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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One of my characters, Mallory is a 37-year old mother who is willingly strict with her son, as repulsive as that sounds it turns out she is remorseful over her parenting decisions and her son is de...
I am writing a novel. Should I need to add Face Description ( or the personality ) of all the Characters? Is there a template that can help me? Are there any novels that does not describe faces or...
Example: Jane digs in the flowerbed for her ring. Moves to the yard. I’ve seen this a bunch of times, but it still feels sort of wrong when I do it. I just want to know if this is “normal”. Th...
For example: A YOUNG MAN drifts into a bar. Something absent in his yes. His varsity jaket, dirty and torn. Blood still drips down his face from the accident. This is -- JAMES SMITH, 17, the boy n...
DISCLAIMER: This probably not the ideal StackExchange site for this question, but it was the closest one I found I have been using this name, "MikePendragonXD" online for a few years now. It repre...
I think that it fits better in certain books to use the local measurement system, but is there a rule about this? Are some books more tolerant to change than others, like fantasy novels? Or does i...
Something I have been thinking about recently is how to write a character who is an artificial intelligence and not have him feel human. Specifically an AI who is designed to think faster and bette...
I have a technical question. In my story, I've several chunks of dialog where one character's response is a grunt or a groan or rude sound or a swear word, or whatever, but is not in quotes. As a...
The comparison to the celebrity ends with the name. For example, there is a story about Jack and his dog. Jack decides to name his dog Elvis because he's an Elvis fan and is listening to Jail Hou...
I’m writing the pilot for a Crime/Mystery/Thriller. When we first meet the lead detective character - he is depressed about not being able to work. Not at his best, but that is about to change fo...
Am I changing POVs if I'm describing what two or more characters are sensing (touch, smell, sound, etc.)? I know it's not okay to jump from one POV to another. Example: Anna was afraid he'd not...
My main characters first appear in the book all at once. How do write their descriptions so that the reader isn't overloaded with so much information all at once?
Yesterday I finished my first blog post! I have given lot of efforts into it, and I tried to keep it as simple as I could so that my readers of all levels could understand it. I need your tips for ...
I have a character in my story who has the habit of making philosophic observations about life and the functioning of things, or his opinion/vision about something. Although most of his observati...
I'm an amateur writer. I'm having problems with dialogue writing specifically with punctuation and capitalization. Also, I need some advice on how to avoid word repetition. Please help this new guy...
I am writing my bachelor's thesis in software engineering. It is split into two parts: a theoretical part where I analyze existing literature, compare models and draw conclusions; and a part where ...
I have done a little research on the different points of view, and want to delve further into the ways in which the execution of a story varies between first person and third person omniscient. T...
I have an Ancient Roman theme with the names of my characters, however someone pointed out to me Valerian is already a scifi character's name. Are the french comics (which spell it with an accent o...
I have a friend who is a rather ambitious (writing and otherwise), and has even self-published a couple of books. I know having a sense of self-confidence is a good thing, but just churning out lu...
My team and I are drafting a technical report to summarize the methods and results of a pilot study we recently conducted. After drafting a handful of sections, I passed them off to our supervisor ...
I'm a fairly prolific writer and have been published by several free publications and journals, and I want to try my hand at freelancing. The only problem is that none of the freelance platforms I ...
So I have a few characters now (two possibly three) who identify as LGBT. My problem is I'm worried that I might come across as "trying to be politically correct". How do I write about characters w...
I encountered a certain problem while building my world, one that will affect how the story is written: The protagonists never fight by themselves. There are always at least 15-60 military drones ...
Please do not make this a duplicate, I know there's a couple of questions like this, but they are not quite like my question, and their answers don't answer my question to the fullest, hence me ask...
Leaving aside whether I ought to blog my book or not, I am doing just that. Each blog post will be a section, multiple sections will be a chapter, etc. Currently I'm looking for a good wordpress t...
So the story I want to write can really only be written in one of two ways. Basically it's the modern world, a handful of people develop god-like powers, and some of them want to use those powers t...
I'm in a bit of a dilemma. At one point near the end of my story, I intentionally pulled a huge Deus Ex Machina that has no previous explanation, hint or even justification. In fact, I could (and ...
I said in a previous question that my protagonist "is a very shitty person that makes bad decisions for the wrong reasons". My antagonist, however, is a good person trying to do what they think is ...
I'm not asking for an exact figure, but I just want a rough idea of how well the people here have done. (I know the definition of successful varies, so I'm just going to use successful as a term fo...
Consider placing the second book of a SF/F trilogy into the point of view of a secondary character from the first book. Good? Bad? This seems like a workable idea to me, interesting, expand the wo...
I was wondering where I could find editors for atheist essays. I want to see how they write in this field, and what sort of articles tend to be accepted. It would be very useful! Suggestions that...
I've been writing a book that has a fair share of geometric diagrams and equations. However, I am unable to make use of a computer for this and have been maintaining a journal where I manually draw...
I've asked the question a few times before about how to get published in newspapers and magazines, and the most common response has been, by far: "what are your qualifications to write about the pi...
When writing essays for History class, 5 points are taken off for every contraction. I don't see why writing it fully out is better than using a contraction, since it's shorter and it doesn't affec...
For online, developer-centered documentation for a complex software product, which structure is going to be more usable: a smaller number of long, comprehensive pages, or a larger number of more gr...
I have had a similar experience about six or seven times: I email an editor, and, after several dozen times of pitching articles to various of editors, I get a response. They find my pitch interest...
What if you don't know any publisher or editor or agent? Help there? Would it be smart to go to college because of these circumstances? I understand that you don't need a college degree to become a...
Why this Question is Being asked In a previous question it was suggested that I write a treatment to assist with revising & cutting. A treatment is essentially a multi-page, spoilerific summar...
In my writing, I tend to format lists of items: The school has a vegetable garden in which the children grow cabbages, onions, potatoes, and carrots during their free time. as actual vertical...
I developed a news platform for people to know the most important 5-10 news stories every day. The apps/platform is targeted at people (like me) who don't read much news but would like to stay info...
Editing, to focus my question a bit. My goal is to turn a book around from concept to publishable in a 2 year time period. Currently the plan is to write a draft in a year and revise the following,...
This image was found on a University of Hawaii Cinematic & Digital Narrative Production course and the professor found the image on Google search. Although the plot structure is not unique, t...
I need to know the correct way to quote a song lyric on a stone that is to be placed in a memorial garden. The first part of the song is in quotation because that's the way it's written in the ac...
In my story, the main character gets help from / saved by two complete strangers. They don't tell the mc who they are or what they are doing, they just helped the mc out of kindness and disappear j...
Currently I'm writing my dissertation and I'm using IEEE to reference books in Bibliography. Some of my work includes text like this: [...]There are different vendors and open source software w...
Would the line: "Peter!" cried his father. make grammatical sense? It seems to work intuitively, but I'm just not sure. It's also a tough question to google, as it turns out, so any reply wou...
My teacher does not like "to-be verbs" (is, are, etc.) to be used in our sentences. Here is the section in question: A significant scene in the novel is after... How can I replace the 'is' in th...
I'm looking at my project through the lens of the 'scene-sequel' model now. Scene=Goal/Conflict/Disaster, Sequel=Reaction/Dilemma/Decision. My story has been through over a dozen various revisions...
I've been looking for a certain piece of software for a long time, but I never quite found something that matches what I need. I'm a very visually oriented guy, the best way for me to keep track of...
I was just wondering if there was a restriction to the number of books a child can write? Is there?
