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 is good/preferred way of presenting directory trees in programming books? My main criteria are following: It should be readable and intuitive It shouldn't take too much page space It shou...
For my book I'm planning to self-pub, I aim to hire a copyeditor / proofreader at some point. The question is this: Should I do any proofreading myself, other than using a spell checker? Currently...
My fiancée is a first-time children's book author. What should she expect from her first meeting with the publisher and editors? Any advice? They've already seen some samples of her unpublished ...
I have multiple scenes in a chapter, sometimes from different POVs, or different locations/times. Now I would like to make it clear to the reader that they have left a scene and are entering a new ...
A friend has asked me to read through a chapter of his story and give my opinion. Lets say he has two main characters Mr John de Havilland and Mrs Sally de Havilland. I've noticed that the author...
This is not a great question but I use a lot of cliffhangers. And I have a habit of making cliffhangers in the end of every chapter that I write just to hook the reader. The question is, is it a g...
Are there any tools or online communities that deal with word association? I'm looking for a resource where I could poll for common associations for a particular word. If you do know of such a too...
I'm writing a teen dystopian adventure/thriller/romance novel. I've been thinking about the plot for awhile. I've got an idea I want to develop: a dystopian world where the government has gotten ri...
A problem I run into frequently is that I am struck by an idea, more accurately termed "a premise," for a story, but then I can't decide what to do with it. I think of a million ways to present th...
I'm writing a short story about a girl who has apparently 'missed' an earthquake. This is the beginning of the second scene (here is the first): Erin was sitting on her bed, working on a new ...
When you are writing a story that is set in a fantasy world (maybe our world with just one made-up element, or a completely different world), what is a good way to come up with names for species th...
I've sent my manuscript to tens of literary agents. Strangely enough, I received no positive response. My question: Can I hire a literary agent? If yes, how much it costs? Are there other ways (e...
I have a world (well universe since the main focus of the shared world has the ability for space travel) that I am working on some books on however I believe its really large enough that I can open...
I see lazy plot devices as anything that is too coincidental. Person One just so happened to be in the 'area' when Person Two was attacked (then they end up running into each other a bunch of times...
I'm in the middle of reading Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, and it occurred to me that I'd finally found a good place to ask a question I'd been wondering about for years. How do au...
Okay here's the thing. After a tough verbal fight with my friend, I concluded that I will post this question here and get some concrete answers. According to what I feel, italicized words are use...
After the great amount of encouragement that you all gave me here, you'd be happy to know that I finally started writing my novel and I'm writing whenever I get time. Special thanks goes to Lauren ...
I have been writing bits and pieces for quite a while now. I just can't ever follow through. I have written tons of poems (close to 50) but the only reason they have been possible is because I can ...
I am a software developer, as I get older, I find myself with the issue of not having as much time to learn as I once did. My learning schedule has gone from 'whenever I have time' to 2 hours or so...
This is sort of the continuation of this previous question. The full text is here (just in case). Sophia grabbed her bag, and headed towards an entrance in the corner of the room. She walked...
I've been working for some time on a story about a detective who finds himself alienated, delusional and hopeless while trapped inside a dystopic, postmodern dream. This segment voices some of the ...
I have written some short stories (in fact, they are flash fiction). When I'm writing short stories, the ideas and the structure come to my mind by themselves. Something different happens when I ...
Okay, I tried finding this on Google to no avail, and lit.se is gone, so this is sort of my last resort, so I'm trying to make it a writing question. I'm breezing through The Perks of Being a Wall...
I'm currently working on the first draft of a screenplay, and it's not very good right now. It's little things; some parts go too quickly or slowly, other dialogue exchanges need improvement, and...
I’m thinking about developing a blog where the main character is fictional and has fictional relationships with well known celebrities and sports figures. Are there any legal ramifications for wri...
Is the following first-person POV introduction good, or would it be helped by switching the story to third-person limited? The book is very action-centric, involving a good deal of fights and large...
In the breakdown description I received from a publisher, they mention that they also pay industry leading royalties of ##%. What does that mean?
I am writing a book on how to program in C#.NET. Each of the sections follows this format: Section Aims Content Section Review Quiz Exercises The section review is there to summarise all of th...
I'm formulating a habit where I create too many writing projects. I'll work on a project, and things will go fine, until I have this incredible idea and I start writing on it. This continues overti...
This is the continuation of a story I mentioned in a previous story. I would like to know if the reader would feel intrigued by the dialogue and situation (a girl who seems to be a stripper is lyi...
Disclaimer: English isn't my native language. A while back, I posted this and this. I got... well, reviews. While not outright helpful (ie. indirect, which is the whole point of critiques, I guess...
We know that reading sentences with capital letters is hard. I noticed that some documents are still written with capital letters. Why are license agreements, disclaiming letters and others written...
How can one use social proof as an argument without sounding like "just because everybody is doing it so should you"?. My problem is trying to demonstrate with social proof that trendy tools/techni...
Disclaimer: I'm not an Native English Speaker. This is my fifth attempt of writing a short story (the previous ones are set in the same "universe" as this one). I would like to know if the reade...
The main character of a story dies before the story itself ends. Nothing new here, you can keep a story interesting following their death. But I have an additional requirement: The dead main charac...
During Roman and medieval times the use of slaves was very common in most civilizations. Crimes often carried punishments that would fall under "cruel and unusual" today. Is it possible to write ...
Within a technical document I want to refer to a system or process by a shorter name. I have no idea what this process is called so searching the internet is not getting me anywhere. Is this corre...
I am looking to write a book on Physics/Mathematics. Of course this book will need to include mathematical equations and diagrams. Are there any writing softwares that have devices such as TeX and...
When I read books, blogs, or even answers like this, the advice is usually always the same: To revise properly, you must print out your manuscript, and revise on paper. The thinking goes that one c...
I am thinking of going down the self publishing path. Now looking at most agents and publishers websites, it seems the expected word count for most novels is around 70-90K. Now these word counts m...
So I have this great character( not the main protagonist), who is funny and intelligent. Each scene I write for him is a delight. But the problem is, he is doing nothing for the plot. I have tried...
I have prepared a book which utilizes some information which was licensed under a Creative Commons license of which a large number of people contributed. I believe that the use of this material re...
This is the first time I'm writing something that jumps from one period of time to another in a short story: The field was vast and empty, like a green abandoned planet. Icaro and Maru were l...
Several times I've seen lists formatted like this: My parenthetical pet peeves: 1) Referring to a single parenthesis as "a parenthesee" or something similarly beastly. 2) Smiley faces prec...
The last time I printed a book I just needed something done cheaply and quickly. The print store used very bright, glossy office paper (the same that they use for office documents) and used constru...
I find it easier to write many things with parentheses, but I don't know if this is considered good practice. I would expect some might say that parentheses are indicative of excessive digression a...
I'm writing a short paper on macroeconomics; the professor gave us two tries, I submitted the first try, and now got my feedback. The feedback is: "The first paragraph could also deserve a referen...
Sometimes you can write a lot without saying anything, sometimes you can say a lot but get little through the reader. In technical writing the later is very typical (at least for me), one can ten...
One of the Rules of writing indicates that knowing the end before the beginning is critical to writing. Which I find odd, because in my writing (early days, probably doing it wrong), one of the bes...
I'm considering opening up my current work in progress to critique. In the past I haven't had very much luck with the local writer's group, but I'm willing to try again. Maybe not with them, but de...
