Activity for Lauren Ipsum
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: How to show characters learning something in a non-boring way? If you as the writer find the process of X fascinating, you will be able to translate that to the page in a way which makes it fascinating for the reader. If you enjoy math, you talk about the satisfying click of numbers as they slide into place, and how there is always a right and a wrong, unlike t... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Normal structure for Dialogue paragraphs The problem is that the prose in the middle is stage business, and there are only so many times you can interrupt with stage business. I think you have to punctuate the non-dialogue bits as sentences, not interrupters. > > “Dawn once told me about a problem she once had with her step-mother." Wendy ... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: What are some strategies for surprising the reader? In addition to Dale's excellent answer, try ending a chapter or a scene break on a phrase or sentence which can be slightly misinterpreted. The example I'm thinking of is from Anne McCaffrey's Moreta. Briefly, people ride dragons, who have the ability to teleport in both time and space. When telepor... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Confusion on inconsistent verb tenses in a magazine article The tenses are changing because there are two sets of past events and two sets of present events. - In the first paragraph the action described occurred in the past: the anger was repressed, the youths flooded the streets, the Islamists surged. - The second paragraph says "Right now as you're sittin... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Is it possible for an author's first book to be popular? of course debuts can do well if they're good. Some of it will also depend on marketing and genre, but there's nothing stopping a first novel from being a smash. (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Jumping between points in time in narrative As long as you very clearly indicate the date at the beginning of each chapter, so the reader isn't lost, sure, go for it. (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Tactician's Viewpoint and Contradictory Characterization Let's call your characters Dave (the intuitive tactician) and Kate (the analytic) so we have some way to refer to them. Kate can be so analytical, so dependent on data, that she feels like she can't ever commit to a decision. But what if there's one more supply train coming? Did we think of every si... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Can a plagiarist sue one who plagiarized them? I am not a lawyer. This is based on my understanding of U.S. copyright laws. Any part of B's story which is unique to B is, I believe, the property of B. So if B is writing an X-Files fanfic about Mulder, Scully, and an original character who is a female agent for the Canadian Security Intelligence ... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Switching from past to present tense to increase narrative speed? No, you can only do that if you're making some sort of break or shift in narrative style. If the story switches to a dream, for instance, or if the characters enter a Fae realm or another universe where they perceive time differently, you might be able to get away with it, but in English prose, if yo... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: How can we have foreshadowing in a story that takes place in a universe where the future can't be known beforehand? I think you're confusing "foreshadowing" with "prophesizing." Foreshadow is derived literally from "before" + "shadow" — the shadow of an event falls before the event itself. The "shadow" means the reader can see something coming before it happens. (Imagine a very tall tree falling. The shadow of the... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Craft group exercises or chapters in critique groups? Get out of your own head. Write. Just write. Stop worrying about whether it's perfect. Stop worrying about which book to follow. You've got a list taller than the coffee table and they can contradict each other. Just write. Get something on paper. If you're really flailing around, pick your first b... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Referring to sign language in conversations Use guillemets « » for signed speech, as discussed in this question: How does one present spoken dialogue as a secondary language to signed speech? Then your reader will always know when someone is signing or speaking aloud, and you can use the tag "signed" as often as you'd use "said." (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Is it a bad writing practice to end a paragraph with question? When you have a question like that in narration, you are essentially narrating the protagonist's thoughts. If you put quotes around them, or italicized them, and made them present tense, they would be dialogue. As long as you keep that in mind (and don't overuse the technique, as Watercleave correct... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Is it considered faulty language to use Spivak pronouns in an essay? Ask your teacher. I had one who didn't mind, and the others suggested ways to write around the problem (variously, use the "universal he," use the "universal she," alternate he and she, recast the sentence as plural). Each teacher will have different preferences. It doesn't hurt to ask upfront. (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Writing dialogue for a non-English speaker in English? Your best bet is research. Find a "Little India" community, wander around, and listen. Sit at a corner coffeeshop for a few days. Walk through the retail area. Don't stalk people, but pay attention to who is speaking and what they're saying. You may get just a lot of Hindi, but if you're in an Engli... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Fiction Novels & Active vs. Passive Voice Go with your gut. Quit worrying about voice. Get it down on paper, walk away, come back and revise it, find a beta or pay an editor. Let your reader worry about the passive voice for the first draft. Tell the person to keep an eye out for it, and if your reader comes back with "yeah, this part sounde... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: What does "OFF" mean in a script? In the context you've provided, `OFF Marie, left stewing now` means "this is the last thing the camera sees before it moves off her to the next shot." These are framing directions to the camera person. Look at the parentheticals: > PAMELA And it’s not an apartment, it’s a house that you live in? `(... