Posts by Lauren Ipsum
There's no reason why it couldn't work, as long as you quickly make clear that it's internal dialogue. If it's a first-person narrative, the entire story is "internal dialogue," in a sense. The ma...
In the context you've provided, OFF Marie, left stewing now means "this is the last thing the camera sees before it moves off her to the next shot." These are framing directions to the camera pers...
The way you have it is fine. It's clear that each paragraph is a different speaker, even if the dialogue doesn't begin the paragraph. You may also want to browse other questions here under the dia...
Yes, if you have two POV narrators in the same section, you must at least put her POV in another paragraph. Think of it as similar to speech; if you'd put a new speaker on a new line or in a new pa...
If you can't boil down your novel into a logline (or "elevator pitch," which is how I learned it), then you may actually have a problem with your novel. You've provided the structure of your answe...
My original thought was "Of course a good headline can have a pronoun," but wow, a bit of research shows having any pronouns in headlines is actually quite rare. NY Times: Moving Your Show to Bro...
I would think yes, since "in order" is a bit superfluous, but there are always exceptions in context. You can probably take it out most of the time (like 85 to 90 percent).
Unlike @what, I often enjoy the extra material, particularly if you have it set up as a chapter interstitial or a page or two of introductory material before a chapter gets underway. It allows the ...
Books of the last, say, 75 years are set in what's called in medias res, in the middle of things. The story starts where the plot starts, more or less. But back in, for example, Victorian novels, ...
Hyphens indicate a compound adjective: a do-it-yourself project. The hyphens are to let the reader know that all the hyphenated words belong to one thought. If you're using capitals to denote a pr...
The reason you think it's obvious is that you assume that only a woman would be having a romantic dinner with a man. Your baseline assumption is that everyone is straight. There is absolutely nothi...
No, because the dash (which should properly be an M-dash, like this — ) is an interrupter. You can use it at the end of a broken-off phrase, or if a sentence is interrupted, but you need some kind ...
I think if she's a major secondary character, you should try a draft where you go big with the weirdness without trying to explain her or "civilize" her. Make her weird. Embrace her weirdness witho...
I would only use the gendered pronoun if you know the gender of the animal in question. Lions have manes; lionesses don't. A calico or tortiseshell housecat is 99% guaranteed to be female, while an...
(This is better now that it's been edited...) It may sound odd, but I think the main criterion is how the story treats death. If death is one possible threat among many (being captured, being tor...
You identify two problems in your question. One is "how can I effectively develop topics out of thin air without research, or spending hours before actually writing?" This is a "what to write abou...
1) I would only capitalize the name if the restaurant considers it the proper name of the dish. So Denny's (a diner-type restaurant chain) at one point served an item called Moons Over My Hammy (...
I'd call that development. It covers everything in Dale's excellent list and dmm's couch time.
Similar to Dale, I'd use square brackets and color the word magenta. The magenta is a crossover from my design job, where anything in magenta is placeholder text. Magenta in a writing context would...
The best advice I can give you is to find actual ESL speakers and listen to them. If you can find an ESL class in your area, talk to the teacher. Ask permission from teacher and students to audit a...
Word doesn't recognize the difference between tick marks and smart apostrophes in the Find/Replace dialog. Just type the apostrophe character in both fields. As long as the preferences in your docu...
Your particular issue is that this is a rhetorical question. A real question is "Where is she?" or "How do I defuse the bomb?" You can use italics, caps, and maybe bold, depending on what else yo...
Allow me to introduce you to Scrivener. Scrivener is a word processor which allows you to create unlimited documents within a single project, and see all your documents in a nice document tree in...
Beyond John Smithers's excellent answer... If you don't have the proverbial thorn for Androcles to remove from the lion's paw, you can choose something which is symbolic in general, so people imme...
I love Scrivener for this kind of thing. You can put each thought onto an individual page, and then drag them around as you see fit. It even has a virtual corkboard screen so you can see many indiv...
