Posts by Lauren Ipsum
I wouldn't just use fire and ice. The classic Four Elements (earth, air, fire, water) have been used for mythological and magical structures for many stories. Look at the Avatar: The Last Airbender...
Depends on what the powers are, and what the weaknesses are. Can your character fly but nobody else can? Or can he always parallel-park perfectly on the first shot? Does he have super strength or...
Sophistication and polish and complexity are not for the first draft. Period. Your first draft is meant to be the rough, crappy one. It's getting your ideas out. You are letting the perfect become...
Without having seen your piece, of course, I can only speculate, but I wonder if what you were doing was the opposite of predictability: You signaled you were going straight, or right, when your go...
Sorry, you may have to die a bit. Make a copy of your plot outline. (You have an outline, right? No? Then you'll have to create one after the fact. Read through your existing book and pick out the...
I use Excel. You do have to keep track of your own material — nothing will do it for you — but a basic spreadsheet with columns of Chapter, Scene, Location, Day of Week, Time of Day, and maybe Ch...
Someone who deserves to be smeared over a brick wall doesn't have reedeming features. That's not to say the villain is stupid, or one-dimensional, or his/her only motive is "I like to be eeeeeeevi...
Roughly speaking, acts divide the action into sections. At the end of each act is a turning point. Some disaster has befallen the protagonist(s), who must then choose whether to turn back or go for...
Translation is best done by humans. There is no software available to push a button and Make This Portuguese, and even if there is, word-for-word translation simply can't capture the nuance and mea...
1) Might one ask why the character destined to die is named... Cancer? I'm just calling him "Charlie" for the rest of this discussion. 2) Does Charlie have any agency, life, personality, or backgr...
1) You're trying to write your final polished draft on your first shot. It won't happen. Focus on one goal at a time. First determine your substance. Then organize it. Then write it. Never mind how...
for the sake of extra detail There's your problem. Don't add extra detail which your POV character can't perceive. Find someplace else to put the pretty phrase or leave it in your slush file.
1) Marketing a product is not "convincing someone to buy something they do not want" or "giving the people what they want." It is creating a need in the buyer which s/he either didn't have or didn'...
Am I allowed to beat the drum for Scrivener again? :) Scrivener is a tremendously flexible writing program which allows you to rearrange your items easily, by dragging around icons, by putting up...
I am in favor of rules and coherence. However, also remember that you do not have to show all your work. Just because you as the writer/creator know how magic/powers work doesn't mean you have to ...
I would use the case which is in the application, to make it easier for the reader to match apples to apples. You might even add quote marks and other formatting for additional clarity: Figure ...
If you're trying to capture the feel of drifting on a summer's day in a perfect green glade, then if anything you need to be even more stream-of-consciousness than you are now. Read up on Gerard Ma...
I'm just rewriting. You need more narration and action tags: She stood in front of his desk for a full minute before he noticed her. When he looked up at last, his only greeting was a raised eyebr...
Ten years of windup. Today was the pitch. I was going to throw Hollywood a curve ball like they'd never seen.
You could go for a small Mac laptop and try finding one with AppleCare. Apple does sell refurbished laptops with a warranty for less than list price.
I would use a (very) few invented vocabulary words to indicate specific items which are unique to your created race, but put them in context so that the reader can quickly divine the meaning, or ex...
I like a mix of dialog tags and action tags. You should definitely break up paragraphs of speech with stage business and action tags. Dean Wesley Smith had an advice piece for writers which I ran...
If you're easy distracted by shiny things (or Twitter, your RSS feed, Facebook page, chat window, weather updates, email, or desktop photo) then having a program which blocks them all out may help ...
The last line or lines should have some reason for being there. They can: be suspenseful ("What are you doing here?") be funny ("Tinkerty-tonk," I said, and I meant it to sting.) close a scene (S...
