Activity for _X_
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Comment | Post #39269 |
unrelated, but the delete function works like a charm (more) |
— | almost 5 years ago |
| Edit | Post #39269 | Initial revision | — | almost 5 years ago |
| Question | — |
password recovery I attempted a password recovery, but it does not seem to work. The error message was: `The server encountered a configuration or processing error and was unable to complete your request. Please try again, and if the problem persists contact the administrator.` `If you believe you encounter... (more) |
— | almost 5 years ago |
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"Dear Stack Exchange, I am very disappointed in you" - How to construct a strong opening line in a letter? 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 that a long-standing member and moderator of the Writing.SE community, among others, has been dismissed i... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Do we simplify descriptions when they sound weird? Case 1: The opening of the wallet is irrelevant to the story You have already established that the woman has a small wallet from where she pulls out small coins. You can skip all subsequent restatements of this fact. Any further repetition of the action can be reduced to > The old woman pulled ano... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How to realistically describe pain? Show the visible effects of the pain. Let the reader feel it. I think the issue is that you're being sidetracked into trying to describe the feeling of pain. Pain is a very subjective feeling. It is so subjective that in the medical profession they try to ascertain the degree of pain by either askin... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Don't look at what I did there This question is about hiding from the reader the fact that I am skipping some steps. Worse, perhaps, I don't want to show them, and I may have no clue or intention of figuring out how these steps should go: I simply want to go from scene A to scene B, jumping over how that could possibly happen. So... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Spicing up a moment of peace In the ever swinging tone of a novel, one may wish to show a moment of peace amidst all the chaos. In my novel it happens a few times, most notably when characters are travelling across vast natural landscapes, or when they gaze at the stars at night. Quite often, during a revision, I mark all these... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How should I handle amnesia-based plot threads? (interesting vs cliché) The challenge of the day is to rename your magical process as 'memory erasing' and the person affected as 'memory cleansed' or 'memoryless' (or variations thereof). No more worries about amnesia, especially if you don't want to provide any realism, nor portray it to any degree of accuracy. As a side... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: To what extent should we fear giving offense? Be free, and truthful If there is a truth, speak the truth. If you as an author decide what the truth is in your fictional world, then, again, speak it. You should only be worried about a lie: if it can be verified, you may be liable, if it is a lie to your artwork, your readers will notice and judg... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How could the disregard for both plot and dialogue tell the story? A knowledgeable Writing.SE user once said you could write fifty thousand times the word 'meow' and call it a novel. Such a piece of writing would hardly be considered an account of anything, even less so a 'story'. If we dial back from the extreme, you could consider some random sentences, like the ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Compelling story with the world as a villain The frame challenge of the day is whether the world is the villain, or is perceived to be the villain by the MC. Other answers have already covered the case in which the world being a villain is an objective fact. I will address the frame challenge in which the MC attributes such a nature to the wor... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Transitional sections TL;DR The magic is not in the place, but in the characters' reaction to it. The story is told from the POV of the characters. They may find your three main locations interesting, and the places in between a wasteland of boredom. It does not make the in-between places any less interesting in the cont... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: What kind of name should a fantasy author go by? The frame challenge of this question is whether you would like to be read by someone who considers your name to be an important factor in the decision on whether reading your book. If having the largest readership is important to you, then you may also want to consider whether the content of your bo... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How to write disorientation with sensory overload? Related writing.SE literature: - Effective techniques for describing pain - How to describe pain in first person? We can break down the problem into separate components. The style Increasing the pace of the sentences is a great idea to convey immediacy. Breaking paragraphs more frequently is... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How do we distinguish how a character pronounces a word and how it is spelled in a dialogue? Show it. Using a different spelling is akin to telling: you could similarly just make a recording and ship it with your story. It does not make much sense, right? You could instead show it. Write down the dialogue in proper English, but show what the words sound like, show the face that the charact... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Avoiding racist tropes in fantasy A world with races (or species) so dissimilar from one another, without a continuum between them, ought to be racist. Subverting the trope, which is a trope in itself, is going to just flip the racist viewpoint, without removing it. You can make short dark elves with long beards, and you simply switc... