Posts by Lauren Ipsum
I have the 2011 edition of the AP Stylebook, which gives the following as correct examples: He promised this: The company will make good all the losses. There were three considerations: ex...
Your problem is that you're trying to use one tool for two opposing tasks. You're using an outline as a guide for writing (what happens next). You want to use your outline to gauge the size of y...
I don't have a problem with them (they're called bookisms, I believe) if: You don't overdo it. It's tempting to make every dialogue tag something vivid or extra. Don't. D.W. Smith pointed out in ...
My feeling is that if your story is set in the real world with real-world technology and does not involve magic or sci-fi tech, you should do some research (Wikipedia does not qualify) to make sure...
This is fine as written, so long as later in the section you have Second and Third or Last and so forth. I'd make each numbered item a separate paragraph, regardless of length, so it's easier to fo...
You're suffering from impacted arborvision: you have so much pressure on you that you can no longer see the forest for the trees. Get an editor. Ask someone else to look at your work. Let a fresh ...
There is indeed such a term. Phil Farrand of The Nitpicker's Guide to Star Trek called this "being the cabbagehead." Certain information had to be revealed to the audience, but it was information...
You can break up long stretches of dialogue with: Stage business (describing the person moving around, handling things, getting up and walking, sighing, laughing, eating, etc.) Reaction shots fro...
Find a key word or phrase and then start searching through Bartleby's and Shakespeare to see if any good quotes come up. Even if they don't, just looking at poetry might shake something loose.
Nope, works fine. Starting from the POV of a minor character to establish the setting is no problem at all; in fact, that can be an interesting prologue, particularly if you're dealing with a myste...
If you're aware that your work sounds a lot like someone else's, start changing yours until it's not so close. If you have to keep justifying "But it's not Saw!" then you're too close. Change a met...
I think your first example is perfect, making sure that you drop out words from the speaker to indicate the passage of time as your foreground characters are talking "over" the speaker. It makes pe...
Way back in 10th grade, when we were learning how to do research papers on the back of a coal shovel, our teacher had us take all our notes on 3x5 cards. We had to submit them as part of the grade ...
I'd call it stream-of-consciousness prose. And try magazines which accept short stories.
There are a few ways to solve this: 1) Switch narrators. Everything is told by your main character until his/her death, at which point some other character finishes the story. 2) Your narrator ...
If you have so many unfamiliar or questionable terms that you think the reader will need both original and translation, by all means add a glossary. More information never hurts. As long as it's in...
In reverse order: As far as plagiarism, it depends on what you're doing with your take-off. Is it mean to be performed in public? Are you trying to get a recording contract? Does the music of you...
Introduce a cabbagehead character. "Cabbagehead" is a term from Phil Farrand, who wrote the Nitpicker's Guides to various Star Trek series. He points out that particularly in NextGen, it became ne...
If you want to write like a native speaker, you should also be listening. So listen to radio broadcasts, podcasts, and TV shows. (Movies can vary; because they are shorter, they can be narratively ...
If you want to have a series of books which tell an ongoing story, but you want readers to be able to drop in midway, you will of necessity need to recap something in the beginning. How you do it d...
Take notes when you're suffering for later use. No really. Get into the habit of carrying something to jot down your thoughts on (phone, tablet, moleskine notebook, marbled notebook, whatever) and...
five and a half years No hyphens. Hyphens are for adjective phrases: It was a five-and-a-half-year journey. You also don't use the hyphen with the fraction. 51⁄2 years
I would say it depends on how the item is discussed in the body of the book. If a Markov chain is something referred to as a single entity, then index it as a single item. If you discuss several ...
Not online. Try a writer's group, where it is absolutely and explicitly clear that you are discussing this in the service of a story, and where other folks are discussing things just as potential...
I would say Mercedes Lackey's Shadow of the Lion and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell would both qualify as "historical fantasy." The latter has relationships, but I wouldn't cal...
