Posts by Lauren Ipsum
If you're "reproducing" a newspaper article in your book, write it exactly as you would an actual newspaper article. That makes it look real, and helps keep the suspension of disbelief for your rea...
Doesn't bother me, considering the context, but then I'm known for having a potty mouth. :) As long as your book is pitched to an adult audience, you're fine.
I think this is an excellent idea if you have multiple invented terms which your readers might or might not remember. Books which depend heavily on constructed languages sometimes have a glossary i...
It sounds great. I think what's throwing you is that you're expecting to get the story from both protagonist and antagonist perspectives. Just focus on the hero. His or her story will have the grea...
Italic text is the most common format for telepathic communications. Savil spotted the soldiers filing into the pass and called up to her nephew. Get into position. They're here, she sent. A...
"they would have gone from children to teens to young adults" is called a Bildungsroman, or a coming of age story. It's a classic and perfectly serviceable plot journey. Your plot is based on each ...
Sherlock Holmes is famous for deducing answers to puzzles from observation. He was widely and deeply read, although he also deliberately forgot information which he felt wasn't important. He was a ...
Option 1 will probably be easiest. Create a Part or Section break and give it a name: Part II, Rivendell, The War. You indicate the passage of time with some kind of identifying text at the beginni...
If you're not telling a humorous story, and your protagonists come across something which looks like it should be funny but ends up being deadly, then you have a Killer Rabbit situation. Bear wit...
It's a diary. It can be arbitrary. It can be long or short, meandering or brisk, organized or all over the place. Do whatever serves your story and your character. The only guidance you might nee...
The kinds of poetry: blank verse, free verse, structured (limericks/sonnets/haiku etc.) Rhyme and meter: when they matter, when they don't, when to violate, when Mr. Pritchard should be told to su...
It makes a huge difference that it's a comic. Seeing the visual cue of how the character is drawn will go 90% of the way towards dispelling any confusion, particularly if we only see child Lais and...
My beloved Scrivener does the job beautifully. Paste your text in and then go under Project —> Text Statistics and it gives you the list you're looking for. Other people on this board have rec...
Write something amazing. Make sure an editor looks over it for mistakes. If it's really good, nobody will care if you're a second-grade dropout or have a Ph.D. in teaching underwater basket-weaving...
If you're on a Mac, you can't use yWriter. :) Beyond that, from the screenshots it looks like yWriter only allows you to break into chapters, while Scrivener lets you have files in folders with no ...
Your description has to be about the setup — the 5% that isn't about the discovery. Or maybe the first 10%, after the initial discovery which gets your protagonist over the threshold of the adventu...
Get everything out in the first draft. Let him ramble on all you like. Put the first draft aside for a month or so. Go back and re-read, and be absolutely ruthless in your culling when re-reading ...
I am not in academia, but I would actually be annoyed to see a shortened URL as a footnote. You aren't writing it by hand; as far as I know there aren't maximum printed page requirements; if it's b...
I think it's fine, because you as a company are creating an instruction manual which is going to be used by specific people. It's not literally a public Wikipedia. To make it as clear as possible,...
I think you're on the right track. The point of italics is to alert the reader that the words are not in the same language as the rest of the text. I like the logic that the English-spoken "si" wo...
how about something like "I agree with all the points you've made here. You covered this thoroughly and did an excellent job. I could not improve upon this."?
I write blog posts in the present tense even if I'm writing about something which happened in the past, because it's funnier to be "present" as the gag is unfolding. I prefer novels in the past te...
The plural of anecdote is not data... but speaking from my own experience, sci-fi and fantasy are just about all I read. So it doesn't matter how popular the Girl Who Kicked the Dragon Fire Tattoo ...
The term "card" is fungible. Your card can be a 36x48 poster or seventeen pages in Scrivener or an entire notebook of thoughts. It could be a character quiz, a playlist, a drawing, a list of favori...
If you have that many important points, make them a bulleted list instead of making them bold. They will stand out without being overwhelming. Blockquote is used to quote a big block of text, as o...