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: How should you format short speech by consecutive speakers? The way you have it is fine. It's clear that each paragraph is a different speaker, even if the dialogue doesn't begin the paragraph. You may also want to browse other questions here under the `dialogue` tag. (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Hyphen or en-dash Neither; it should be an em-dash or a colon. A hyphen is used to connect a compound (a must-read book, Linux-based) and an en-dash connects a range of numbers (1966–69). I prefer the colon if you must have a subtitle. If you use the em-dash, I prefer spaces around it, but that's up to the house style... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Is it OK to have two different POVs in a same paragraph (third-person omniscient narrator)? Yes, if you have two POV narrators in the same section, you must at least put her POV in another paragraph. Think of it as similar to speech; if you'd put a new speaker on a new line or in a new paragraph, you must do the same with POV. These are her thoughts. You have to differentiate them. (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Successful stories that don't follow the standard story template? That particular structure is called the "Hero's Journey," and yes, there are many stories which aren't. - 1984, Animal Farm, Death of a Salesman, Brokeback Mountain — look for stories with sad endings, because that often means the hero didn't succeed in overcoming the problem, and wasn't transformed... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: How to distill a plot into a logline? If you can't boil down your novel into a logline (or "elevator pitch," which is how I learned it), then you may actually have a problem with your novel. You've provided the structure of your answer in your own question. An elevator pitch must have: - the protagonist - the goal of the protagonist - ... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Can a good headline contain a pronoun? My original thought was "Of course a good headline can have a pronoun," but wow, a bit of research shows having any pronouns in headlines is actually quite rare. - NY Times: Moving Your Show to Broadway? Not So Fast - WSJ: Hedge Funds Extend Their Slide - Newsweek: Her Biggest Race (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: "In order to" vs "To" I would think yes, since "in order" is a bit superfluous, but there are always exceptions in context. You can probably take it out most of the time (like 85 to 90 percent). (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: What can I do to make my writing less choppy? In addition to SF's excellent advice for the nuts and bolts of writing, if you're having difficulty coming up with a skeleton to hang your story on: 1) For a tried-and-true classic, try the Hero's Journey. (Star Wars is the perfect contemporary example.) Something happens, person goes on quest to fi... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: How does the placement of transition sentences affects the meaning/tone of a piece? Your sentence implies that action took place which the reader is not seeing (the "other means"). Wherever that sentence is, that's where/when you're placing this off-screen action. However, because the action of finding the letter physically happens in the next paragraph (that is, it's not off-scree... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: How to introduce a world that's alien to the reader Unlike @what, I often enjoy the extra material, particularly if you have it set up as a chapter interstitial or a page or two of introductory material before a chapter gets underway. It allows the reader to get another view of the world which could not be presented through the eyes of the characters ... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: If not in the prologue/intro, where would a hook be? Books of the last, say, 75 years are set in what's called in medias res, in the middle of things. The story starts where the plot starts, more or less. But back in, for example, Victorian novels, it was much more common to give the entire life story of the protagonist. The really exciting part of Ja... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Whether to describe personality of a character or let the readers deduce it based on the actions Well, if you don't have time or space in your story to show some aspect of a character's personality, why bother with it? Does it matter if your character refuses to shop at Walmart because of their abusive business practices if the story is about how he hates strawberries? If the characteristic is ... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Capitalize and/or hyphenate "the Start Your Own Business project"? Hyphens indicate a compound adjective: a do-it-yourself project. The hyphens are to let the reader know that all the hyphenated words belong to one thought. If you're using capitals to denote a proper name, the hyphens are unnecessary. The caps make it a unit. (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Should I make the gender of the narrator more obvious? The reason you think it's obvious is that you assume that only a woman would be having a romantic dinner with a man. Your baseline assumption is that everyone is straight. There is absolutely nothing in the text which precludes the narrator from being a gay or bi man having a romantic dinner with ano... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Is it acceptable to place a dash after a question mark? No, because the dash (which should properly be an M-dash, like this — ) is an interrupter. You can use it at the end of a broken-off phrase, or if a sentence is interrupted, but you need some kind of narration in between. examples: > "Why don't you go and ask him to help you? He's a really nice guy... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Should I highlight or downplay a character's quirk to make her seem more odd? I think if she's a major secondary character, you should try a draft where you go big with the weirdness without trying to explain her or "civilize" her. Make her weird. Embrace her weirdness without apology. She should embrace her weirdness without apology. And just as important, keep her mysterious... