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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Related My book was never meant to be a series, so I'm genuinely uncertain on what to do. I only really write completely self-contained things. Background I've really been having a great time wr...
I published two books with a publishing company, and I was wondering whether I could publish my next one with a different one. Can I?
When 2 or more characters speak in unison you can generally do something like this "awwwww, she's so cute!" the girls said in unison in near perfect harmony but what about when the line is on...
An academic paper is referred to as using the authors name and publication year. For example, Smith (2008) studied the property of blah-blah Smith and Johnson (2013)'s article investigated blah...
In novels which contain a constructed language (conlang), there are areas where the rules of pronunciation can be specified. These areas have the disadvantage of either being before the story and r...
How good is it to use script-style conversations in stories? New Hampshire, 2144, Beside a sign at Bulgart st. James: Please, Robert, I don't have time to discuss this. You must hand ove...
I just finished the first of a series of children's books and ready to sell. How does one sell their book without giving up all rights to it?
I have a being with a name. I capitalize its name when I mention it. But mostly, I refer to it as "it". I use "it" a lot in dialogue, as characters talk about this being. Should I capitalize "i...
What is an easy way to create a detailed character profile for a short story? I'm new to this Stack Exchange, and need help creating an organized character profile, with the information I have on m...
This question may be related with this question. I come to the direct point. I am confused with the usage of bullet points. Is is necessary to capitalize the first letter in each bullet point? Also...
Specifically, I want to know about whether or not it's okay to start at a point that gives a little bit away. In my story, the main character gets captured and that's the point I want to start at a...
I'm well on my way to 50k but I feel like my story has not plot and is quite bad. I read somewhere that NaNo is awful for quality of writing. (How) can I improve the quality of writing during N...
To provide a little background, I'm writing a novel set in a fantasy world, within which there are multiple languages. I'm applying the rule that any speech the viewpoint character (I'm using subj...
This is from a piece I wrote a couple of years back: The sky seemed like a big, large pool of grey smoke. The weather was cool, moist. A fresh, earthy smell hung on the air. I peered throu...
First of all, let me explain that I am a plotter, and that I am an extreme case. This means that I develop my novels basically down to the scene before I even think of writing a first draft. This i...
Background Alright, so my friends and English teacher recently found out that I've written novels, and asked to read them. So, I gave them out because I have plenty of self-confidence and really e...
Introduction I said a reader in the title. I don't know if I can answer this myself, as I'm not the kind of person who hates on something for not being good. I like virtually everything, and don't...
Let's say you're writing a blog post based on a single source, like a podcast. You use several quotes from the podcast for the post. Is it necessary to cite the single podcast source every time yo...
In my current novel, my main character has a rival for whom he has a deep personal hatred. Think Harry Potter and Malfoy, but with something solid at the beginning. I'm attempting to come up with a...
I'm writing a novel with several POV characters, one of which is the director of an intelligence agency. So far, the entire story is told in third person subjective. Each scene is told from the per...
I have written my entire novel thus far in past tense. However, I feel like my final chapter/epilogue would work better in present tense. I want to give the reader the sense that everything s/he ha...
This goes for any amount of narratives, dual, triple, quadruple, whatever. I'm writing a story with three points of views going on simultaneously right now, about at the same time. However, is it ...
I would love to work as a technical writer, copy editor, journalist, or whatever--as long as it's related to writing. I would especially love to freelance and complete contracts every day. So, I've...
Since starting to learn a little about writing I've noticed that I'm more critical when I read things. This has led to a conundrum I've had recently and I'm not sure if it's inevitable or the resu...
I'm a plotter, meaning that I develop and plan my novels before I ever start writing them. In my case, this is almost something of an extreme, as I develop every part of the novel carefully and the...
I have planned out my novel, but I also want to adapt it into a screenplay and comic book with a lot of differences. I have been pondering if it should be the other way around, or should I start wi...
In my novel, there is a antagonistic character named Numbers who reacts in a similar manner to those he is talking to, even freakishly so. Because of this he is easily able to become a powerful cha...
For a long time, I have wondered which way of writing the following is correct. (Is more than one correct?) The expected result for integers denotes that a value should be at least a specific va...
I received some critiques on my writing where the reader indicated it read fine but there was just something off about my tense. However, he couldn't put a finger on what, exactly, was wrong with i...
In a first person story I am writing, I have many subplots going on, but when I started writing it, I realized that the subplots were not obvious. How can I make it more clear that progress is occu...
I can write first-person great, but many stories can only be told third-person and i dont have much experience here. It always feels clunky, doesn't flow right. And get distracted by pronouns and w...
This is my first time in writers, so I apologise if I make a mistake. I've searched for this, but I can't find a concrete and complete answer. Please forgive me if I've somehow missed it and it had...
Tokein. Jane Austen. Steinbeck. The greats of the past. I often come across people on this site and elsewhere who use the works of these great authors and others as examples and reservoirs of advic...
Okay, so every 5 minutes I see a question uploaded to this site about writing software. What is writing software? Why don't you just plan on paper? I find it much easier to write out all of my mudd...
My comic novel has a scene in which the hero is battling a monster. And at a moment of tension, where he's losing badly, there's a scene break in which the narrator goes into a brief digression. Af...
Should I use contractions in my narrative, or only use them in dialogue? I have noticed that in some books, like The Passage by Justin Crownin, contractions are used in the prose. In others, like ...
I've been delving a lot into the the crime investigation genre, and at first I thought "Simple, just start of with Who, What, Where, When, Why and How and you've got yourself a story!" but I quickl...
I have always been an avid reader of utopian novels. Not necessarily those that advertised themselves as such, but the small utopias, of people doing good, of relationships going right, of a happin...
I was looking for some writers who are famous for their rich in metaphors, poetic style (to study and learn from them). Surprisingly, Google had failed me, locating only one page with a relevant qu...
I've been sending my fourth-ish novel through the my writing group. It is about a trio of teenagers running away from some mercenaries. One of them (Maris) is a girl who has only had a year of form...
In the back of the Strawberry Panic Complete Novel Collection there is a "Translation Notes" section explaining some of the terms like genpaku, mogi (Japanese) and financier (French), but it also t...
In the story I'm writing, the villain is a tyrant who is taking over control of the world (a very small one, with only two continents) as he pleases. The hero and many other people are affected by ...
Events happening in two places in one short story? Is this ethical to happen in one short story (craftwise) or is it unprofessional to break the linear flow? Eg: A wakes up thinks, wait get dress...
Disclaimer: I am not intending on doing this. It is just a question I thought was fascinating and might be useful to other writers. Here's the scenario. You're writing a series of novels. After t...
At this point in my story, it's already been revealed that 2 characters share a telepathic link with one another that allows them to communicate to each other with their minds. "Now before we g...
So I was writing a story and realized that there was more then enough background material from the characters and actions that these characters went through to write a whole book just on them and t...
In his book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Orson Scott Card mentions the differences between fantasy and sci-fi readers, and even says that an author should stick to only one genre, as t...
First: I did look for similar questions and this is the closest one I could find, and it's not quite answering the question I'm asking: Legalities about fictionalizing current events Here's the...
I'm writing a novel in which the story is told from a first person pov. I don't want it to be predictable so I feel that if I kill the protagonist it will give it a sense of difference since they u...
My character has a habit (or running gag) of pointing out plot holes in conversations with her friends who lie a lot. She is quick to tell them what fragment of their st...
