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As a writer, it is difficult to help your readers hold two dissonant ideas in their heads. This can occur when the situation you are describing does not match well with the lived experience of your...
In a novel I plan on writing soon, the main protagonist (and indeed nearly everyone else in the story as well) is an elf. Humans are present, but they are far in the mountains, living in disorganiz...
I'm beginning to write a novel on a person in the military, and this is set in the future so the technology would be different, but I want a basic overview of every branch of the military. This wou...
I have the idea to propose a world and some initial stories and offer other authors online to add their stories to this world. Could that work and yield interesting stuff? How should it organized t...
I've written a poem exploring my conflicting emotions of anger and the joy that the anger keeps supressing. Is it appropriate to publish a literary work based on such intense negative emotions?
When writing, scenes come to my mind in different languages mixed together. For example in a single scene a description will be in French, some dialogues in English, with a few words of Spanish and...
The protagonist in my story decides to research a topic. Naturally, I wanted her to encounter some obstacles first, so I arranged the starting chapters like this: First frustration > Second ...
My current work is in first person. Well, it's a début so I didn't compare the benefits of first vs. third when I started writing it. I just picked the first because it was easy. Now the plot line...
I wrote a novel called Animal Suicide. It's a mix of romance and dark humor. It's about a girl who, after a weird incident, postpones a pill overdose and starts researching about the topic of anima...
I am making this question with the assumption in mind that specific genres attract certain types of people. How can I determine the target audience based off of genre alone? I'm looking for the r...
The title is a little vague, so allow me to explain my question in depth here. If someone can think of a better way to phrase the title, feel free to edit it. First off, my definition of Bridging...
I have a scene in my story where the main character (the story is told from his POV) opens a door and there is a monster in the room. I want a sudden introduction, to show how shocked the characte...
I have read that a lot of passive voice deadens the story to 2 dimensional even if you are just trying to show something that takes time when you use the passive voice. I quite often use passive v...
I'm writing (or at least trying to write) a novel, and using standard manuscript format: 12-point Courier, double-spaced, 1-inch margins, etc. I'm using Google Docs, which automatically converts s...
My understanding is that a "reflection character" is someone who acts as a "foil" for the hero(ine). This is someone the main character fights with, or at least interacts with, a lot. How is this...
Similar to this question, I am slowly coming to realize that my writing is getting choppy. Unlike that question however, my problem does not lie within sentences, or even paragraphs. It lies within...
Should a self published book on a biblical topic, use MLA or Chicago citation styles? It'll be a persuasive writing on a biblical subject. I want to persuade the reader to my point of view but I k...
For a long time I would edit chapters as I wrote them, to make them as complete as possible. Unfortunately this often resulted in me running out of steam and never actually finishing them. I've r...
I'm embarking on writing my first popular science book on a controversial subject. For sure the writing must be rational, coherent with a clear train of thought and littered with references to be c...
I find myself using these words all the time. Now (<-- there's one!), to be clear the context I'm using them is in conversational style writing, on social commentary, or in forum posts like th...
I have a book I am writing, and every time I go into a grammar fixing program, I get a lot of "Fragmented Sentences." Can some one explain to me how to fix these with out losing any part of the sen...
What if a chapter is incredibly depressive, dark, with intense language. And the next reads almost like a dialogue from a Seth MacFarlane comedy. Or even better, what if the tone switches occur bet...
I have a story with several characters. I've decided that I won't give them names, but refer to them as their titles. For example, the grocer. The cleaner. The officer. Currently I capitalize ...
Sometimes I have inspiration for a story. In random pieces of spare time I daydream more and more details until I am satisfied with the concept and then I don't take it any farther. In my head, the...
I wasn't entirely sure how to phrase the title, so if a better way to put it occurs to anyone, please feel free to edit it. Here's the situation: the goal of a novel is to get the main character ...
