Posts by Lauren Ipsum
If you want to unify the voices: Get a tough editor. Explain to him/her that you have two authors and you want to standardize their voices. You might pick a passage or a chapter which particularly...
The issue with learning a language is that you need to walk before you can run. You need the simple, repetitive exercises so you can learn the building blocks of the language. In high school Fren...
Let's say I'm writing a sci-fi novel. I want to use a word which another writer has coined, which has become well-recognized outside the original book, for the name of an alien species in my story....
I've seen this construction quite a bit, although only in the last five years or so. It's a transcription of a way of speaking, where the speaker is emphasizing something by using a verbal full sto...
Whether you put the acronym or the name first depends on how everyone refers to it. If it's almost always an acronym, but you have to explain it on first reference, write it as: New drugs to tr...
I never use ampersands in copy unless they're part of a proper company name (e.g., Johnson & Johnson). It just looks lazy to me. I would write it as "August 4–5," because the presentation is ta...
Any time you get two or more people in a group (or a family) with the same name, they are almost immediately given a nickname or some extra appellation so everyone knows who is being talked about. ...
If you have supporters following your blog, you might be able to argue that you have an audience who will buy your writing. However, to be meaningful to an agent and therefore a publisher, your au...
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I edit novels (among other works). I was having a discussion with someone (not an editor) who didn't understand my technique. What I do is read through the document, and the moment something occu...
I will cheerfully use "singular they" if that is a particular person's pronoun, but not as a lazy substitute for "he/she." Rewrite the sentence, either as plural or as second-person. 1) When us...
It's totally fine. It expresses a combination of query and astonishment. There was even an attempt to combine the marks into one, called an interrobang, but it never caught on. Using "?!" is neithe...
There are three rules for conversation: 1) Indicate through some mark of punctuation that someone is speaking aloud. This can be double quotes " , single quotes ' , dashes of varying lengths — ,...
1) This kind of formatting may be something which would have to be done manually by the end typesetter/layout person before publication. You would run everything in numerical sequence regardless of...
The protagonist(s) win/s, the antagonist(s) is/are defeated (even temporarily), and the reader can imagine the protagonists continuing on to other adventures, or with their lives, in some positive ...
You might want to break up the three scenes with something else, but generally speaking, yes, it's okay to focus on character development even if there isn't a ton of plot movement. Maybe add in a...
I have never heard of McKee's definition of "beat." I have only heard of and use the filmmaking definition. I have always viewed Event as part of your overall plot structure, and Beat as a granul...
If you move out of the child's POV, make it really obvious. Move that scene to its own chapter. Call it "Interlude" or something. Have the non-child POV scene be the only scene in the chapter. If...
Humans don't all look the same, dress the same, speak the same language. Why should $FANTASYRACE? So you have Legolas elves. You should also have Rhea Perlman elves. You should have Lupita Nyong'...
Yes, you're totally fine. If your tense shift happens between paragraphs — that is, the new tense starts a new paragraph — it should be clear what's happening. If this is a first-person narrative a...
In Game of Thrones there were two sets of stakes: the magical Night King, and the mundane power struggle for the Iron Throne. The characters reasonably decided they had to deal with the magical, mo...
I can think of a TV example where the timelines are not synchronous and it was a big part of the surprise at the end of S1. On Westworld, you have human-identical androids (called "hosts") who are...
You cannot randomly change POV in the middle of a paragraph just to get in that one critical snipe at your main character. You can have a scene break (usually two returns, to create white space) ...
I would be fine with either a comma or a semi-colon, although I think I'd prefer the semi-colon. Lists, particularly with sentence fragments, are pretty flexible in terms of content and punctuation...
Punctuation (and spelling and capitalization) in text messages is different from punctuation in other forms of written communication (emails, memos, standard prose). In particular, punctuation, o...
