How do I start?
After years of studying and working, I got a job that has a relatively large amount of free time with only short bursts of intense work. So I decided to go back to my hobby of writing, this time in a slightly more serious way. The problem is that I have so many questions and have no idea how to get started.
How do I describe places? For example, how can I describe a mini colosseum without using the words 'mini colosseum'? In addition, when I was young, I wrote a short story about people visiting a city that turned to stone (including trees, animals, and humans). How can I describe it without repeating the word 'stone' every few sentences? Are there tools for this?
How do I write info dump about the world without it sounding info dump? I mean, I understand that the first or second chapter in books/novels usually has a big info dump, but they don't write everything down. So how do one spread it out later in a story?
How can I avoid sounding like a robot or an AI? Years of studying exact sciences have given me a tendency to describe things dryly, as if I were reading from a list. How can I bring life and emotions into my writing?
Speaking about AI, how okay is it to use AI? I obviously don't mean whether it's okay for AI to write the story, but what about grammatical corrections or spelling errors I may have missed? And will it make my writing sound like AI?
And last but not least, where can I publish what I write to get constructive criticism? Are there specific sites? Specific format? Subreddit?