Posts by Lauren Ipsum
1) Might one ask why the character destined to die is named... Cancer? I'm just calling him "Charlie" for the rest of this discussion. 2) Does Charlie have any agency, life, personality, or backgr...
Your story generally happens at some particular moment, whether you're telling it in the present tense or past tense. There's nothing wrong with describing actions which happened a precise amount o...
Whether you put the acronym or the name first depends on how everyone refers to it. If it's almost always an acronym, but you have to explain it on first reference, write it as: New drugs to tr...
1) You're trying to write your final polished draft on your first shot. It won't happen. Focus on one goal at a time. First determine your substance. Then organize it. Then write it. Never mind how...
Two examples spring to mind, neither exactly your situation: Christopher Tolkien did work on his father's oeuvre, but that's more curation than editing. He did cobble together The Children of Húri...
The three-act or five-act structure can still exist even if the elements are not shown in order. It's the effect on the audience which is changed. In the case of Memento, you see the end first, an...
Things that are good are things which you liked, and elements which achieved what the writer was going for. Funny bits: anything which makes you laugh (which is clearly supposed to) Nice turns of...
for the sake of extra detail There's your problem. Don't add extra detail which your POV character can't perceive. Find someplace else to put the pretty phrase or leave it in your slush file.
I have gone to my local bookstore to order a self-published book. I gave them the ISBN, they ordered it, it arrived a week later, I walked in and completed the transaction. The book is now on my sh...
1) Marketing a product is not "convincing someone to buy something they do not want" or "giving the people what they want." It is creating a need in the buyer which s/he either didn't have or didn'...
I wouldn't just use fire and ice. The classic Four Elements (earth, air, fire, water) have been used for mythological and magical structures for many stories. Look at the Avatar: The Last Airbender...
Yes, you can develop secondary characters, and should to the extent your narrative has room. While they are multi-volume arcs, David & Leigh Eddings's Belgariad and Malloreon series are good ...
If it's really short — no more than a few paragraphs — set it off with italics. It should quickly become apparent from context who the first-person-italics character is. If it's pages and pages, ...
Your story line should have an arc: a beginning (problem), middle (attempts to fix the problem), and end (resolution of the problem). If you have multiple story lines, each one has its own arc. Th...
After the last word of the story, before any aftermatter like a glossary, author's note, list of characters, timeline, or appendix. So yes, after the epilogue, because the epilogue is still part o...
Only put in what is necessary for the plot. You develop the character so that the actions s/he takes make sense for the plot. If the character reveals something about his/her past, there should be...
You don't ever use apostrophes to form plurals, so that's right out. If the Roman numeral is part of the name, you would add an S: A total of 15 Saturn Vs were built, but only 13 were flown. If ...
Just because The Crunch happens doesn't mean that your protagonists all lose. Yes, the obvious antagonist is The Crunch. But is that all your heroes are fighting? Is that all they're striving for?...
Can you? Of course; you just did. Your characters, I might point out, are not inaminate. They are alive. They have thought, opinion, and agency. They may be made of silicon, but they are not "inani...
The Carnegie Hall method: Practice, practice, practice. You were able to come up with the cooked noodles metaphor, right? So clearly your describing skills are not broken. You just have to work th...
A university assignment probably falls under "non-commercial individual use." You aren't making money off the content. Quote it and cite it, don't try to pass it off as your original work, and you...
The quality of any storyline or character is in the execution. Having one characteristic in common with many other stories does not, by definition, make it a cliché. That said, if you're worried ab...
My opinion is that once you've published, even on Kindle, it's done. Other than typos or a gross mistake like using the wrong character name by accident, you don't make changes. Your story is you...
Either italics or quotes are fine to introduce the term; you could even bold the phrase if you're introducing many specialized concepts throughout your work. I wouldn't capitalize it or otherwise f...
Mark Baker is exactly right. Your story needs to be about a person (who can be a human, alien, small animal, android, werewolf, sentient car, or Groot). I needed to develop my characters to gi...
