journalists and golde...
For years, now, I have been suffering from depression. I am going to therapy and I am also visiting a self-help group on a regular basis. But my mental health issues seem to be so complex that I wo...
How do I keep a track of the Daily Word Count? i.e. if I have a target of 500 Words/day for 5 days, how can I keep a Daily Word Count to ensure that I'm on par with my Daily Target?
I've just approved my typeset manuscript and re-reading the book, I'm aware that it sounds very far away from my internal voice. Whilst it has all of the elements in practice, the colour and fluenc...
How can a 3-year-old book receive a positive rating from Kirkus, and even earn a Kirkus Star, yet still have almost no sales? I have a book coming out in a few months, and I thought if I had a pos...
I recently re-read a story I did from 2012, and reading it cold made me realize how much I liked it. There was just one problem: the narrator mentions real athletes. Writing from an alter ego, in a...
Is it legally OK that my character's name by coincidence matches someone's in real life, famous or not? (For example I am naming a character Aaron Hale.) The character's appearance and everything e...
Warning: long question. To start it off lightheartedly, here is the topic as doggerel. There are plenty of questions with titles like these: "What is this form?" — "Can I do this in poems?" — "How...
I’ve compiled material for a book about the economic system for laypeople who consider economics to be a difficult and boring subject. The book describes economic concepts in easy to understand ...
When is it appropriate to switch between past tense and historical present tense when telling a story in first person? Should we try to keep the same tense throughout, or can narration be in histor...
Example from my writing: Not everything was rainbow and roses, of course. Sometimes rain would fall on my head or a thorn prickle my finger. Of course, not everything was rainbow and ros...
In my current novel, I'm dealing with very scary creatures that never fail to fill my protagonist with fear, but I always have her doing the same thing. My character always seems to simply widen he...
I have this weird problem: I know my characters, I know what they're like, and I know how they would act in any given situation and in the plot I use them in, but I don't know how to describe their...
In general, how long does it take a traditional publisher to approve/disapprove your manuscript from the time you submit it to them? The literary work is fiction and is about 330 pages. Also, is ...
We write the best way, not when trying to perfect every sentence as we write our first draft, but when writing down our thoughts and not revising them till we finish that draft. Now in some books I...
In a story that I am writing, due to some time travel issues, the protagonists will have to wait a number of years before the next stage of the story happens. Things that happen between then and no...
I know several sites that provide plenty of example sentences for a given word, but they are usually rather colloquial. I also have one dictionary that provides example sentences from classic Eng...
Is 'creative writing' simply a synonym for 'fiction'?
I have read Steven Pinker's Sense of Style, which is a great book. In chapter 4, he talks about how to form lucid coherent sentences, and in chapter 5, called "Arcs of Coherence", he extends his ...
Is there such a thing as an online repository for rejected novel manuscripts? I think it would be a useful and educational resource -- especially to finally see examples of the so-called 'mistake...
As a novelist my preference is for what I call an 'active narrator'. The terminology confuses most as they think I'm talking about sentence construction and the benefits of 'active' or over 'passiv...
I have always been interested in Irish mythology, especially Fionn Mac Cumhaill. I also like to write in journals. Is there a way of combining the two? In other words, say, for example, the life of...
So I'm writing a story that features an alien character, who happens to be a really "internet troll"-ish type with a somewhat godlike tech and a personal army of robots. He/She (?) is fond of Eart...
In my story there are some words in there that even Grammarly couldn't understand, but they make sense in the story. They're slang, or things teenagers might say. Here is an example of what I am t...
How do I cure this? It's driving me crazy. I keep thinking of ideas to write but I either am too lazy to put it to paper or forget it and then randomly remember a few days later. I'M TOO YOUNG FO...
It's easy to show hesitance, fear or angst, you can have a character smoking 5-10 cigarettes in a row, linger for way too long, act out, or something like that. But how can you show a character tha...
I read an essay by John Mason about the principles of the harmony of prose numbers (or feet). I am wondering whether it is of any use, considering other books I have read say that treating prose rh...
I have a collection of original short stories, all of which have been published in English in literary magazines. A French translator friend recently translated the stories into French (I speak Fre...
Okay, so I have a weak motivation for a god character whose son (whom he tried to prevent his birth) seems like he is an apt tool to be used for a plot that will only be brought into fruition about...
Both my husband's great grandfather and, on my side, my own great-great grandfather were published authors. Their books appear on the Bibliobazaar/Open Source sites. Although we are direct descen...
I am working on a technical book. Planning to publish with Amazon's Createspace. Decided on a pen-name because: Real name is too long, hard to spell and pronounce for most people Given current p...
For context, I'm writing a fantasy story.
I'm writing a script for a short film so I'm trying to keep the things that are kind of dispendable, away. The story of the script starts at a bar, with the friend of the main character, a boy, h...
I am currently learning Dvorak, and I wonder if it's worth it to switch. This question has been asked before, but the criteria were different. In those questions people said they went from 50 to 60...
I published my debut poetry book on Amazon. It seems like reaching wider audience means spending lots of money. I don't want to do that. So far I received the very good feedback and reviews from my...
My question is rather simple. In fact, it's in the title and requires almost no explanation. We can see throughout literature the use of names and title. For example in Of Mice and Men we can obse...
I have this chimera-type character whose name is Ryu, but at this point I think it best to change his name. But I've already grown used to his name, and I've written it all over my book pages. Is i...
I used to write on a word processing software, so all the work of rewriting, correcting, editing was easy. Now I'm more and more inclined to handwrite my manuscripts, but all this work of cross out...
I'm very confused about tenses. I am not sure if I am mixing modifiers up or slipping from past to present. Can someone help me please, here are a few examples: Stooping, he lit a fire, warming hi...
There are some people who have read some of my book so far and they think it is childish and then some say it's somewhat morbid. What are your views on what each of those terms means?
The Seraphinians is a writeup and attempt to document issues with a movement within the Orthodox Church. They are the people who say you have to believe in Protestant fundamentalism's Young Earth C...
I know this is similar to How to Handle a Character When She Is Lying About Her Name but the situation is slightly different in where my problem lies. I have a character who is introduced as Tabat...
I love creating characters and my plots generally focus greatly on their inner conflicts and their relationships with other characters (my experience has almost exclusively been writing romance). T...
In a novel I've been writing, I begin by introducing a character and describing her history and personality from a third-person perspective. Now, I want to start talking about a different characte...
When journalists get an assignment to interview someone in an industry they aren’t familiar with, or write on a new topic, how do they familiarise with context-specific vocabulary?
I have a story that is primarily told from one POV character (third-person limited). However, plotted within this story are a few chapters from other characters. Most of my multiple-POV research r...
I know (I think) many stories that have a point they want to present to the audience. However, I wanted to focus on the excitement of the adventure first. The result always seems to devolve into a...
I am capable of dreaming up interesting settings and even placing things in a world, but I have trouble dreaming up characters and plot. Example: my first aborted attempt at a steampunk story ended...
