Posts by Lauren Ipsum
It's a little convenient, but you can get around that a few ways: 1) Hang a lampshade on it. That is, have the characters point out that they found that other MacGuffin at the treasury too, and wh...
Digits tend to be read faster and are less important. Spelling out numbers takes longer to read and are emphasized. So there are two things to consider: 1) How do people think of dates? Do you thi...
Set off your part with some kind of identifier: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. ...
It depends on the context. It can be casual, but it's the correct past tense of "to get." I got sick. I got a book for my birthday. I got there in time. Perfectly correct, if slightly ca...
We faced away from each other awkwardly, as if we were on the first date we never had. A hypothetical or conditional, not a metaphor. We faced away from each other awkwardly, portraying th...
Sure, why not? Get it on paper, kick it around a bit, and then hand it off to an editor to see if it worked.
I think an author's personal stance can absolutely be a deal-breaker. I won't buy or read anything more from Orson Scott Card now that I know about his raging homophobia. It would be an endorsement...
"Write what you see in your head"? That first takes observational skills. What are you seeing? Are you seeing all of it? Are you also listening, smelling, tasting, feeling? Are you observing your (...
You found a time when you can write. Why on earth would you want to break that habit? Fix your grammatical errors in the morning. Get your ideas on paper when the Muse wants you.
To a certain extent it will depend on your audience, but I think the answer is not "worry about too much detail" but "worry about making it comprehensible to the lay person." If your story is dep...
If you want your story to sound authentic, you must learn and use the slang of the city(ies) in question. The New York Times had a fascinating dialect quiz a few years ago, and the author just pu...
Gerund phrases describe continuous or ongoing action, or action that happens at the same time as another action. Past-tense verbs generally describe a completed action, or a sequence of actions. ...
Your problem is not merely that you want "novels which are well-done." You want writing styles you feel safe reading because you would feel happy imitating them. You are asking someone else, someon...
As long as you don't have a contract specifying that your next N books must be with Copmany A, there's no reason you can't go with Company B. If you mean that you self-published and want to chang...
I've seen it written on the same line in defiance of the "new speaker, new paragraph" rule: "And is this your girlfriend?" Mom asked. "No, I'm not — " "Absolutely not — " we both protested i...
Capitalizing a pronoun gives it proper noun status or deity status. So writing It means either that the thing's name is literally It, like Stephen King's monster, or you're referring to a god the w...
This is purely a matter of style. It depends on where the writing is being published and what the content is. House style will usually dictate if you use periods/full stops at the end of bullet poi...
Two methods I can think of: 1) The character says or thinks what he's understood. "So you want me to go to the hut in the forest and kill the wizard?" He listened as the elders discusse...
I think this is a great question, and I commend you on your self-awareness. If you're having trouble conceiving of a drive for your hero on your own, I suggest you go through some of your favorit...
It depends on the commenter. Is this a friend who is just being effusive, or someone who's offering constructive criticism (or praise) with an eye toward getting you published? Roughly speaking, it...
It sounds like you're seeing this problem in Hero's Journey stories, which have a pretty standard arc (Hero leaves Home, gains Mentors and Helpers, faces Challenge at Threshold, returns Home with K...
Write a bunch of short pieces with no particular plot to get used to writing him. Drabbles (100 words), double-drabbles (200), flash (1,000 to 2,000). Your stories should just be little windows i...
Whatever you decide the reason is for Numbers to take on others' personalities, you have to explain it to the reader in a way which makes sense. Your character could have Giovannini Mirror Syndr...
C is the clearest and easiest to read. The commas not only set off the interrupter to highlight it but give the reader a moment to pause and note the two items being discussed (least and most).
Don't worry about it in your first draft. Wait until your second, possibly your third. Your first draft is to get the story down on paper. Then you let it sit for a month and go back. The second dr...
