General Q&A about the craft of professional writing, editing, and publishing. Questions about all types of writing are welcome -- fiction, technical documentation, scholarly articles, poetry, scriptwriting, blogs, and more.
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I have a powerful antagonist perform important functions within my story. At the midpoint, he just leaves. Several Plot developments depend on this character. I tried replacing him with other char...
When someone says that writing is good or bad, better or worse, is it merely a way to talk about whether something is popular, or interesting to you? Or is there more to it than that? Compare the...
I want to say that the author uses Character A's "character development" to explore Character B. In other words, the author builds on the personality of A to exemplify the nature of B. What is an...
I'm writing a story which requires frequent switching between languages, sometimes in the same sentence. I thought about writing the foreign language in italics, but the problem is that I already ...
I wonder if someone can tell me whether there is a convention when laying out a lyric to show different parts (or even a chorus). In my novel, there are a number of poems and lyrics. They are set i...
I don't understand the example emboldened below. Can't you add just a superscript number in the text, then in the footnotes cite that "minor case"? Unquestionably one superscript cannot "detract fr...
I'm currently writing a story taking place in the recent past in which (aside from the main plot) my characters get to spend some time in a big city. They end up visiting the tourist joints but als...
In my post-apocalyptic story, the split of male and female main/supporting characters is 50/50. The girls and women in the story, Eris, Marina, and Ezrith, display very little emotion--Eris repr...
In the Bible, the apple is a symbol for knowledge, immortality, temptation, the fall of man and sin. The book itself gave the apple a symbolic meaning. How can you as an author give an object like ...
I'm coming up with an outline for a cyberpunk story. I want to establish (at some point) that the main character has marksmanship proficiency by starting my cyberpunk story with a VR sequence, in w...
I am a reader more than a writer, and fantasy is my favorite genre. I used to write short stories and poems. Some of them are published in magazines and get good reviews. In 2018 January, I read ...
Is it possible to introduce evil characters (be identified as evil) before the action (the crimes committed by the characters) takes place?
I have three variations of the same storyline and cannot decide which one I want to write: erotic story turning dark and dangerous A young adult man and woman fall in love. It is the woman's fir...
Okay, there is some preliminary information for you to be able to answer this question: There is a sword of great power, a McGuffin, and a destined one who wields it. The destined one has two compa...
Sometimes exposition is just necessary. Although there's plenty of youtube videos with examples in films of exposition done right, I'm struggling to find good examples of written exposition. I te...
I have in mind a character who is the protagonist's trusted ally throughout the story, but it is revealed at the end that he was the primary antagonist for most of it. This kind of thing has, of c...
I understand that if you’ve got two people speaking, you often don’t need speaker tags because it’s assumed that both people take it in turns unless otherwise specified. This keeps the conversation...
Is writing fantasy novel with no mages, witches, wizards or anything remotely magical a waste of time? Can it still be classified as fantasy?
In my story, the MC goes through a number of events with a common theme, each told in separate scenes. At the end of the story, he tells a friend about the things he experienced. Both the events an...
My main character is realistically flawed with a few good points. I'm very satisfied with where she is at. As I begin to connect the internal and external conflicts however, it seems that there is ...
So I made a name for a character and his name is quite fancy so I have no idea what I should do with him. I named him, ready? Sir Nathaniel Charles III. Without asking for specific suggestions on ...
"A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out t...
I find myself often being irritated at elements in situations that help characters succeed, elements which are also highly unlikely or even illogical. But often, if not more, I find myself angered ...
Arguments, discussions, disagreements In my script I have a lot of "arguments" – loose definition: long discussions where characters disagree about what to do. These arguments don't escalate to ...
The participants describe everything needed for the story to continue, within the conversation. The environment, the emotions, everything. The reader gets to "see" it all through their words. Has i...
The Hugo awards are prominent fan awards in the SF&F genre. In 2021, I noticed that all of the finalists in the Novella category are from a single publisher, Tor.com. Novellas have, I underst...
This seems to be a bit of a corner case. I have two articles, with the same first author, B. G. Cook. The first article has a second author, S. C. Cook. The other article has two other authors (G. ...
I am reviewing a computer science submission to an academic conference. The authors use "randvar" instead of "random variable" (as well as "logvar" instead of "logical variable"). I am wondering i...
What sites, libraries, or other organizations have strong, easy-to-browse collections of letters, diaries, and other primary sources that are great for authors doing research for historical fiction...
I know a lot of books do it (Harry Potter, LOTR, Wheel of Time). It's even part of the "Hero's Journey". However, my book starts with the "inciting incidient" i.e. my main charatcer begins her firs...
I have read many books where the character is in one place at a certain time and, without a scene break being utilised, they are all of a sudden in a different place at a different time, but it wo...
In academic writing, several articles on the topic of writing papers denounce the practice of "announcing" the topic. As an example, if a paper were to read... The goal of this study is to not...
So I am writing a book, the start of the book sounds interesting even to the my "board" of readers. After a while I had 586 words in total SO FAR,I am not sure if my writing is nonsense. This is my...
I want people to understand what I write, but I do not want to use conventions such as plot or dialogue to tell a story. Without a plot I have been criticized of not having written a story, but s...
Is it possible to build a new character and/or world in a science fiction under a tight word limit? What aspects should be covered and what avoided? Also are there some similar previous examples to...
How important are the author's mood and emotions while writing a story or describing a scene? For example, while writing an erotic scene, is it important for the author to feel the same way as the...
Over on the Judaism site, I summarized a narrative text in a block quotation. Because the narrative is well-known, I expected many people to skip the block quotation; therefore, I did not want it t...
I'm a professional writer, but I've never written a memoir. I've been asked to submit a proposal to ghostwrite a memoir. The person whose memoir I would write knows I've not written a memoir before...
Over the years I gained small audience and I love them. My last work quite disappoint them in regard of one character and I feel bad about it. I felt like character's struggle she went through woul...
So I'm writing a short story based in a WW2 American military base camp stationed in Germany. It's about A Jewish Soviet soldier that, with the help of an American soldier and a series of coinciden...
So, I have this little story I would like to tell. It's about a girl and how she's forced to take a journey with the man who has just killed her father. I'll skip the details. The point is I'm no...
I have a tendency to forget to describe character's appearance. But I always describe them, though often a little while after their introduction. So, how long after someone's introduction is "accep...
Something I talk about with friends when planning and sharing our projects & media we like is titles - and specifically my disdain for one-word titles. They seem to be more than dominant in mul...
I have a growing non-fiction blog about challenging existing dogmas in my culture, and it has been attracting a good amount of readers. However its growth is still not optimal, as they just read or...
I admire the writing style of many other writers and I try to emulate them, but most of the time it doesn't turn out how I want it to. Is this because it's not uniquely my own style, but rather for...
I struggle with forming full-fledged ideas. I'll come up with a snippet of an idea, have a hard time fleshing the idea out, and then lose interest before the idea becomes an actual story concept. ...
I am wondering if how we name a version of a spacecraft differs from how we name a version of a software. For software, I usually see things like "2.0.32.32" or something like that and sometimes th...
Problem I'm writing a play that includes a number of minor characters who only exist for a scene or two. They are defined by their personality traits, not by their professions, and their names are...
For example: I sensed as if he became sad from the way he spoke after telling him that I would go with her.
