Posts by Lauren Ipsum
"What the protagonist doesn't know" is an obstacle. Each obstacle should be overcome in order to advance the plot. You may have to plot out your entire story and work backwards, seeing where each ...
You've almost got it — you need to add a few more quote marks. You have quote marks for dialogue. In American English that's a double quote ("). When something is quoted within dialogue, you nest...
Don't name him in his own thoughts. (I'm going to add names here for ease of discussion.) You have: vengeance was his, Garth of the Bill clan. He was the Foremost of the Forsworn But he's no...
men can identify and empathize with male as well as female protagonists, while women identify better with female protagonists (the claim being, they can certainly sympathize with male protagonis...
Show a little preview. Pick one thing which is small and easy to do: call Fire. So your character can light a cooking fire. But Fire can be used for a lot of things: a lamp, a furnace, a hot air b...
The narration. I'm thinking of not using the narration at all. Please don't do this. It is very, very hard to understand even when handled by a master. If this is your first book, it will be...
Well, "good" is subjective. You can have a loathsome, hissable, completely irredeemable villain who roasts puppies, shoots women with crossbows, and writes comics where Captain America is revealed ...
If you indent paragraphs, every paragraph gets indented, period. It doesn't matter if that paragraph is a single word of dialogue, a page-long rant, or four pages of stream-of-consciousness. So: ...
You might try Critique Circle, which is a free online critiquing community. (I haven't used it, but others here have.) If you have enough rep, you could ask in our Chat Room, the Overlook Hotel. ...
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...
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...
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...
Skip the peaceful period. If there's no conflict, there's nothing to write about. Go to "Part II" of your book. Open with the characters having a party to celebrate two decades of peace. In the mi...
Sure, why not? I think thanks should be in front and information should be at the back. Gratitude should be expressed early on, and homework should only be offered if the reader is still intereste...
1) A similar but not exact iteration of this is the Water! trilogy by Gael Baudino. It's not well-known and I found the experimental format exhausting. Still, Your Mileage May Vary. In the three ...
There's no difference — As, Bs, Cs, Ds, Fs. No italic, no bold, no apostrophe.
I call this a "grains of rice" problem. It's from a question over on Graphic Design SE, How do I draw rice grains in Photoshop?, but the idea is the same. If you want to draw grains of rice, you ha...
Re compatibility: Scrivener allows you to export in many formats; the company makes a point of not holding you hostage to proprietary software. One of my favorite features of Scrivener is the orga...
Two suggestions: 1) The reader knows that the killer is after Pete the Protagonist, right? So the killer is stalking Pete, in increasingly tense scenarios. Each time the killer gets closer but doe...
Overbearing pride. He's done a lot. He's seen a lot. He has a lot of experience. He's very accomplished, and he thinks anyone would benefit from learning from him. The "nostalgia" and "being over...
Get a video recorder and a few friends. Explain to your friends what the scene is about, and what you want to have happen. (Eliot and Alec walk into a bar and order a drink. They start talking abo...
While this isn't Graphic Design SE, my first impulse is to say "Change the COLOR SCHEME!" White text on black is seriously painful to read. Make it black text, larger, on a white or light-colored b...
Your writing career will only end if you stop writing. Period. So don't stop writing. You may not have as much time as you want, or as much as you think you need. But don't stop. Write at night, w...
Look up "encyclopedia fairies" on Amazon and peruse some of the available books. Pick any being and start varying it. Cross a few. Add an unexpected characteristic. (Within reason. I think even Tol...
Can the game do math? I might suggest "X needs n more MP to do that." "You must have n MP for that move." "Dammit, Scotty, I need more MP!" [yeah, I know, Paraborg's lawyers will come after you]
