Posts by Lauren Ipsum
Two methods I can think of: 1) The character says or thinks what he's understood. "So you want me to go to the hut in the forest and kill the wizard?" He listened as the elders discusse...
Sure, why not? Get it on paper, kick it around a bit, and then hand it off to an editor to see if it worked.
I think an author's personal stance can absolutely be a deal-breaker. I won't buy or read anything more from Orson Scott Card now that I know about his raging homophobia. It would be an endorsement...
"Write what you see in your head"? That first takes observational skills. What are you seeing? Are you seeing all of it? Are you also listening, smelling, tasting, feeling? Are you observing your (...
You found a time when you can write. Why on earth would you want to break that habit? Fix your grammatical errors in the morning. Get your ideas on paper when the Muse wants you.
To a certain extent it will depend on your audience, but I think the answer is not "worry about too much detail" but "worry about making it comprehensible to the lay person." If your story is dep...
If you want your story to sound authentic, you must learn and use the slang of the city(ies) in question. The New York Times had a fascinating dialect quiz a few years ago, and the author just pu...
Gerund phrases describe continuous or ongoing action, or action that happens at the same time as another action. Past-tense verbs generally describe a completed action, or a sequence of actions. ...
Your problem is not merely that you want "novels which are well-done." You want writing styles you feel safe reading because you would feel happy imitating them. You are asking someone else, someon...
As long as you don't have a contract specifying that your next N books must be with Copmany A, there's no reason you can't go with Company B. If you mean that you self-published and want to chang...
I've seen it written on the same line in defiance of the "new speaker, new paragraph" rule: "And is this your girlfriend?" Mom asked. "No, I'm not — " "Absolutely not — " we both protested i...
Capitalizing a pronoun gives it proper noun status or deity status. So writing It means either that the thing's name is literally It, like Stephen King's monster, or you're referring to a god the w...
This is purely a matter of style. It depends on where the writing is being published and what the content is. House style will usually dictate if you use periods/full stops at the end of bullet poi...
It could be both. "Coming of Age" describes how a young person puts aside childish wants and needs and accepts adult responsibilities and priorities. "Redemption" can happen at any age, and desc...
I think this is a great question, and I commend you on your self-awareness. If you're having trouble conceiving of a drive for your hero on your own, I suggest you go through some of your favorit...
It depends on the commenter. Is this a friend who is just being effusive, or someone who's offering constructive criticism (or praise) with an eye toward getting you published? Roughly speaking, it...
It sounds like you're seeing this problem in Hero's Journey stories, which have a pretty standard arc (Hero leaves Home, gains Mentors and Helpers, faces Challenge at Threshold, returns Home with K...
Write a bunch of short pieces with no particular plot to get used to writing him. Drabbles (100 words), double-drabbles (200), flash (1,000 to 2,000). Your stories should just be little windows i...
Whatever you decide the reason is for Numbers to take on others' personalities, you have to explain it to the reader in a way which makes sense. Your character could have Giovannini Mirror Syndr...
You're essentially talking about historical fiction. Susan Elia MacNeal writes the Maggie Hope mysteries, about a (fictional) woman who is raised in America but then goes to work for the British ...
If the main character is eventually the enemy in the book (because she's hurting people) and her death would be a good thing for the people around her, then the end of the story would be relief on ...
There is no one answer to this because everyone writes differently. Some people have to outline every beat in every scene; some are complete pantsers. Every book is different too; some stories need...
My feeling is that you should hint at it, so that it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina, but write your story and show it to some beta readers asking about that in particular. If you hint too stro...
Your font doesn't matter. Publishing industry standard is 250 words per page. From the Editorial Freelancers Association: The industry standard for a manuscript page, however, is a firm 250 wo...
Patricia Briggs did almost exactly this in her Mercy Thompson novel Frost Burned. The series overall (this is book 8) is told in the first person from Mercy's POV, but in two chapters Briggs shifts...
