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 like to read across a variety of authors, genres, and publication dates. Whenever I sit down to write something of my own immediately after marathoning a book or series, I tend to unconsciously u...
I believe writing in the first person gets the reader closer to the character. As far as I know, this is generally accepted as true. That's not all there is to character development, certainly, but...
If a step-father is texting his step daughter and he writes: Maybe your "dad" can step up and take the dog What's meant by putting quotation marks around the word "dad"?
I'm getting close to writing my first novel (plotter here - I develop the book first), but I do not yet have names for my main characters. I found this question, which helped me in that area, but n...
Background I studied writing in depth before ever seriously trying it myself. I read a lot, and I looked at reputable books on the subject. Over the years, I combined what I knew into a formula wh...
I've always felt that my writing is very sequential. It's a chain of events. This happens, then this happens, then this happens, and so on. Not to say that the events are boring, but I just always ...
I'm writing my first series of novels, which will contain four books. As often happens, about half way through developing the books, I opened up the possibility for an entirely new series set in th...
I am a novice writer, just starting on a mini novel in the Science Fiction genre. The crux of the novel is about 4 or 5 discussions between protagonist and a set of particular individuals with the...
I am writing a novel of historical fiction about the Second World War. It is written in the POV of several German and Russian characters but is intended for English readers. Which units of measurem...
When writing a title or a name of a place in a novel, do you capitalize the "T" in "the"? For example the name of an establishment, which of these would be correct: They went to The Cloak and Dag...
I am trying to describe a process. There are two players in the scenario. Player A tries to find player B. If player A finds player B, then player A tags player B. Something like that. Here is an...
I am not a published author, though I am nearing that stage. This is because I decided many years ago to learn all I could about writing, and hone my skill with practice, before actually writing my...
Here and there I've been hearing about what readers 'expect' from certain genres. Romance readers expect the hero and heroine to wind up together. Fantasy readers expect epic fantasy full of battle...
I'm completely new to this forum (or whatever it's called) so don't hesitate to point out anything done wrong. Also, please excuse the bad English, it's not my mother tongue. I'm planning (yeah...
First off, 'platform' might not be the best word. I am talking about what you construct a website with, as in Wordpress, vbulletin, etc. I can't seem to find what these are called. I will use the w...
I'm writing a futuristic light novel, in which the world looks really different than the world we're used to and thus I feel like I have to describe every single detail. However I won't really have...
I've been looking for a word to describe this tone of voice for a long time but never came across it. Now let me just spread a pinch of context. It's a first person novel, and our protagonist is v...
The terms are bandied around quite often to describe fictional characters, generally in order to help describe how developed a character is in terms of personality and backstory. However, are ther...
I am currently developing a series of fantasy novels, and have discovered that I will likely be adding a second point of view in the second or third book (five books total in the series). Up until ...
I always feel that a book or movie has achieved something great when I have an emotional reaction to it. For a very brief moment, the protagonist's pain, drive, happiness, or shock becomes my own. ...
In English, I can never remember where to put the comma when using the conjunction word, but. For example: I'd like to stay home and read a book, but I need to pick up some cat food. Jenny asked...
is it correct to ask, WHY LAUGHING In a scenerio where the antagonist is laughing at the hero... is it right for the hero to ask... why laughing? I know of "why are you laughing?" but I've heard ...
I've heard quite a few complaints about character deaths being used to further the plot. They say it's boring and overdone and mention that there are plenty of other ways to get to the same point w...
Background: I've been writing fan fiction for five years now. I began when I didn't have a clue what I was doing, so my methods have evolved during those years. By now I have a solid process that I...
I have a scene in which two characters, Boy and Girl, meet for the first time. Girl is the POV character in this section. They are about to have lunch, when Girl is called away on an emergency. ...
I'm writing a speech on using symbols, and I've just made the statement that you should generally stick with one, maybe two, symbols that span the story (smaller symbols that arise and fade quickly...
In the second book of his Inheritence Cycle, Christopher Paolini makes the grievous error of landing his main character in the middle of a serene woodland where he must sit and talk with an old elf...
This question is slightly less straightforward than the title implies, and requires a little explanation. Firstly, I am an entirely self-taught writer. Because of this, my methods are probably a ...
If I have an idea for a novel (consisting, let's say, of a premise and a vague idea of characters), how can I tell if the idea will turn into a series or a stand-alone? I don't want to start develo...
I am an aspiring author, and I have recently just begun developing my first novel. It is a series, but I have engineered the first novel to be a standalone in case the series falls through. When ...
In Donald Maass's book Writing the Breakout Novel, he talks about stakes. He goes over how a breakout novel needs two kinds: personal stakes - what the hero could lose - and public stakes - what th...
Often when trying to give a reader an approximate size for something that fits in your hand that they can visualize and quickly understand, a writer might describe it as "about the size of a pack o...
I am writing a novel, and I am trying to find the right dialogue tags for identifying the character that is currently speaking. Here are some examples of two forms, and I am unable to decide which ...
In a book I'm writing at the moment I have created a world with a day and night cycle. I have created a veil of mystery over this madman and this machine he's made, however, every event to do with ...
Towards the beginning of my story, my character is forced to leave home. I'm hoping this scene will be rather eventful and emotional and specifically don't want it to be meaningless to the reader (...
I am considering writing a novel in which society has fallen into a perverse pit of debauchery. This is necessary to the novel, but it also presents some problems. I want the reader to know just ho...
I'm struggling with when to omit the comma before dialogue (as well as when to use capitals) in fiction writing. My understanding is that you would omit the comma before/after something like "he sa...
As provided in this excellent answer by @what, there is a certain 'creative time,' for writing, when you can write the best. I've been aware of this for awhile, though I never really saw it for wha...
I'm having trouble figuring out which form is the past tense for sentences like these. For each example, which would be correct? Or have I completely missed something? Thanks. John stepped on the ...
(Made up character) Farrel jumps from his rambler house roof but lands horizontally and on his left arm. His left arms ulna snaps and pierces out of his skin. This is just an example because I'm ha...
Though I'm by no means perfect, I generally consider myself a good writer. The issue is that most older writers I know look back on their writing at my age and cringe at the sentences their artless...
I've recently been having trouble with developing plots. The plots I created seemed heavily sequential. No matter how many twists or complications I put in, they always seemed dry, proceeding from ...
I recall reading somewhere (I believe it was Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy) that you should either stick with one genre or the other. The reason he gave is that if you...
I'm a rookie writer, working on short stories thus far, mostly for practice and exposure. I need to get them out there somewhere. They're probably going to mostly fit into Sci-fi, fantasy, horror, ...
Should I be a Novel Writer or a Screenwriter? This question is intended for the beginning writer, who is unsure if he should start with writing physical books, or with writing scripts for movie d...
Okay, I think it goes without saying that vampire stories are really overdone. But I have a novel idea I would really like to write that has a vampire theme. I think I can pull it off if I do it in...
In studying writing, I've learned that you need to give your protagonist something - usually a quality - that makes the reader want him to win. Without this quality, the reader doesn't care what ha...
In my current novel, the protagonist is driven forward throughout the plot by events that happened to him in the past. The reader needs to know these events, so I'd like to include them in a prolog...
I read the question Help! I've got Writer's Block which explains solutions to the problem. I was wondering why someone gets writer's block? Is it anxiety? Is it due to the fact that the mind is ...
I have built a world in which to write my fantasy book, and I'm currently writing my first book about it. I have it all planned out and am in the process of writing it. I have plans for a further b...
