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 have the following sentence: Once they realize they have no chance of defeating you, they'll end up joining you. I feel this sentence may come across as a bit "cocky" because I would want t...
A lot of people die in my story, some of them are parents. One of the main characters for example lost his father (and one brother) in a car crash when he was young, which he was a part of. He beca...
tl;dr : I need a way to emphasise the names of special skills without it becoming annoying or it overlapping with the formatting already present in the story. I'm writing a story in an RPG-like ...
Writing a coherent letter takes a lot of practice. What steps could one use in writing to form a coherent letter in german?
I briefly read ‘Investigations Of A Dog And Other Creatures’ by Franz Kafka; I think that he was demonstrating satire by exaggerating a point that his canine protagonist was making about the availa...
I had a story in mind that basically came from a true historical event in the 1930's. I won't be using real people for the characters but the main storyline is somewhat based on what actually happe...
I know there's a lot of questions regarding this topic, but none of them delved too deep into if there's a different level intimacy between the two perspectives. People have told me that FPP in a...
I am writing a fantasy novel set in the Middle East. For multiple reasons related to both plot and atmosphere, I'm using flowers and flowering trees a lot in both descriptions and dialogue. Trouble...
I'm trying to find an appropriate name for my main character. I want his name to reflect his personality and symbolize certain aspects of his past. For example, for a character who has supernatura...
I want to tell a character's backstory, but I don't want that character to tell it directly to the protagonist, or to use another character to do it for them. Is there a way to do this?
I've long been interested in writing a fantasy novel. Over the countless iterations I've gone through, one thing has remained clear: a quest for originality. I know some people like the fantasy c...
My background I'm a native French speaker and a software engineer, I studied in French and grew up speaking French. My Question is: which language should I use for my technical blog posts? On o...
Say I want to work on a game and, since I'm not very good at creating games yet, I want to work on the story first and foremost. Before I even want to commit to creating the game, I want to do get ...
Game books like Choose your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf series were very popular in the past. They are a series of single-player gamebooks. Typically, beginning at the first sect...
Essentially, I have a protagonist who I set up as a 'main' good guy in one of my series. However, in my final series, I intend to make him turn to the dark side and oppose my other protagonists (fr...
My story begins with a little girl waking up in a creepy and probably very haunted house in the middle of nowhere. She has no memories of how she got there, what happened or what the place even is,...
I'm starting my story with my protagonist found (by the police), bleeding at a crime scene. When he wakes up, he has no recollection i.e. he's lost his memory. He's interrogated by two Inspectors,...
When you say a character shook their head, does that mean they nodded, as in "yes", or they shook it sideways, signifying the answer is "no?"
In my story there is a scene where a character narrates some past to another character. And this past consists of 600 - 900 words. How do I write this? It is like a story within a story, but it on...
If I get hung up choosing a name for a character, should I come back to it later? Or should I try to figure one out? I feel like sometimes I have some momentum going forward and taking too much tim...
I'm building a dedicated WordPress website for my (in-progress) graphic novel. My first thought was that I'd have an artist's blog for work-in-progress, and explore some of the worldbuild-y aspect...
I had submitted a review article few days before and I have received a comment from an editor of a journal. The comment is " Is it literature or review study"? I am wondering that I had submitted ...
Some people tell me there are not enough descriptions in my book, some say there are too much. How do you know how much detail is enough? Is there like a rule of thumb for these things? Do I leav...
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a lot of short stories describing fictional things and places directly to the reader (like The Library of Babel). For instance, let's see one excerpt of Decline and Fall o...
Suppose I'm writing an essay on topic A. My view on A, however, requires the reader to be familiar with certain aspects of other, perhaps seemingly unrelated, topics say B, C, and D. It is not reas...
There are many stories out there that are open-ended, up for different interpretations. Many theories spawn around such stories, most of which sound possible/plausible, but are nevertheless only th...
Say I am writing a (mostly) realistic fiction book. The entirety of said work is mostly what a person would expect from realistic fiction with the world being almost entirely similar to our own, po...
In the story I am writing, I have a character who is working on a project and will present it to a group of judges who will mark it in a sort of examination. The project is a source of stress for t...
I am writing a fantasy novel with multiple points of view throughout. I plan to have the narrator sound differently for each character's perspective. For example, one character will focus more on d...
Should I repeat character descriptions if a minor character reappears the second time too far into the story? For example, I have a minor character who is introduced and has a bit of involvement a...
I'm still new to articy:draft and I want to know if it's possible to search and replace words across the whole project. I know searching is possible, but I can't find the replace function, if it's ...
A "fish out of water" character can serve as a reader proxy: whether it is a wondrous view, an unusual custom, or what have you, the character experiences and responds to them, and through him - th...
Posting on a question about word frequency data, I read an excellent answer from @DPT about avoiding words that become so frequent, they're problematic. In a snippet of that answer, they wrote: ...
I introduced a young person (called Raven) who the main character was friends with in my story; Raven is an excellent student who the main character is also teaching music to. The story is the resu...
Over my years on StackExchange I've come to view answering SE questions as its own, highly specialized writing subgenre, with its own demands, and its own ideal format. By trial and error, and obs...
Must writing always be done in the tone/style of ordinary contemporary speech? For example, some people might say that the conjunction "for" is archaic and should not be used in modern prose, but ...
Apologies for the difficulties I've been having, and leaning for help here. Every step seems to be its own stumbling block. Question: All else being equal, is a positive desire/goal/motivation (of...
I'm writing a story written in third-person limited, and the main character has no real name. They simply go by the nickname they're given by the people they hang around at the time, resulting in m...
I'm looking for a dialog tag for when someone is in awe and saying something along the lines of "oooooo!" or "wooooooow!" "Oooooooo!" they ______ed. Does it exist? If so, what is it?
Background: I'm working on a game that has multiple paths for players to choose from. The choices the players make can lead them to very different endings. There are many bad endings but only one t...
In my story, there's this big bad, who needs to be destroyed. That is the main goal for about the last third of the video game. So the group of heroes manages to destroy him! ... but I don't want t...
I have a character who is living through a very regular everyday routine for a longer time, let's say a couple of months. How do I describe this routine and give the impression of time passing by i...
Context: I’m currently writing a novel that has a built in prologue. I’m unsure if I should use the prologue as the first chapter. It involves the main character being sent away by his parents for ...
I think I've written a pretty good chapter one, but now the question is: where do I go from there? I mean: should I introduce a new POV character? Can I jump ahead in time a little to somewhat af...
I have characters who have to use false names. Should the narrator use their real name or false name? For example, if person A was being called Adam when their real name was Archie, person B would ...
I am a blogger and sometimes I find articles with similar content or an idea coincidentally similar as mine which is not published at the time of reading that similar article but which I have writt...
Typically, the voice of marketing content doesn't match the voice of technical content -- marketing is trying to persuade you that you need something; technical writing is generally instructing you...
I have been working on a book for a while, and I probably will be done with it soon. My work is very original in my mind and in the end, this book will be very high quality. But I have been wonderi...
Just a short question, but is there a term for eras or ages being mixed together in a story? To be more specific, I'm writing a story which is primarily set during the Middle Age. However, some o...
For my BA degree, I am required to complete a thesis project in the field of fiction writing, and I plan to write a novel. With the idea I'm pursuing right now, I plan for it to have elements of fa...
