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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What genre best describes my novel about the life of a character whose entirely fictional history includes many realistically humorous interludes as well as some serious, even tragic incidents? It ...
So the annual play at my university is coming up and i wanted it to be on a novel i recently read. I'm ready to adopt it but the thing is that i wanted to know if i might encounter any trouble with...
Good evening, I'm in the process of writing a small research paper for my college and im facing the following dilemma. One of my sources has a typo. More specifically instead of the word "Christi...
I've just been struggling recently with this doubt that I could never think of ideas I've seen written on my own. If that sounds confusing to you, you aren't the only one. Of course, I could sit ...
My wife and I are working on a book that will contain photographs of paintings that were exhibited, with owner permission, in shows hung by wife or obtained from other photographs. All of the works...
I'm in the process of planning a story right now, without the intention of sharing it it with others, but I would like it to be comprehensible if I do. It's set in the 1880s and is formatted like a...
In the book What If?, the author usually write the unit as kilometer, atmosphere, megawatt instead of km, atm, MW. However he does use the symbols in the drawings: In one line both mm and millim...
English is full of homophones that can cause confusion when speaking, but if the two similar sounding words are spelled differently they can be clarified as soon as they are written down. However, ...
I always read that good writers shouldn't use similitudes and metaphors. Also, a writer shouldn't use too many descriptions. Then, I read Raymond Chandler and my little stupid world of securities w...
How can a protagonist, being a writer himself, share a full short story he has written with the readers within a short story? What are the techniques he can use to separate the frame story from th...
People advise to keep description to a minimum, or to make it worthwhile to the audience. I'm talking about description that isn't really necessary/important to the plot but is necessary/important ...
Novelists seeking a literary agent's representation are advised to prepare a long list of carefully chosen agents (e.g. genre matches are important), but to only contact a few at a time. The respon...
Short version: In an essay that aims to persuade and leave an impact on the reader (which also involves making it flow logically), is it more effective to have the larger scale societal example in ...
This question rather stems from my last question about inspiration vs copying from another authors work. While the suggestions I got there haven't completed resolved my issues and doubts, they have...
In the email I'm writing there are three separate points. The last two ones are not so long so that each of them can fit in a single paragraph. However, the first one is needed to be split into two...
I guess this is a question about inspiration versus copying. I recently came across a story that really gripped me both with the inspiration for an idea and at the same time a doubt I could ever wr...
I have two characters, Alice and Bob. They have just met and each is trying to deceive the other. But their thought processes and the nature of their deceptions are very different from one anothe...
Can you guys give a novice writer some advice on how to write good, frightening horror? I'm think more short story than novel, but anything that can give readers the creeps. I want to avoid being t...
I'm considering working in writing. I'd like to save myself some time in case I'm not up for the job. How do I go about evaluating myself as a professional writer? I was going to ask for a peer ...
I am currently working on a novel. currently two girls are the only active characters. I am curious if I need to separate the dialogue and action when one character is acting and another is actin...
My work presents proposals with information divided by numbered headings. Under these headings, the technical writers use a variety of paragraphs, numbered indentations, and indented bullet points....
I got the idea to write a book about my life story from my mother. At first I thought who would want to read about my life, then I thought back on my life and actually thought wow I have been thru ...
My friend and I are working on a story that we want to publish and share on the internet (kind of like what FictionPress does), but we have some formatting worked into our story that we would like ...
When writing a book, how does bibliography work? Can I just list all the resources used at the end in a "Bibliography" section? If so, do I need to put the exact pages that I used? Also, do I nee...
I needed some help with feedback with my writing. I am new to writing and would really appreciate if someone can read it and provide feedback. Any kind of tips and tricks or suggestion are welcome....
I found this freeware app, labytrinth, years ago. It allowed to create elements (characters, places, objects, etc) and detail information about them. Then you could drag these elements into a wide ...
For a new guidebook project (freelancing in IT) I wonder at which point I should evaluate the idea. I see these possibilities: Create a website with a newsletter subscription form and see if peop...
I suppose this is not really advisable but how do you report speech in a conversation with another person? Should standard reported speech rules apply or do I treat it as direct speech? "My home...
Background I've found that at the end of a lot of my chapters, the endings feel quite forced and abrupt. This is because I don't know where to go, I've done what I need to do. For example: Exc...
Some translations surpass the original texts, thanks to the translator. Can a text become more poetic by being re-written into more beautiful language by an open-source algorithm? The algorithm co...
The number one reason I unsubscribe from writer's newsletters is negative email headlines like Stop Procrastinating and Finally, You Can Finish Your Novel and 10 tips to focus better and finish in ...
I have a main character, I'm attempting to disguise this fact. But it is tricky. Out of nowhere, the character rises up as a successful military leader. The events that lead up to that are plausibl...
Remember the end of the Godfather, where they spliced all the different assassinations with the christening? Or any film with good cutting, where they swap between different characters and what the...
I began work A Long Time Ago(tm) on this particular book and only took it up again about eighteen months ago. Back in 2007, I checked around but didn't see anybody of note with the name of my prota...
I hope this isn't too general. I wanted to ask for advice on making it unclear which characters will survive to the end. The first arc of the story involves a lot of characters, more than 12, but o...
I'm reading a (proposed) novel for a friend, and they've used large chunks (as in, full paragraphs verbatim) from online sources within their text, usually sourcing from encyclopedias. The way they...
I'm writing a paper for IEEE using Microsoft office Word 2013. I want to use dynamic reference which is available in this version of Word. In a place of my article the references are similar to: ...
In a magazine where an individual author's name is not published with the article, it seems obvious to me that the article can be presumed to reflect the consensus of the entire editorial team on w...
What's the term or name of the literary device/technique employed when a novel is mostly written in first person from the protagonist's view, but events as yet unknown to the character are written ...
I am not asking you to tell me to keep my sentences less than 20 words long because I am determined to write some really long sentences. What I want to know is how to avoid sounding unnatural. Do I...
Some writings offend the current political mainstream, because they contradict the prevailing opinions and propose different values. Where can such writing be published? Samples of writing are htt...
I'm interested in putting together an anthology --a work containing some original material, but also lengthy excerpts and/or full text of previously published material by other authors, from a vari...
What would you do if you faced the same dilemma Sir Arthur Conan Doyle faced when he actually wanted to end "Sherlock Holmes" which was at it's peak of popularity with the public? What would you do...
I, like most writers, have a number of ideas about my current work in progress. I know how some chapters in the story will play out almost precisely (the ending / final chapter, for example) and h...
I have been searching for a Runbook / Operations Guide example and can't seem to find a useful one for my company. The current runbook they handed me contains use cases and requirements, which I k...
When writing a legal document, what is the proper way to replace and/or in a list with more than two terms to remove ambiguity? For example, if I just have two terms: deliver apples and/or ora...
Fantasy worlds are usually set in a separate world, time, and space from our own. Many are set in an alternate world and dimension. They feature medieval-like setting and technology. Yet some fant...
I've had a story developing inside my head for years (literally about 5 or 6 years now) but every time I try to put that story onto paper it never turns out how I wanted it. It feels like this is m...
I was critiquing a friend's novel and I noticed that all the characters seem to have the voice of my friend. Speech fillers, vocabulary, sentence structure all seems the same throughout. How c...
I'm writing a short story. In it, someone hires a professional assassin to kill a young woman. While the killer is investigating his target he unknowingly starts having feelings for her but he only...