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: What are the pros and cons of starting a novel with internal dialogue? There's no reason why it couldn't work, as long as you quickly make clear that it's internal dialogue. If it's a first-person narrative, the entire story is "internal dialogue," in a sense. The main benefit is to give the reader immediate access to the character's inner life, which may help us ident... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Should the word "The" be included in a label when labelling a character? If you're tipping so far into melodrama that you've called your villain The Skull, then embrace it and capitalize "The." You can even make a bit of gallows humor out of it and have the protagonists joke about whether Jack The Ripper or Winnie The Pooh were named for him, whether he stole the idea fro... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: What are the Criteria that Distinguish a Thriller from Horror? (This is better now that it's been edited...) It may sound odd, but I think the main criterion is how the story treats death. If death is one possible threat among many (being captured, being tortured, the macguffin falling to the enemy, blackmail, heartbreak, public exposure, humiliation, politica... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: How to invoke my creative side without investing too much time? You identify two problems in your question. One is "how can I effectively develop topics out of thin air without research, or spending hours before actually writing?" This is a "what to write about" question, which is not on-topic for Writers. (Plus, there's no such thing as "developing topics witho... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Capitals for menu items in narrative 1) I would only capitalize the name if the restaurant considers it the proper name of the dish. So Denny's (a diner-type restaurant chain) at one point served an item called Moons Over My Hammy (hush, it was tasty), which would take capitals. So would their Grand Slam breakfast. But if you were gett... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: How do you call the non-writing parts of creating a text? I'd call that development. It covers everything in Dale's excellent list and dmm's couch time. (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: How should I write "shush" in a narrative? It's a transliteration of a sound, so write what you hear. If it's one long sound you write > Shhhhhhhh! (however many Hs amuse you) If it's a short one, you write > Shhh! with three Hs. One or two look like a typo (Sh! and Shh!). Four and it becomes the long version. Sometimes I actually say t... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: Indicating a word choice you're unsure of Similar to Dale, I'd use square brackets and color the word magenta. The magenta is a crossover from my design job, where anything in magenta is placeholder text. Magenta in a writing context would immediately signal to me "This item needs to be changed or replaced in some fashion." (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: Quotes or no, for Hiccup If you really feel the need to have whatever noise she makes expressed as dialogue, I would write it as "Hic!" However, I personally would either write it as Hic! to indicate it's more of a sound than speech, or just relate it narratively: > Jane hiccuped loudly, startling even herself. She tried n... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: How do I make an ESL character sound realistic? The best advice I can give you is to find actual ESL speakers and listen to them. If you can find an ESL class in your area, talk to the teacher. Ask permission from teacher and students to audit and/or record the class, so you can hear what word choices are being made. (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: How do I search for tick marks not smart quotes in Word? Word doesn't recognize the difference between tick marks and smart apostrophes in the Find/Replace dialog. Just type the apostrophe character in both fields. As long as the preferences in your document are set to "smarten quotes," it will replace them all with smart apostrophes. (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: Shouting in a question Your particular issue is that this is a rhetorical question. A real question is "Where is she?" or "How do I defuse the bomb?" You can use italics, caps, and maybe bold, depending on what else you've used that formatting for. The ?! construction connotes a particular emotion, so I wouldn't throw it ... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: What is a good tool for organizing story notes? Allow me to introduce you to Scrivener. Scrivener is a word processor which allows you to create unlimited documents within a single project, and see all your documents in a nice document tree in a side pane. You can create folders and subfolders, drag items around from here to there, link documents... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: How to write to accommodate subsequent automatic translation You can't guarantee the reader will make sense of your translated text without a layer of human intervention. If anything, you should have two: one who is an expert in the field, to make sure content wasn't lost in translation, and one to read for native-language coherence. Translating text is not ... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: Story resolution issue - A symbolic gift for two new friends Beyond John Smithers's excellent answer... If you don't have the proverbial thorn for Androcles to remove from the lion's paw, you can choose something which is symbolic in general, so people immediately understand what it means. For example, if A presents B with a diamond ring, and B wears it on t... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: Difference between an 'Abstract' and an 'Introduction' in a feature article? An abstract is a quick summary or overview of the entire piece. It's used for search results (manual or computerized) — basically, the reader is saying, "Is this the piece I need as a source for X task?" The introduction can vary in information and tone. It can be the classic "Tell 'em what you're g... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: Outlining Structures for Romance Novels A and B meet. A and B fall in love. Optional: A and B enjoy snugglebunnies. Obstacle gets between A and B. A and/or B overcome obstacle. Omnia vincit amor. (since it was requested that I turn this into an answer) (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |