Posts by Lauren Ipsum
They're called speech bubbles and thought bubbles, respectively. Speech bubbles usually have clean edges and a kind of triangle pointing to the speaker's mouth; thought bubbles have puffy, cloud-li...
I agree with both your points: if your first sentence stood alone, I'd omit that. But in sequence with the other two, it sounds better to leave it in. There is an actual rule in English linguisti...
If your example is part of narration in a story, you have it written exactly right. There's no need for the acronym. "aka" the acronym originally came from law enforcement when describing someone...
This sounds closest to The Lord of the Rings, which is one enormous story split into three physical volumes. Each volume contains two parts which Tolkien labelled books, but Tolkien himself though...
If you have a full sentence as a parenthetical, you generally don't capitalize and punctuate it that way. So it normally appears: Dick and Jane watch Spot run (they know Spot likes to chase car...
1) Don't worry about it for this draft. Write your entire book. Get it down on paper. Then put in a drawer for a month. Then, when it's finished and you have a little distance, you can go back an...
The difference is that the first sentence doesn't have a tag. It's a line of dialogue followed by a complete sentence. The second sentence is dialogue followed by a dialogue tag. Your first set ...
I like the third version, without colons, because the visual break and the code formatting makes it clear that this is a new "clause," or thought, and the piece of code is not a grammatically corre...
Let's call them Monty the Moderate and Larry the Left-Winger for the sake of discussion... I think both your charaters are less left-wing and anti-war than you think they are. If Monty is willin...
Honestly, I have no problem with writing single letters or numbers in dialogue, particularly if they are acronyms. All the following look fine to me: "The variable x is greater than the variable ...
Gael Baudino sort of did this in her Water! trilogy. In the three books (O Greenest Branch, The Dove Looked In, Branch and Crown) she kept switching not merely narrator and POV, but the entire na...
I don't think your protagonist has to be ordinary to be relatable. While I haven't read the series, isn't the point of The Diary of a Wimpy Kid that the protagonist isn't the "healthy good guy h...
It doesn't matter if your book is 95% one person speaking. If your character is speaking aloud, and especially if you have a second person who interrupts even once a chapter, you must have punctuat...
Let me answer this in a more practical fashion: Let's say you've written a Hero's Journey, which has a standard pattern. And as you read over your work, you realize "this sounds a lot like Star Wa...
I think that's fine, actually, with a little tweaking. I'd move your "only the beginning" farther back in the paragraph, and clarify that thought a tiny bit: (bold is only for emphasis; you wouldn'...
Consequences. A strikes B. Even if B provoked A, A still gets arrested, processed, tried, convicted, and serves time. A gets grief from family and friends. A feels mixed anger, resentment, and gui...
Generally accepted structures, which are used for clarity: Each time the speaker changes, you start a new paragraph. The speaker may start and stop, and you can have narration and action tags, bu...
Your goal is to get your students to think about using standard skills in non-standard ways. Anyone can build a house; not everyone can build Fallingwater. Dig up classic engineering conundrums f...
Try plotting backwards. The writers of House, MD often worked this way. They figured out some esoteric disease or ailment (or perhaps something not so esoteric but easy to confuse with other probl...
I think in all three examples you're starting to impede comprehension, and change the meaning of the sentence. Example 1 sounds like the caller is cleaning the apartment of the narrator, because ...
had achieved their goal and become immortal because you're talking about past efforts. I think the second paragraph should be in subjunctive, which is what you put in your suggested c...
Your first comma isn't the problem. It's that you have an interrupter and didn't put the second comma in. Then, when the smoke had cleared, Jane rushed over to her. An interrupter is a few wo...
Only as much as bringing a past character forward can disguise him or her. If you have a brilliant, borderline sociopathic crime-solver who uses recreational pharmaceuticals to stave off boredom ...
If these questions are explicitly given to you as worded, I think you can make them into section headers, and organize your responses under them. The hypophora as you reference it describes situat...
You have a few options: Your story didn't fail. It just didn't find its audience on that site. Post it somewhere else. Your story didn't fail. It just didn't find its audience right now. Post it ...
