Posts by Lauren Ipsum
Both ages as separate interviews, since his answers will be different and you will have to handle his responses differently. In the second interview, he can even look back and say "Yeah, I remember...
There's no one right answer. You have to write your story and let other people read it, and ask your readers if it feels too jarring. Maybe one POV per chapter is correct, or maybe your story requi...
Almost all the variations you have are fine. A few notes: A little potato-like nose was planted on his face. The grammar here is correct. However, the combination of "potato" and "planted" wo...
Some style guides consider contractions to be informal, and therefore would not be used in certain contexts. Beyond that, there's no grammatical restraint, either on they are vs. they're or the r...
Tell more stories. If you've built a world, put sentient beings in it and put conflicts in front of them. Let the world unfold in front of your characters, and let the characters talk about the o...
While I wouldn't consider "gerunds" (or even adverbs) to be mistakes, if you're worried about your grammar, hire an editor to do a line-edit. Explain (if this is the case) that you're happy with th...
Sketch out both (or multiple) ideas as fully-fleshed plots from beginning to end. Get all your separate possibilities down on paper. Put everything aside for a week. Come back to them and re-read...
You're being given a prompt, so that will do half the work for you. I think it was J. Michael Straczynski, writer of Bablyon 5, who wrote that one could sum up "conflict" in three questions: Wh...
Gary Gygax's Gord the Rogue series was allegedly an entire RPG campaign turned into a set of novels (which explains the ridiculous deus ex machina ending). If role-playing helps you to flesh out ...
sure, why not? I think as long as there is some coherent structure behind the character so that you can establish that this person would behave in thus-and-such a way, and it's consistent and credi...
There is no One True Way. Every writer is different. Even the same writer may have two different approaches to two different books (or series). JK Rowling plotted out the entire seven-book Harry P...
It depends on context. Why has the character's name never been mentioned? Why does no one know it? What label, nickname, or epithet are you using to describe the character instead? I would mentio...
The answer to this and your other similar question is the same: Your Mileage May Vary. If you can get it to work, go for it. There's no rule about it one way or the other. In Susanna Clarke's Jon...
Company and brand names are not set off in italics, period. It's irrelevant whether the name is real or fictional. The kinds of names/titles which do take italics: Publications (newspapers, mag...
I just finished reading Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence which does almost exactly this, although over five books. The first book has three siblings as main characters, book 2 has one boy...
I think "selected literary pieces or passages" is your linchpin here. Let's take that college mainstay, the Norton Anthology (this one is American Literature). This is a book which contains quote...
Yes, you can ask for feedback at any and all of those stages. The feedback which is helpful at any stage is "This works and here's why" and "This doesn't work and here's why." The "here's why" is...
First of all, your protagonist almost must change, or there's not much point to your book. If s/he does not at some point stop running and pull him/herself together, your reader will feel like the ...
I'd say yes if you're careful about it and don't overdo it. Different formatting can be useful in quickly alerting the reader that the text is from an article or an email, particularly if it begins...
You don't capitalize the dialogue tag she said or she laughed if it's attached to your dialogue. You would only capitalize She laughed if it's a new thought. So: "Do you know where we are going...
So give your villain more to do. Raise the stakes. If the General overseeing the various troops and hunters doesn't feel scary enough, give him more motivation. Give him someone REALLY scary to re...
Because you are attaching your speaker tag to the dialogue being spoken. If you were using an action tag, or separating the speaker tag from the dialogue, then the quoted material stands alone and ...
It's a lot easier to think of the character if s/he has a name, but it isn't strictly required. In Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca, the first-person narrator is never named, and is only known as "the se...
This sounds like a blunt-instrument extreme variation of "Kill your darlings." The idea behind kill your darlings is that sometimes we as writers fall too much in love with our own voices. That p...
I think doing your own research and making your own observations is perfectly legitimate. You can also get a bunch of friends over and have everyone listen to the same video/audio recordings and ...
