Posts by Lauren Ipsum
I've always considered the two poles as cooperative and competitive. Cooperators want to do things in a group, to get the opinions if not the consensus of others, and consider their own wants sec...
First of all, that semi-colon is incorrect. It should be a comma. Here's why. A semi-colon is used 1) to join two independent clauses (stand-alone sentences) which are related in content, or 2) to...
If your paragraph is a gray wall of text, break it up where it makes sense. You aren't required to break it only on dialogue. And trim your narration too: A figure under the box moved behind Pr...
I suggest you start with an Innocent (or an Outsider) — a Cabbagehead kind of character, someone who doesn't know anything about your world so the world has to be explained to and/or experienced by...
A screenplay is meant to be performed. A novel is meant to be read. (You can have an audio recording of a novel, but that's still someone reading it aloud, not a radio drama.) A screenplay has ...
Your problem is that your givens are incorrect. You don't need a colon, and you have the question mark in the wrong spot. Stripped of the confusing detail, your sentence reads Should I place ...
This depends on how the character sees himself (or if it's close third-person from someone else's POV, how that character sees him). If he is one sentinel of many — so it's a kind of descriptor, ...
As a female reader of SF/F who enjoys fantasy books with protagonists of whatever gender and plot, my advice is: Make it interesting. It doesn't matter if the basic plot structure is older than ...
Pay attention to your editor's/beta readers' reactions. Ask specifically: Were you satisfied with the story? Did it do what you think it set out to do? Were you suprised in a bad way about anyth...
1) Related to Secespitus's answer: Are you familiar with Rory's Story Cubes? they are dice with little icons on the sides rather than pips or numbers. They might be stick figures doing something, a...
Use a courtesy title which reflects your gender. Sign your submission as "Ms. Morgan Meredith." Subtle but unambiguous.
My complaint about Paolini was that he took a reasonably generic plot idea and... wrote it generically. His worldbuilding wasn't original, in any capacity. His characters were boring. His elves wer...
I have seen capital letters after colons if what comes after the colon is a full sentence: These rules have only one purpose: They are meant to humiliate. If you remove the subject and verb,...
Aside from the third item being correct, as others have noted, the punctuation around the dialogue tag reflects how it interacts with your two pieces of dialogue. An ellipsis indicates that the s...
I'm personally fond of the term amanuensis, and while I hardly ever get to use it, this sounds like the perfect legitimate need: A person employed to write or type what another dictates or to c...
You absolutely can publish your book with CreateSpace and NOOK at the same time. Each print version needs its own ISBN. I wrote to B&N about this exact issue, and this was their response, emp...
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...
oh mercy, "the" is invisible. Stop fretting so much. Write your story. Write it with repeated words, with TK placeholders everywhere, wif badly grammar, with too much emphasis, with lots of... elli...
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...
