Posts by Neil
There's no single standard about this. Whether you engage your readers is up to you, in some cases up to your editor at the publication in question (or perhaps their policies). Barring that kind o...
Is there a way to see a list of tags? When I want to answer questions, it'd be helpful if I can zero in on areas of interest.
I was recently editing a novel destined to be published primarily in e-book form, and made a list of pre-press instructions, to be followed when the final text is agreed upon. Some of these instruc...
In everyday writing, (say on the web, or an email) I'd use bullets where possible. I think they're more accessible and quicker to scan. Unless there were some reason to actually number things. The ...
This is a good question. Unfortunately, outside of the programming realm, there's no system for tracking changes at the character level that I'm aware of. (If there is one, I'd love to know about i...
A map can be a nice touch, or it can be a hindrance. Are there are particular scenes where a map would let you snip out several paragraphs of tedious explanation? If there are only one or two such ...
Art is obsession, and how well (or badly) it's dealt with seems to fascinate artists. Ernest Hemingway was the focus of Dan Simmons's The Crook Factory, a faux-historical novel set mostly in Cuba...
Your English writing skills could use a little smoothing out, if the question above is representative. However, that will improve in time with practice and the help of a good editor. If you have th...
On the test, I'm in the "slight" category on three out of the four axes, which includes the judging - perceiving one that you're concerned with. I tend to work with outlines, but if the story takes...
What's the most important thing that your readers need to know right way? What's the scene that will drag them into your story? The answers to those questions will tell you what should come first. ...
Great start! from this: Publishing and the like is a completely different field. ...are we going to assume that, with publishing off-topic (for now, I know that this is all pretty rough) sho...
Different versions of Word count words slightly differently. For files that are just text, this isn't generally a problem, it's things like text in graphics and footnotes that throw this off. There...
Whether to outline a story thoroughly or not at all is a question that's been asked for a long time. But some general information may help. If you're writing on your own, you can write however yo...
This isn't a comic strip, it's prose. Written this way, the slap seems cartoony. I'd much rather you describe the action than simply recite the sound it makes.
I don't know a single person who uses "of African descent" in everyday speech and the people I spend time with are pretty accepting, liberal-Democrat New Jersey sorts of people. The black people I ...
The best advice I can give you is to write a post that fits into the blog where you're going to publish it. Universe Factory seems to favor short posts, and I see a couple of multipart posts, so I'...
There's nothing wrong with writing a foreword to a book; ones written by the translator are sometimes called something like "Translator's Foreword" or "About this Translation", etc. Whether you s...
We can't tell you what should happen in your story. (In fact, questions asking what to write are off-topic here.) But perhaps you can ask yourself a few questions: If the scene is described grap...
Check the manuscript guidelines of where you're submitting. Anything else is a personal style preference. Some manuscript guidelines require straight quotes, some ask for curly quotes throughout....
In fiction, there's no rule for this, only differing styles and opinions. However, some editors seem to like using the Chicago Manual of Style's alternative rule for this. 9.3 An alternative r...
I recommend keeping quotation marks outside of the link, unless they're part of the title of the work. So you'd have this: I was reading the story "Flowers for Algernon" when the doorbell rang...
If this were a question about usage in a technical paper or an essay, I'd suggest referring to a style manual for guidance. However, outside of formatting and punctuation rules, I don't think there...
It's probably useful to think of a developmental editor as a project manager. While it's often associated with non-fiction, but it's not unheard of for novelists to hire a developmental editor. (I ...
There's no reason you can't do this, as long as it's the reader understands the information you're giving them. The clearer way to do something is nearly always preferred. Writers have formatted ...
The transition seems fairly smooth to me, probably because the action doesn't feel like action: It feels like the continuation of the musings in the earlier paragraphs. Maybe this is because we'r...
