Posts by Lauren Ipsum
This is a classic "cabbagehead character," who allows you to gradually unveil your worldbuilding as he leaves his isolation and goes out into the larger community. Nothing wrong with this at all....
My beloved Scrivener does the job beautifully. Paste your text in and then go under Project —> Text Statistics and it gives you the list you're looking for. Other people on this board have rec...
If you're "reproducing" a newspaper article in your book, write it exactly as you would an actual newspaper article. That makes it look real, and helps keep the suspension of disbelief for your rea...
If you're on a Mac, you can't use yWriter. :) Beyond that, from the screenshots it looks like yWriter only allows you to break into chapters, while Scrivener lets you have files in folders with no ...
Your description has to be about the setup — the 5% that isn't about the discovery. Or maybe the first 10%, after the initial discovery which gets your protagonist over the threshold of the adventu...
Get everything out in the first draft. Let him ramble on all you like. Put the first draft aside for a month or so. Go back and re-read, and be absolutely ruthless in your culling when re-reading ...
Chapter titles which aren't used as orientation sort of delineate the story: Potions Class, The Quidditch Match, A Long-Expected Party, The Tower of Cirith Ungol. They are a distillation, not even ...
There are plenty of SFF stories which deal with deities. There's an entire Forgotten Realms (D&D) series about gods being forced to take mortal avatars and walk the earth. The Belgariad pentolo...
"Romance" vs. "fantasy" are significantly different genres. You can absolutely have romance in a fantasy and fantasy in a romance, and you can absolutely write a romantic story in a fantasy setting...
Although, I totally understand that experienced ones... do not spend hours thinking up a new pun. How do you know that? Skills take time and practice. Maybe the good writers do spend hours ...
Proper names get capitalized. Generic names don't. Federal Bureau of Sparkly Vampires Department of Redundancy Department Imperial Dogwalkers Consortium The Sacred Order of Turnip Twaddlers The C...
Dialogue and monologue. Dialogue with her friends, one by one, until they leave. With a bartender or barista. On a chat room or a BBS. Monologue could be writing in a diary or a blog. Or potenti...
This related answer may help you, but I'll expand more here: I think it was J. Michael Straczynski, writer of Bablyon 5, who wrote that one could sum up "conflict" in three questions: What does ...
A simple way is to differentiate the narrative voice. Your narration should be clean, standard, grammatically correct prose, while these narrated thoughts can sound a bit choppier and more like spe...
Most trilogies or series follow chronological order, but there's no requirement. Do whatever serves your story. As long as it's clear to your reader what's happening when in relation to other event...
You're 95% of the way there; you have good instincts for what's readable. • For your first example, I'd try to put as much of the logistics of translation into narration as I could manage. After ...
You've almost got it — you need to add a few more quote marks. You have quote marks for dialogue. In American English that's a double quote ("). When something is quoted within dialogue, you nest...
Don't name him in his own thoughts. (I'm going to add names here for ease of discussion.) You have: vengeance was his, Garth of the Bill clan. He was the Foremost of the Forsworn But he's no...
men can identify and empathize with male as well as female protagonists, while women identify better with female protagonists (the claim being, they can certainly sympathize with male protagonis...
Show a little preview. Pick one thing which is small and easy to do: call Fire. So your character can light a cooking fire. But Fire can be used for a lot of things: a lamp, a furnace, a hot air b...
The narration. I'm thinking of not using the narration at all. Please don't do this. It is very, very hard to understand even when handled by a master. If this is your first book, it will be...
Well, "good" is subjective. You can have a loathsome, hissable, completely irredeemable villain who roasts puppies, shoots women with crossbows, and writes comics where Captain America is revealed ...
If you indent paragraphs, every paragraph gets indented, period. It doesn't matter if that paragraph is a single word of dialogue, a page-long rant, or four pages of stream-of-consciousness. So: ...
You might try Critique Circle, which is a free online critiquing community. (I haven't used it, but others here have.) If you have enough rep, you could ask in our Chat Room, the Overlook Hotel. ...
But I can't have the narrator simply lie to the reader Sure you can. That's called an unreliable narrator. Instead of having a generic narrator-to-reader chapter, your "The Story So Far" mate...
