Posts by Lauren Ipsum
You don't ever use apostrophes to form plurals, so that's right out. If the Roman numeral is part of the name, you would add an S: A total of 15 Saturn Vs were built, but only 13 were flown. If ...
Just because The Crunch happens doesn't mean that your protagonists all lose. Yes, the obvious antagonist is The Crunch. But is that all your heroes are fighting? Is that all they're striving for?...
My opinion is that once you've published, even on Kindle, it's done. Other than typos or a gross mistake like using the wrong character name by accident, you don't make changes. Your story is you...
You're missing item 4, or 3a: "Here's another Good Thing which will allow us to win!" In your swordfighting example: I can put in the same kind of work they do and become as good as they are! ...
Remember that terms like "third person limited" are not meant to be jails. They are descriptive. If it works for your story to have one (or a handful) of scenes outside your protagonists' viewpoi...
Accents are not decorations. Have a reason for using them beyond "I'm writing a fantasy and they look cool." (The same goes for apostrophes.) In addition to Daniel's very good answer: An accent ...
1) Where's the best place to hide a red fish? In a pond full of other red fish. Since you're writing in a fantasy genre, you have liberty to create an entire society. You're doing all your own wor...
You should only attempt the style of the 17th/18th centuries if you're writing some kind of pastiche or mimicry of a book written then — for example, a Sense and Sensibility and Dragons kind of thi...
It's also similar to Harry Potter and Divergent. Just as there was a rash of vampire/paranormal YA fiction after Twilight, there's currently a run on quasi-facist highly and arbitrarily segregated ...
Speaking as an American who has limited familiarity with any version, I suggest King James, because that's the one the general American public would hear the most in passing outside a church contex...
@lew answered this when addressing this question: Is this an example of an unreliable narrator? From this Wikipedia article The Naïf: a narrator whose perception is immature or limited through...
An unreliable narrator is one who knows the truth but doesn't reveal it to the reader. It sounds like your story has a narrator who does not, in fact, know the truth. Dr. Watson is sometimes seen ...
I don't know if I'd call that fourth-wall breaking as much as meta. Meta subtly acknowledges realities outside the text without explicitly addressing the reader. Tolkien's unnamed narrator using ...
One aspect which has turned out to be really important to me lately: Stick the landing. By this I mean that the ending of the book has to be satisfying — it has to work with the story as a whole. (...
Why would MLA violate standard typesetting rules? In American English, quoted material nested inside double quotes uses single quotes. (In British English it's the reverse: single quotes on the out...
Further to Mark Baker's excellent answer: If you want your writing to be more colorful, practice observing and recording colorful things. I don't necessary mean literal color, although that's not...
Is this a comedic story or a straightforward/dramatic one? If it's a comedic story, then just run with it, because everything is supposed to be exaggerated. Your characters may not even have to no...
Given that you haven't given us a lot of the givens... Not every romance is cliché. There are formulas, to be sure (c.f. Harlequin, Nicholas Sparks, Lifetime), but just because the tropes are hea...
All caps has come to mean shouting. You can have a voice which is harsh but not loud. So no, I wouldn't use all caps to mean something which is difficult to listen to. Describe it as "harsh" and le...
I for one, would love to read a follow up novel about a world ruled by orcs. So let me ask you this: Why not write that book instead? In fact, why not make the orcs the heroes of your story?...
I don't think there can be an answer for this. I don't think you can even have an answer for a given writer. Mercedes Lackey rewrote her first trilogy seventeen times, but now she churns out books ...
Create engaging characters and put them in situations with high stakes. The characters in your first chapter (or prologue) don't even have to be main characters. They don't even have to survive t...
I'll approach this from a different angle than the two great answers already here. Let's assume that yes, your story is too similar to an existing, fairly well-known property. How do you fix that? ...
In the BBC Sherlock fandom there are many lively discussions about how a lot of the story takes place in subtext: Person C is a "mirror" for Protagonist A, water symbolizes emotions, drinking tea m...
The extent to which you can do this varies depending on your audience, but generally, I wouldn't do it with a thoroughly unknown word. Tonitrus is an excellent example. Great word, means what you n...
