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One thing that often annoys me in historical fiction or fantasy books is the dissonance between the writing style and the events and historical period described in the book. The writing is usually ...
I am a long time Dungeon Master of Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder. My games run in a custom world of my own making. However, I utilise a lot of the traditional lore and races of D&D. I'm ...
I’ve been a writer for fifteen years, five as a full-time writer, and still haven’t figured out how to get the people in my life to view it as a job. Right now, I’m editing a novel to a very tight ...
I recently saw a contest for writing flash fiction - the contest rules were that it had to be under 100 words long. I thought "Hey, that's cool! I'll give it a shot." So I sat down, and tried to s...
For a long time I've been searching for some reference on how to write a scientific journal but failed to find one. I specifically want to write a scientific journal to be used as my personal jou...
I can't find a standard, is the most common use to have the abbreviation followed by the defintion? Example NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Using git to track modifications to the project allows contributors to include comments with each commit. If the project's guidelines, and managers' control, keeps those comments limited to a forma...
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...
Free indirect discourse is a writing technique that makes the writing display the character's thoughts whilst still remaining in third-person narrative, with 'he' or 'she' as pronouns. As an exampl...
I'm testreading a novel for somebody I know. It's an adventure novel targeted at teens, with ~60k words. At one point in the first quarter, one of our protagonists comes across some huts. The huts ...
I’m attempting to write some ‘difficult to read’ scenes such as violence, rape, trauma, etc. And I’m not talking about ‘good’ violence such as in Game of Thrones or a Quentin Tarantino film. The no...
Consider a document structure like this: 1. First-Level-Heading Some text to give an overview about what I want to tell in this chapter. In LaTeX, this heading would be produced using the \sectio...
I am surprised by the vehemence of many writers' objection to said-bookisms -- the practice of using a verb other than "said" or "asked" in order to convey dialog. Writers are told you can't hiss a...
I would like to self-publish a book with a binding that allows for the book to stay open if you put it down on a desk. What would be an affordable way of accomplishing this? Perhaps you need to k...
I've read a few amateur stories online and sometimes the author will include so much detail that the reader gets a little bored or distracted and forgets what the actual story is talking about. How...
I started a book about 2 years ago, got about halfway through, and then got sidetracked. I know this is a typically bad habit of novelists... Fortunately, the book idea that distracted me made it t...
Background: Im working on a rather long instructional book, and have just started trying to use LaTeX. The book doesn't have any scientific notation in it, and most of the diagrams I made in other ...
A writer can either choose to use bullets or else stick to conventional (or in certain cases non-conventional) numbering. Are there set guidelines about when to use what? Is the use of numbering pr...
I mainly write for academic journals (and creative writing for my own amusement), but from time to time, I publish opinion pieces in various mainstream magazines and newspapers, for which I am mode...
In the context of a technical manual, I need to write instructions guiding users through several standard manipulations. When providing examples of these manipulations, I have written a short sente...
While writing blog post mostly on technical articles, I often come to dilema that does my post is too detailed for reader eventually they will skip further reading due to complexity or is it too s...
I have some character stuff im trying to figure out for an AI antagonist. In a game development project that I am part of, there is an artificial intelligence that speaks to the player character t...
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 ...
A personal point of view on the necessity of a new culture in fiction "A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away", "Pandora", "Dune", "Middle Earth". All quite different worlds compared to ours, b...
Is it ever acceptable to use an exclamation mark following a question mark? I am proofreading a novel and have been instructed to make no stylistic changes, only errors that impede sense/clarity. ...
