Posts by Lauren Ipsum
Either underscores or asterisks around the words, I would think. All-caps run the risk of being printed in all-caps.
Let's say I'm creating a unique world for my book. New planet, maybe new species, complex society with complex rules, history, government, and so on. Some of these details are absolutely necessary ...
Have you tried Scrivener? I haven't used it for screenwriting, but it looks like it's got a great tool for it. It's not open source, but $45 is fairly cheap.
I think you're confusing motives and details. You mentioned people from 500 years ago being very different from us. What concerns do we share over the centuries? Survival basics: food, shelter,...
If you're going to set something in a familiar city, I want all the details to prove you know it. I want it to be like when we watch Elementary or Person of Interest and we're constantly pausing to...
You're letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. You know it's a critical scene, and you're scared to screw it up. That's reasonable. The problem is that you're so scared of screwing it u...
I'd lay out the existing journeys in some kind of grid (Excel might actually work for this) and see what commonalities there are, or if some kind of theme appears. Make a list of what defines a G...
Many of the original Grimm and Andersen fairytales had tragic elements in their endings. The Little Mermaid got legs, but every step felt like walking on broken glass, and she doesn't win the princ...
If you want examples of successful diplomacy, try CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series, which I think is up to 15 books so far. The main character, Bren, is a diplomat between humans and the non-human spe...
I'm of the same mind as SF. Is the protagonist the killer or the good guys? If it's a crime novel, tone down the blood spatter and have more in the precinct. Lengthen the scenes where the detecti...
I think italics would be perfect. It makes total sense that the protagonist is recalling what someone else said — it's sort of an in-line flashback. Otherwise, how are you going to indicate that it...
Change something else in the sentence. A fighter is someone who fights for the pleasure of spectators, against his or her own safety. A fighter is someone who fights for the pleas...
Yes, you can absolutely use quotes to indicate sarcasm (or irony). If the sarcasm is in dialogue, you can write it exactly as in Hobbes's example. If you want to have the additional stage business...
The simplest solution is for Stephen King to alter his byline somehow — to Steve King, or Stephen [X.] King (whatever his middle initial is), or Stefan King, or his childhood nickname Steverino Pol...
A "draft" is one complete pass-through of writing a piece (an article, blog post, short story, novella, novel, etc.). Your "first draft" is generally considered the first time you commit the enti...
At the end, after the story is finished, in a section called "Author's notes." You can list your thanks, your sources, and any other comments you want to make.
A and B meet. A and B fall in love. Optional: A and B enjoy snugglebunnies. Obstacle gets between A and B. A and/or B overcome obstacle. Omnia vincit amor. (since it was requested that I turn this...
This is a Your Mileage May Vary question; there is no one right answer. My suggestion would be to go through the draft once more, fix what you think needs fixing, and then find a beta reader and/or...
Different schools have different methods (for example, some insist that the last line of the introduction must be the thesis statement), but I learned that a "conclusion" is essentially reiterating...
My suggestion would be to find an agent. The agent will have the experience, knowledge, and connections which you don't, and may be able to steer you towards publishing houses which are more gener...
You need the comma because you are addressing the person. "Did you feel the earthquake last night?" is a complete sentence. Adding "Eri" is a kind of one-word clause. You need the comma to separate...
Present tense in some different formatting (I like italics) if those are Eri's thoughts presented as interior dialogue. Past tense if that's her thought in narration. As presented above, you have ...
Started a nuclear disaster, potential for otherworldly elements — I'd say he's a fanatic trying to bring about the end of the world so that aliens will swoop down and rescue him. No seriously. The...
I would see these as transitions, bits which help move the reader smoothly from one thought (spread over one or several paragraphs) to the next. I think presenting it that way will give your stude...
Nope, it's fine. The repetition and sentence structure give it a dreamy feel, which I think is exactly what you want for that moment. "The" is fairly invisible here. (P.S. You had "Eri kissed his ...
