Posts by Lauren Ipsum
It's a diary. It can be arbitrary. It can be long or short, meandering or brisk, organized or all over the place. Do whatever serves your story and your character. The only guidance you might nee...
It sounds like what you want is a narrative structure similar to the recent Deadpool film, where the main character frequently breaks the fourth wall, has voiceover narration of ongoing events, fla...
Motive. Why did the person do it? Helpers and Hinderers. People who assist in or impede the investigation. They can range from the detective's partner to evil minions to muckety-mucks on either si...
I think what's being missed here is the idea that what makes something a "perfect" world is not the same for everyone. If you want an example of a utopia, try The Wizard of Oz and the subsequent 1...
The two I can think of off the top of my head are Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Dirk Gently, et al.) “Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl...
Doesn't bother me, considering the context, but then I'm known for having a potty mouth. :) As long as your book is pitched to an adult audience, you're fine.
I think this is an excellent idea if you have multiple invented terms which your readers might or might not remember. Books which depend heavily on constructed languages sometimes have a glossary i...
It sounds great. I think what's throwing you is that you're expecting to get the story from both protagonist and antagonist perspectives. Just focus on the hero. His or her story will have the grea...
Italic text is the most common format for telepathic communications. Savil spotted the soldiers filing into the pass and called up to her nephew. Get into position. They're here, she sent. A...
"they would have gone from children to teens to young adults" is called a Bildungsroman, or a coming of age story. It's a classic and perfectly serviceable plot journey. Your plot is based on each ...
Sherlock Holmes is famous for deducing answers to puzzles from observation. He was widely and deeply read, although he also deliberately forgot information which he felt wasn't important. He was a ...
Option 1 will probably be easiest. Create a Part or Section break and give it a name: Part II, Rivendell, The War. You indicate the passage of time with some kind of identifying text at the beginni...
If you're not telling a humorous story, and your protagonists come across something which looks like it should be funny but ends up being deadly, then you have a Killer Rabbit situation. Bear wit...
Depends. Do you want a happy ending, or a downer? Do you want to explore the idea that "winning" or "achieving the goal" can come at too high a price? Will your protagonist realize that it doesn...
The kinds of poetry: blank verse, free verse, structured (limericks/sonnets/haiku etc.) Rhyme and meter: when they matter, when they don't, when to violate, when Mr. Pritchard should be told to su...
It makes a huge difference that it's a comic. Seeing the visual cue of how the character is drawn will go 90% of the way towards dispelling any confusion, particularly if we only see child Lais and...
sure, why not? just don't do the crazy poetry thing and hold the period until the blank page after the About the Author blurb. More seriously, it's a purely aesthetic choice. Use it, leave it out...
This is much easier to accept if it's a first-person narrative, because the book is written in your character's voice. Speech/monologue/dialogue is much more forgiving than prose narration. Since t...
In addition to Mark's excellent advice, I would suggest: 1) Start slowly. In Game of Thrones, we start with just the Starks, and Martin adds on characters a few at a time and lets us live with the...
If your book is going to be published by a traditional publishing house, they'll format it however they like. If your book is going to be self-published, you can format it however you like. Go ahe...
There's no one right answer, but generally I'd say it's too much when it slows down your narrative and you don't want it to. For example: John looked through the two windows to see Sherlock s...
While it might not be "professional," there are about eleventy gazillion words of meta-analysis (shortened to just meta) of the BBC's Sherlock, easily accessible on Tumblr by looking for the approp...
Write your Silmarillion instead. Tolkien created his Elvish languages because he was a professor of linguistics. He created the world of LOTR to have someone to speak his languages. The Silmaril...
I think it's author preference. Either of these would be okay: “Where do you want these?” Jon’s publisher asked, bobbling a box with the word “books” scrawled across the side. “Where do yo...
If it's a report generated by your company, you may as well put the logo on it. The only reason not to is if it's literally an internal memo, like an email or something, which isn't really being "d...
