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In my story, there is a spot where there is a major shift in perspective as one point of view is supposed to be from someone writing in the first person to another point of view in the third person...
I've signed up for a short story contest where the word limit is 5000 words. In show-don't tell, one invariably uses more words showing than telling. I'm worried about the word limit: What if I use...
I am trying to write a character that speaks English poorly. I do not want to grossly misspell words for sounds or use bad grammar. I find those techniques to sound juvenile and the bad grammar i...
I'm thinking of putting a "straight plot twist" to my story. What I have in mind is putting in a similar situation that leads to a previous plot twist, but actually the plot is just going straight ...
So in watching playthroughs of various video games, because I do that when I find something interesting, I had this strong urge to write some fluff. However, when I sat down to think of it, any kin...
Which of these is correct? I showed him the woman. “Blood loss is a problem. She needs the wound cauterized.” His eyes widened, “I can’t do that! Her face—” “—is half scraped off. ...
This is one of the tics I've noticed in my writing recently, and it's starting to bug me. Almost every single one of my paragraphs, particularly during dialogue sequences, starts with "The characte...
How do I avoid being wordy? Do you know of any exercises or something similar to help with that? I feel, when reading my own writing, that I use "expensive" language, as we say in Portuguese, wa...
Back in highschool in the 90s we had an assignment to write an extra chapter for a book. After some discussion the teacher told us that under no circumstances can we kill the protagonist as the boo...
I've just released a fiction novel last year. Unfortunately, I have found several grammatical errors within the manuscript. In addition, I've also extended a few of the 'lacking' chapters of the st...
When I write I usually only want to tell the reader the important stuff, but that tends to be a small scene every couple of hours. Too much of the time, the scene is only a page or so. That leads t...
How do I describe the sound of a low growl in a low technological culture context? All that comes to mind as possible descriptions are the sounds of rolling logs, or the wheels of a wagon. Note...
I read many articles on-line, but cannot understand where to draw the line between expository and argumentative writing. According to many articles, expository writing presents information. Argumen...
I'm asking this because I haven't yet come across a similar discussion on the internet or anywhere else. My design scheme for my debut novel is to title major sections within the chapters. These a...
I was just wondering if anybody had some tips on how to avoid repetitively describing characters' actions in the same way? Here is an example which I'm struggling to reform, mostly because I keep u...
In one of my wanderings through the interwebs, I stumbled upon the idea that "neutral stories are boring". A neutral story is a story that doesn't support any side, i.e. an impartial story that jus...
I'm writing a story where the main character makes and detonates bombs. The character could be considered a terrorist. I want to portray the character as an expert, but I don't know a way to obtain...
Many of us have written/ are interested in writing a book. However, I've seen that all books, whether digital or printed, contain a legal disclaimer and some kind of copyright notice. Something lik...
We're all familiar with stories about good and evil, where characters are unambiguous. The benefit of this sort of a story is that we can enjoy the conclusion of the good struggle, without being t...
I am writing something similar to a review article about a scientific insight that connects and streamlines a number of seemingly different previous results. In the introduction, I give an example...
For each line of dialog, I have three pieces of text: the dialog itself, and two things I call Subtext1 and Subtext2 for now. Dialog: Self-explanatory, the only thing actually "visible" to the rea...
Should we use present tense or future tense when writing an article? I know this question will be off topic if I asked without example. So I will add an example: You should use a very clean fo...
What are some words that can help me vividly describe a motorcycle accident as if it was being seen by the reader? What are some words that can describe that crash, with such detail that the reader...
When it comes to citing text from someone else's work, the rule is to provide a proper citation and source. Once you do that, you're off the hook. But when it comes to copying images it seems to be...
I'm writing a story where my two main characters have been merged together so that they share a single body. They spend a lot of time discussing things and arguing on what actions to take. This has...
