Posts by Lauren Ipsum
I'm just rewriting. :) A bit of trimming, a bit of adding: "You understand — it's nothing personal." It wasn't quite a question. When Robert Jansen didn't quite provide an answer, the man turned a...
I would say no. Not for a book. Regardless of how you are defining cliffhanger, I don't think you need an aaiiigh!! moment at the end of every single chapter. A chapter should end for a reason, bu...
If you feel like your plot elements show too much of the author's deus ex machina, then go back and figure out a way to make them more organic. Sometimes this may mean backing up several scenes, ...
...it looks rude? I have never heard of italics being called "rude." Your friend is full of it. Both your examples are perfect exactly as they are. The first one is a brief interior monologue, se...
Quit bean-counting. Finish the novel and then go back and worry about whether the first act works. Methods for structuring a story are guides, not laws. The novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel...
The paragraph starting "Recently" is where you go vegetarian. You set up your pitch in the first three paras, state your premise in the fourth, play a little devil's advocate in the fifth... and th...
The real question is: boring to the writer, boring to the reader, or boring to the other characters? If the character bores you as the writer, either change the character or excise him/her. That p...
I like this idea, actually. I'd straighten it up just a little: She was tired, like a bug crawling and skipping off and on the height of a wall together with something else that wasn’t exactly the...
I was starting to leave a comment on this excellent question when I realized I had come up with a second question which was equally intriguing. If you're writing a story where 95% of the communic...
I don't know if there's one solution. You may have to approach this from a few angles. First off, you do need to train your "typesetters," but in procedure as well as the program. (Someone who can...
If your issue is that you want to improve your writing when you are not writing about a personal crisis, you need to work on strengthening your imagination. You may be finding it easier to transc...
In our college days, my best friend used to write his reports as diplomatic communiqués from Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan. Fortunately, the teacher was also a Trekkie, and appreciated the humor. YMMV...
I think your distinction is perfect. That's exactly how I'd do it.
John Smithers and I read the same proverb. :) In The Rivan Codex, which is the encyclopedia/slush book for David and Leigh Eddings's Belgariad/Malloreon series, Eddings says (I'm paraphrasing from ...
Robusto makes a good point about knowing your audience. Beyond that, I think caps and exclamation points are used for emphasis and attention. Try to find other ways to accomplish those goals. Spaci...
The only thing I can see in this brief exchange to fix is: Line 2: Eh, adrenaline's unreliable. Might only give 'im a heart attack.
If they are abbreviations which are extremely common to the field, once per work is often enough to define them. If they are rare, invented for the piece, or really jargon, I would say once per sec...
I had an English professor once who advised me to write papers discussing a book "as if you were explaining it to a slightly stupider classmate who had also read the work in question." His advice i...
My answer is: steal a little. For example, your character needs to be a big spender, or a big gambler. If you have a friend who is impulsive in every capacity — overly generous with money, dashes...
I Am Not A Lawyer, but so far as I know, you can make your will as formal or casual as you like. What matters is that it's signed as yours. I don't know the legal requirements for having it dated o...
I just finished reading Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence which does almost exactly this, although over five books. The first book has three siblings as main characters, book 2 has one boy...
There's no one right answer. You have to write your story and let other people read it, and ask your readers if it feels too jarring. Maybe one POV per chapter is correct, or maybe your story requi...
A simple way is to differentiate the narrative voice. Your narration should be clean, standard, grammatically correct prose, while these narrated thoughts can sound a bit choppier and more like spe...
But I can't have the narrator simply lie to the reader Sure you can. That's called an unreliable narrator. Instead of having a generic narrator-to-reader chapter, your "The Story So Far" mate...
Dialogue and monologue. Dialogue with her friends, one by one, until they leave. With a bartender or barista. On a chat room or a BBS. Monologue could be writing in a diary or a blog. Or potenti...