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: What's the point of writing that I know will never be used or read? For some, writing is a job, or a significant part of their job. They write to earn a living. They sometimes write more than needed because they need to put down ideas, streamline thoughts and just to practice before getting to the finished product. Basically, they have to. For the rest it is a mean ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Why do most authors shed their LitRPG elements as the stories go? Is it a genre convention? I am completely ignorant of LitRPG. It is entirely possible that some reader get pleasure from the insight into these numerical statistics alongside with the plot. The OP question suggests however that most author get tired of providing these numbers. More than a convention it sounds like a sign of m... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Shifting tenses in the middle of narration We use tenses to establish a temporal order between statements and from there derive chronology and causality between facts. If you mess that up, no one will be able to follow the stream of events in your writings. That does not mean that it is forbidden to switch tenses. In fact in a stream of cons... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Help, I cannot decide when to start the story As far as we know, in our Universe all stories could start from the Big Bang. Or from the primordial soup if we want to stick to living beings on planet Earth. Does it make sense to do so? Imagine having a conversation in which you want to relate about an interesting event that you witnessed. At whi... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Using quote as title - disadvantages No drawbacks, except for quoting trademarks, and for setting expectations. Quoting trademarked sentences may be bad > "I'm lovin' it." may have the drawback of a fast-food chain sending their lawyers knocking at your door. Quoting may just happen, make it obvious On the other hand, the numbe... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: A torrent of foreign terms Focus Summary: choose wisely the necessary "difficult" words that you need to set the tone, the style and the setting, and avoid all the others. The absolute basic is that any story can be told with a bare minimum of words. Many suggested reading books for language beginners are abridged versions o... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How to portray a character who has mood swings? Diagnosis is hard; mirror mood with style Even with the increased sensibility of our times towards these conditions, I would still have a hard time discerning a person with BPD from a random attention-seeking drama queen. Unless you clearly state that your character has a medical condition, or menti... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How do I show and not tell a backstory? The bare minimum is not the backstory The bare minimum that you need to show is not the backstory, but whether the MC is convinced about Matt's good character. For instance, Arthur Conan Doyle does that by having Sherlock Holmes explain to Watson why he believes the good nature of the person they j... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Scale: How to handle a personal story set in an epic war? If removing the frame does not affect the story, then remove it. If the story lacks, then harness the frame. Case I. There is a disconnect between frame and story The epic tale of wars is a frame to your story. In principle the frame set some basic constraints to your plot. In your case, durin... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Job description for my employment reference Q. Do I use active verbs or nouns in a job description? The key is brevity. You want your reader to remember the relevant information, without having to process loads of unnecessarily long grammatical constructs. If you think of it, these descriptions are often arranged as lists, instead of writing ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: A thesaurus that detects rhyming I just stumbled upon https://rhymebrain.com/en Given a word it returns a section that suggests rhymes for related words. They may not synonyms, but it is the only tool I have found so far. (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Suggestions on fine-nibbed fountain pens that retain moisture well, or trouble-shooting of mine, which don't After successfully using disposable fountain pens for nearly two years, I switch to a dip pen. When you consume a pen a week, the main reason was a question of costs and pollution. A dip pen has the advantage that the ink is in a separate container, which can be properly sealed, and shaken to life w... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: geographic description of coastal rock formation That formation is called an arch, and it connects what may soon become a stack) to the main coastline. The key points of both archs and stacks is that they form by erosion. In contrast, a peninsula is typically a larger landmass formed by accretion or alternative means other than erosion. Italy is a... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Describing weighing an object in hand Unless you are writing a police report or a scientific article, where telling the facts is of paramount importance, I fail to see the benefit or purpose of such a description. If the weighting of the object is the central point of the narration, then there is no need to tell it to the reader; in fac... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Averting Always Chaotic Evil I am going for a frame challenge. While scanning the question all that I remembered was a big bag of buzz-words, starting with degenerate, barbarians, nomadic, Indo-Iranians, viruses, and further fluff. It seems to me that you have overloaded your antagonists with all that you think could raise a se... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How to write references? Before you write a reference: 1. check whether their data has a specific licence that would require a specific type of reference (e.g. copying part of the licence for derivative work). 2. check whether they may have a section that clarifies how to cite their data; 3. consider writing an email to as... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Linux command line based Word Processors? NaNo editor Strengths: It handles text files. It runs natively in Linux, and it has a prettier interface compared to vim. It can also do spell checking after installing 'spell'. It has a GNU licence (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Should I describe a character deeply before killing it? You don't need to describe the character of the father before hand. You could do that, but that would be irrelevant. In fact the conflict is between the daughter and the killer. In fact, you have several possible conflicts between these two characters that involve the figure of the father: - the de... