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That's what a contract does. You, and ideally your agent, negotiate a contract with a publisher. The contract specifies what rights you are allowing the publisher to have in exchange for distributi...
Either you're writing a prose piece or you're writing a screenplay. Don't do both. If you're doing some advanced stuff with formatting trying to represent different kinds of media (radio transcri...
You certainly can. You can do anything that works. Melville does something very like this at one point in Moby Dick, so there is good precedent for it. The thing is, why are you doing it? Why brea...
If you don't have a non-native or non-fluent cabbagehead character (and they're awfully useful; I don't know why you're hobbling yourself like that), then another reasonable course of action is to ...
That's an annoying construction to punctuate, I agree. You might try: Smith and Johnson's article (2013) investigated blah blah The article from Smith and Johnson (2013) investigated blah ...
Oh Dear, no. That is not how it works. You should always make your work as clear to the reader as you possibly can. If your use a symbol or a metaphor, it should be to make your meaning clearer, no...
In many books you'll see an author's note at the beginning (or sometimes end) in which the author thanks various people for their help -- beta readers, members of a writing circle, editors, advisor...
You don't. That is a TV thing. The page is not the screen. How you tell a story in each medium is an artifice. You are never reproducing all the elements of real conversation, all the halts and t...
Generally speaking, citations refer to the physical page on which the cited content appears. They do not narrow it down to a logical part of the document that appears on that page. Cite the page on...
The first thing you should do is look at the answer to this question. Then realize that this is not an issue, but something that you can use greatly to your advantage. However, you still have the p...
It very much depends on why it is New York or Chicago. Do you want the specific flavor of the city? Do you want locals to find your portrayal convincing? If so, Lauren is right. But if the particul...
55K words is a novella; your teacher is wrong there. 80K to 85K is a good book length. If your story will require two books (or however many), finish them all before shopping the first one to an a...
It has nothing to do with who spoke or who interrupted. It only has to do with what is a sentence. Speech tags are part of the same sentence as the dialog the report. Separate actions occurring aft...
Third person omniscient and third person limited are analytical categories. They are terms you use if you want to dissect the use of POV in a piece. Don't take them for rules about what you have to...
The fallacy here is the idea that there are general rules at all. There are no general rules about what is allowed in an academic paper, or any other kind of writing. There are specific style guide...
I think it is important to remember that fiction is not primarily a matter or invention but of observation. You are not creating new stories or new characters, you are discovering story and charact...
I believe you are incorrect. If anything, writing in the first person distances you from the character. First, consider the characters from fiction that you feel like you know well. Harry Potter?...
Any word with quotation marks around it which is not a direction quotation implies the word is false or the statement is not wholly true. If it's freezing outside and I go out, I might say that I...
When you sell a novel to a publisher, you sell them specific right to publish in certain languages and certain countries. Whatever rights you don't sell, you retain and can sell to someone else. Us...
Reading broadly is one of the best things a writer can do, aside from writing a lot, but reading only what you consider good writing is somewhat limiting. Books that have issues have a lot to teach...
Third person is not just a grammatical category, it is the whole angle of attack on the subject matter. Most particularly, the third person brings the protagonist into the frame (assuming, of cours...
You have understood correctly. From the Purdue Online Writing Lab: In MLA style, referring to the works of others in your text is done by using what is known as parenthetical citation. This met...
It sounds like you're describing an ensemble cast, where there are several key characters but no single main character. While the page I linked to talks about TV/movies, the same applies to writte...
We solved this by adding overview files in Markdown format into the source tree and making one small configuration change. In Doxyfile, we set GENERATE_TREEVIEW to yes. This enables the sidebar t...
While Lauren is correct about the grammatical difference, the actual impact on the reader is virtually nil. It isn't at this level that texts have impact on readers. The levels on which text chiefl...
