Posts by Lauren Ipsum
Put it in a drawer for a month or three. Pull it out, re-read it, mark up problems, and fix them. Then hand it off to an editor. Implement those edits. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary. At that ...
The basic block of conflict is "Person or Group A wants something, and Person or Group B wants to stop that." The intrigue and originality are all in the details. Create intriguing characters and g...
Avoid killing/raping/otherwise injuring the love interest (particularly a female love interest) just to create manpain in your anti-hero. Avoid making the love interest a plot device with no othe...
I think what you have in your example is fine. Quotes don't have to be strictly spoken dialog. You've indicated in narration twice that it's written on the sign. The reader will understand.
Example 1 puts us in the POV of the listener: I heard a cough. There's also the very tiny implication that it's not a person, but perhaps an animal, a monster, or maybe a mechanical sound which app...
I'm not sure about the rhyming part, but running a sentence onto the next line is called enjambment: Enjambment is the continuation of a sentence or clause over a line-break. If a poet allows a...
Other than Scrivener, already noted above, Excel or another spreadsheet program might be what you need here. In your first column you have your scene or other outline notation to identify where you...
Use whatever you think will work best for your story. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote all but two or three of the Sherlock Holmes stories in first person, from Watson's perspective, and you see the longev...
If you're not submitting this as part of any assignment or for publication in a standardized format, where there are rules about content and structure, I say go for it. Foreword, dedication, acknow...
@gravity_train has it correct in the comment above: a plot twist is unbelievable if it comes from absolutely nowhere. A plot development, twist, and/or character action is unbelievable if it ...
If you add commas to your first example, it will carry the weight of the parens without needing the larger pause and extra words. The quote marks and the generic wording of ThisCo make it clear you...
It's important to the character development that he is isolated for an extended period of time, antagonized by others and also made to feel powerless. If your character is stuck in one spot, a...
If George R.R. Martin can have something like 47 POV characters per book, including one who is only in the prologue and then gets killed by a crow dropping a statue of a lion eating a dragon on his...
There are plotters, and discovery writers. You sound like a plotter. There's nothing wrong with that. Take the time you need to outline your story so you feel comfortable with it, and additionally ...
Depending on the tone of your book, you can make that work for you by making subsequent text sarcastic, funny, meta, or the intro to a flashback. I had destroyed the earth. Okay, it was just a ...
I can think of a few options: Indent the story-within-a-story and treat dialogue normally (just double quotes). Put your Aesop section in italics, the story-within-a-story in book, and treat all ...
A few things to consider: If you're eager to write the "good stuff" where your characters are kissing, go ahead and write it out of sequence. Get it out of your system. Now you can go back and cr...
An infodump is when the author has to get a whole bunch of important information to the reader, but it's not integral to the plot at that moment. If Character 2 is ranting and finally getting some...
Your narrator compares herself to others. I met Sandy at the coffee shop. I towered over her by a full head. Cheap and simple: Your narrator looks at himself in a mirror. In the bathroom,...
Determine what sins he needs to be punished for, and set up mirrors. If it's murder: someone important to him should die. If it's toppling a government and he sets up a new one: his new governmen...
"Redouble" is almost always used in the idiom to redouble one's effort, meaning to increase the effort one is exerting. "Double again" has the very specific meaning of This was increased by 100% ...
If you're concerned that you're using too many, then after you're done your first draft, go back and search for any -ing words. Replace them at least half the time. So: I couldn’t help thinking...
Find an editor and ask that person to help you find a spot to split it. This absolutely can be done; David Eddings's Belgariad series was originally planned to be three books and his publisher had...
In advance of the recent blizzard which struck the East Coast of the U.S., many media outlets were trying to coin a catchy name to describe the event (mainly to hashtag it on social media, let’s be...
Have a new story to tell. If you haven't planned out your overall story as a series from the beginning (that is, you deliberately set it up to be three, five, seven, etc. books), and you're just w...
