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 questions: Should an author have one website or two? As an new author, how important is to have a personal website? Pros and Cons: A blog to get feedback A possible duplicate of, even i...
I have the habit of using paired adjectives in my writing: The noise from the engine lulled her with its slow and monotonous rythim ... ... the lights on the ceiling filled the room in a s...
This is something of a companion question to How does one write from a minority culture? A question on cultural references I have recently had a somewhat unpleasant experience reading Naomi Novik'...
I've noticed a quirk with the narrator voice of one of the two novels I'm working on. This narrator only describes the beautiful aspects of every character's features. You might think the women are...
A lot of people here aren't professional writers, but write in their own free time or for their own pleasure. It's not uncommon, though, wanting (or dreaming) to make "something more" out of it, wh...
Possibly related: How can I get readers to accept more than 1 "buy" in worldbuilding? Worldbuilding is a tireless art; that's what our brother site Worldbuilding-SE is for, and why as a writer ...
I realize this may be a duplicate question. I've seen, for reference [ How long can a first novel be? ] yet I think my situation is a little more specific. I find myself in a similar situation. M...
Around a decade ago, I had a dream. An actual middle of the night dream. An entire movie played in my head, all I had to do was write it down. I did a fair bit of research on the topic then I sp...
I read a lot of YA fiction, a lot of which happens to take place in schools. Recently, an idea jumped into my head for a YA-ish story and told me that it was going to take place in a school. The i...
Joe is the worst. Nobody likes him, not even the so-called friends he teams up with at school, filling other students with terror. He's sarcastic, nasty, and a bit of a racist, and especially ant...
Possibly related questions: Should I add racism in my book's world or have my world have no racism? Is accurate human nature required for good writing, even in fantasy scenarios, or with fictiona...
I'm working on a novel, that's set in pre-Islamic Persia, in the same general way that The Lord of the Rings is set in Britain. (Meaning, it's set in a world all its own, but there's this source of...
I've got a 40h, full-time job, as many do. Yet I'd like to become a writer someday, or at least, bring a novel through the first draft. This considered, I'm trying to give myself a daily target of...
I have a little contradiction in my story that may well be fatal. In my high sci-fi setting, one of my main characters is an android. Let's call him Bob. Bob is efficient, cold and straight-to-th...
As a creative writer in my free time, I sometime suffer from a lack of feedback. To get some impressions on what I've written, I either have to ask my girlfriend (who acts as a sort of beta-reader)...
In a story I'm working on, humanity had sometime in the past reached a very advanced technological level (far higher than ours), but then had a devastating global war, and afterwards technology had...
I'm writing a chapter with a lot of indirection, and I'm wondering if I'm doing too much of it. To be specific, it is the main character remembering an event from his youth when a merchant who sta...
For the writing challenge, I'm currently writing from the point of view of a robot. Also another robot is frequently addressed. However I've hit a problem: Referring to the robots as “it” often giv...
In light of recent events, I intended to write a simple letter of complaint to StackExchange. The obvious thing to do would be to write an opening with the fact such as It came to my knowledge ...
In my story the protagonist hears, in a temple ceremony, the reading of a religious/mythological text. Now in the actual story, I don't need the text itself (the role of the text in context, and th...
The story that I'm currently working on is in a very far future. Clearly, people will speak a different language then. Now, I wondered if it can make sense to (partially) create a conlang for the ...
Suppose an author is writing a novel. The novel has nothing to do with politics, our society, or any of the hot questions of the daily news. It's, say... maybe a fantasy or sci-fi novel, set in a c...
I'm boring and just use Word and Excel for writing my novel and keeping track of stuff. I've tried a couple others, including Scrivener and Evernote, but never got into it. I like the idea of spe...
I've seen a few visual novels on Steam and Kickstarter that mentioned how many words they already contain and what they are planning for the final amount. The problem is: I have no idea how those n...
I've read that writers and editors are often paid on a per-word basis. Then I did a search about the cost of translating a literary work into a different language and I've found varying information...
I tried to find sales figures about printed fantasy novels and how they compare among different countries, but I couldn't find anything in that regard. I can find generic statistics about how the...
I've heard the term "white paper" used in many situations. I've been asked before to write white papers on different subjects, though I've never successfully completed one. I've read many different...
I've long believed that for a novel (or any kind of fiction) to have a certain weight or power behind it, there must be a message. I've been writing this why for many years, and it's lent my fictio...
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...
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...
Where can I find (preferably free) online resources, such as How-To-Write or styleguide articles and blogs, about writing a litRPG book? LitRPG, or Literary Role Playing Game, books combine elemen...
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...
I would like to know whether there are any tools that would help an author write a branching storyline. Usecases may for example be: campaigns for Pen and Paper games visual novels Choose Your O...
This answer to the question Averting Real Women Don’t Wear Dresses introduces a distinction between acts of patience and acts of daring. [...] when it comes to telling a story [...] acts of d...
The Spy is a Netflix series about Israeli spy and hero Eli Cohen. In a recent interview, Eli's widow Nadia expresses great dissatisfaction with the series: a lot of changes were made, ostensibly to...
Recently we have seen multiple questions on various aspects of political correctness. They have sparked some measure of disagreement, which is what I wanted to examine here. To what extent should ...
In the ever swinging tone of a novel, one may wish to show a moment of peace amidst all the chaos. In my novel it happens a few times, most notably when characters are travelling across vast natura...
This question is about hiding from the reader the fact that I am skipping some steps. Worse, perhaps, I don't want to show them, and I may have no clue or intention of figuring out how these steps ...
Note: This question deals exclusively with personal stakes (what the character could lose). It does not deal with public stakes (what the world of the novel could lose). In my mind, there are t...
I am writing a short story, about a particular field with multiple specific terms, none of which are in English. (Specifically, I'm writing about bullfighting, but the question could apply to other...
Let us suppose an unmarried female author. She publishes something. Then she gets married, and chooses to change her surname to her husband's. Obviously, she can choose not to change her surname. ...
There are multiple examples of works of fiction using for their title a quote from another famous work: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and more. The ad...
I open Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises at random (chapter 9). 'I haven't seen you since I've been back,' Brett said. 'No.' 'How are you, Jake?' 'Fine.' Brett looked at me. 'I say,' she s...
I am in the process of editing a short story. It is science fiction of the "if this goes on" kind: I take a social trend I see, and paint its event horizon - a troubling future. 1984 and Fahrenheit...
I have just finished a short story, set in what is known as 20 Minutes into the Future - a time frame that's only a little into the future from our own. There is a change from modern times, but it ...
Here's a critique I've received more than once: "your character talks like a character from a book. He's too eloquent, nobody really talks like that, unless they grew up in a library." Now, to som...
"The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry" comes from Robert Burns's To a Mouse. It is a commonly used expression, though the "mice and men" part is often omitted nowadays. In fact, not ever...
Not all stories follow a 3-act structure. As an example, Les Misérables is rather episodic in its nature: first there's the story of Bishop Myriel and how he meets Jean Valjean, then there's Fantin...
If I were to describe Waterloo from Napoleon's point of view, it would be very different from that same battle from the point of view of a soldier, or even a cavalry lieutenant in the front ranks. ...