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Different header numbering formats in a document Freely quoting from [Office Support. The following text is entirely from the link provided. I do not think I have anything to add to it.] Microsoft Word does not support multiple heading-numbering schemes in a single document or master document. When you work with documents that contain both chapter... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Developing a dialogue that unexpectedly leads to strong feelings between two strangers The tropes In my opinion this is a variation of love at first sight, and of engaging conversation. The latter can be summarised by a climatic conversation ending with a love epiphany, and even a marriage proposal. The trope takes the OP's question to the extreme, but it is fitting nonetheless. The ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: what techniques or approaches can I use to explore distasteful concepts while also making them necessary? Q. How to portray the downfall of [SYSTEM]? A. Show it. There are basically two steps: - first some worldbuilding - second the writing A note on worldbuilding. I'll just say: before even showing it, and before thinking of what could possibly replace it, you need to clarify to yourself what is th... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How do I write a compelling villain-all-along twist? The actual answer depends largely on the genre. In some genres a villain is simply an active impediment between the hero and his goals, e.g. conservative father vs. daydreaming son. In other genres the rivalry assumes larger proportions, with the villain commanding armies of minions, and the hero hav... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How can I efficiently write down my personal problems for further auto-analysis? Q: Do we write down problems that we address using the scientific method? A: Yes. We dump all this information on static media all the time, both for our benefit and for the benefit of others. We do so not only because our brain is limited, but because sharing data, storing information and reproduci... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: When to ask for constructive criticism? Ask the Hungarian TL;DR 1. Unsurprisingly, this question has a mathematical solution based on the Hungarian algorithm. 2. I have not done the calculations, but I imagine that1 the typical answer is: 1: this is based on the guess that the time availability of beta-readers does not scale exponenti... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: What effect does compounding bring when used in the title of a song, poem, story? Amadeus's answer gives a very good insight in the general use of compounding. Strictly related to the use of compounding in titles, you may also want to consider rhythm. In your example, "everytime" produces a single beat, opposed to two beats. It thus flows faster and creates the expectation of a d... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Referring to different instances of the same character in time travel This is a frame challenge. I think your issue could also be that your characters do not have a distinct voice. A 15 years old sounds different from a 20 years old. I am not referring to the timbre of their voices, which should also be different. The vocabulary is different, the ability to articulate... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: What tense to use for events that are still happening? Still happening... in the past Past tense indicates something that was present, in the past. This also implies that it is not happening any longer, or that the situation has changed, or that we simply don't know what the present status is > John Doe was on the bus. John was a keen photographer. Th... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How do I present a future free of gender stereotypes without being jarring or overpowering the narrative? Treat it as if it were normal Where I live slavery is not considered normal. The notion that my neighbour had a slave in their house would probably end up on national news and cause public stir. On the other hand, the same people that would be appalled by such event have no issues with watching TV s... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Can we dialoguify sounds? Onomatopoeia consists in creating words whose sound is similar to the sound you want to reproduce. For instant, an explosion could be replaced by a single > Bang! or the barking of a dog could be written as > Woof! Note that quotes are not necessary. Putting these words in italic is sometimes a g... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How to pick a proper pen-name for online writing? As I mentioned in a comment, the chances that your name will be taken on future platforms, on which you have not yet registered, increase with your notoriety. As you mention, this often leads to the necessity of adding numbers after the cool username of yours. A simple workaround would be to have a ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How can my story take place on Earth without referring to our existing cities and countries? Don't mention it Show it Suspension of disbelief is a powerful drug. It clouds the mind and prevent the reader from realizing that Quimbonia is not a real country. It's true that it looks and feels like the United Kingdom. Its inhabitants even speak British English, and each carry an umbrella. Fact... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: What is the art of designing names? TL;DR No need to worry: when you write a good story, any name sounds great. Good names are as good as the story Good unique names are not easy. In particular, it is not easy to come up with a good fitting name before having the whole story laid out. On the other hand, most of names however sound g... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How do I tell the reader that my character is autistic in Fantasy? I am not on the autistic spectrum, and I confess that it is not obvious to me to what extent and in what manner you plan to characterize your character. On the other hand, I think that your problem could be common to other types of characterizations. To show that a character has certain features, fo... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |