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.
Filters (None)
I try to write on various Q&A sites, but now I am thinking about having my own blog website. The main thing is that I don't know exactly what my niche topics would be for blogs. I write on vari...
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 ...
I hate listening to silence while I write, so I usually end up listening to music, but then I lose my focus. I don't really like classical or lo-fi that much and they don't help me concentrate on ...
A short story I'm writing involves a stage in which the male protagonist talks to a stranger with the intent of asking them to do a favor for his friend. I want them to start having strong feelings...
In my plot, there are these 2 characters who were originally close to each other. However, they had an argument and broke up. In the end of the book, though, they get back together again. What I ne...
In every country, some names are particularly common: 'John' in the UK, 'Juan' in Spain, 'Ivan' in Russia. Those names are common almost to the point of being stereotypical (consider 'John Doe'). ...
I'm identifying my target audience based on the experiment explained in the Snowflake Method book. The narrator describes it as follows: “Now I want you to imagine that you’ve published your no...
I've read the answers to this question but they focus on getting ideas written down pretty much as they occur, that's not my issue, I have both digital and analog methods for doing so with me at al...
I am writing a story that involves time travel, and I have a chapter where a character from the future interacts with his present-day self. This chapter is written from the present-day self's POV. ...
In a story I'm working on, I'm adding a side character to travel with the two main characters because I realized I didn't have very much planned for actually showing who the main characters are and...
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...
I have some character stuff im trying to figure out for an AI antagonist. In a game development project that I am part of, there is an artificial intelligence that speaks to the player character t...
I constantly re-read my work before writing again. It helps me get in the proper mind set. But my biggest problem is that I make more changes on what's already there that I don't get further along ...
It would be nice to be a member of an online community of people who are knowledgeable about writing, willing to directly help eachother in a format such as Q&A (like here on SE), but also enga...
I began an assignment to write a short story for a Creative Writing submission to a publication and although it was accepted, I found that I struggled with the addition of dialogue to this first-pe...
I have an assignment that requires one academic journal source, and I found the records for a journal. The article in question is from a previously published book, but was published in the journal ...
In a comment to my post here, Cyn mentions wishing to avoid implying that the characters might all die, because she's writing for a mid-grade audience. Which made me wonder. I remember reading Th...
Not sure if this is a worldbuilding or writing question, but here it goes. In this setting, gods of humanity are beings of absolute order that exist in another plane of existence. They are consta...
I thought about spreading a story across a video game, comic book and novel, but I am not sure if doing this will alienate my readers, because I don't believe people want to spend a ton of money to...
I backed myself into a corner and have to create a [TV TROPES WARNING] MacGuffin for a story. How can I create a good MacGuffin? How to make it interesting for the reader ? I don't know where to ...
In several third person (usually limited) stories that I've read, there comes a time when one character shares some of their backstory to one or more other characters. This backstory is always (or...
I'm planning out a long series (more than five books as is). It's very optimistic, I know. But I'm just wondering: Would it be better to plan out my series as a trilogy, leaving room to expand if...
In my novel, the protagonist is depressed. In the story which is in my mind... The autumn leaves were falling as I was sitting alone and Gary Jules' "Mad World" was ringing in my iPod. The s...
According to Wikipedia, An epilogue is the final chapter at the end of a story that often serves to reveal the fates of the characters. Some epilogues may feature scenes only tangentially rela...
When writing fictional polytheisms, it's tempting to draw inspiration from the existing ones. In ancient religions (I'm mainly thinking of the Greek/Latin, Egyptian and Norse pantheons) there are ...
I have an ambiguous script situation, 2 co-protagonists begin gaslighting the MC. They each have ulterior motives which they don't say. The reader is intended to infer the lies through contradictor...
In the question What can I ask my readers to help me and how?, a skeptical answer is provided: my blog which is about challenging existing dogmas is just an average. There are many cranky blog of s...
My novel has approximately a dozen women in it, but they don’t tend to talk to each other. Most of them are separated geographically or philosophically and sitting down for a chat does not seem som...
Two other friends and I have been writing a fan fiction and we basically write a chapter each one after another every week. Now that we're nearing the end of the project, we've noticed that the wr...
My intention is to write a novel that falls into the "contemporary fiction" genre. Also, maybe, the "family drama" subgenre, if such a thing exists. I have a plot point that puts one of my characte...
When writing an error prompt, should we end the sentence with a exclamation mark or a dot? I am writing an application for iPhone and I have some error prompt in my application like "Your password...
Related questions: Should an author have one website or two? As an new author, how important is to have a personal website? Pros and Cons: A blog to get feedback A possible duplicate of, even i...
By definition, an epilogue is an additional chapter after the end of a book. Also, it literally means "additional word". I can imagine a need for an epilogue in a series of novels when there is a ...
For a submission (to a grant program, competition, agent, or publisher) that asks for sample chapters, which chapters do you choose? For example, a grant program for unfinished works I'm intereste...
Mark mentioned in his answer that plotholes aren't usually the end of the world, and that I shouldn't sacrifice too much of the story and the characters for the sake of logic. But there's a breaki...
This story includes a select group of individuals who contain superpowers and the main character is obviously one of those few. I don't want to throw it out there straight away and am trying to hin...
How do we write a movie script with a view towards establishing all of the visual symbolisms and how they should be interpreted? Often, movie scripts often only have dialogues and some very brief ...
I'm trying to write a numbered vertical list. The items are not complete sentences. Can you use a semicolon to connect two fragments that are one item? Receive guests; entertain guests Or, sho...
So, I have a character who starts off a complete ass to everyone. She hates the world, especially the protagonist. Then again, she had no parents to her memory, her people are enslaved and continuo...
My main character is up against the world, or, rather, the world and reality are up against her. A good story is in some ways defined by its villain. 1984 personifies its villain by adding a repr...
I have completed my novellas first draft which is 32k words long. For all the reasons, I was doing research as to whether self-publish or try my luck getting a publisher. I should tell you that ...
Essentially, I want to change: Managing a lot of people is a very difficult problem to: Lot of people, difficult problem I understand that when you shorten a title, it will become more vagu...
How does one write a story for a story-based videogame. Is it done in the form of a screenplay? Is it written as any normal prose? Is it written as documentation that goes with the other early desi...
There is a prince. (Or some other person of high rank.) And there is that prince's good friend, who, naturally, holds a somewhat lower rank. There are two ways I could show the close relationship ...
What should a character interview contain to be successful where the goals are: characters with strong voice who are established with a distinct 'personhood' (?) and are generally interesting to fo...
When I'm reading something, I immediately pick up on typos, grammatical errors, misuse of punctuation, and the like, as well as better ways to phrase things. I have no formal education in any sort ...
This might be a very trivial question but I don't know what to google to get an answer so asking anyways. In this dialogue; "I have such a miserable cold, your sarcastic remarks are hardly m...
I'm taking a writing course and the biggest challenge I'm facing is figuring out my audience — particularly for something I have written where I didn't have an audience in mind. Some topics or styl...
I have been looking for a word that rhymes with post with similar meaning to a school. But I go to thesaurus.com, sounding the words on my head for results under "school" and none rhyme. I then tr...
