Posts by Lauren Ipsum
It's completely fine. This technqiue is known as in medias res, "in the middle of things." If you've written it correctly, it shouldn't lessen the tension because we should be invested in the chara...
Personally I would do the the following: Write them all. Get all your first drafts done. Review them all. Get to a decent second or third draft on all three. Send your first book to an editor. Wh...
You are confused about what's being shown. "Show, don't tell" means "show us that the hero is confused by describing the look on his face and how he stutters and drops things" rather than saying in...
No, you can't randomly switch to the present tense like that. You are telling your story in past tense, even if you're talking about the future relative to us. News stories can switch to the pres...
You're letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. Let's be blunt: your initial efforts will suck. That's because every writer's initial efforts suck. Stephen King? Sucked. JK Rowling? Sucke...
Either one is okay. The second one is more emphatic, and I would only put it on a new line if there was a whole speech (that is, not for one sentence). But there's nothing wrong with the punctuatio...
If you want to write sensitively and authentically about personal trauma, you have pretty much two choices: Endure it yourself. I don't recommend choosing to undergo this. Talk to other people wh...
55K words is a novella; your teacher is wrong there. 80K to 85K is a good book length. If your story will require two books (or however many), finish them all before shopping the first one to an a...
That's an annoying construction to punctuate, I agree. You might try: Smith and Johnson's article (2013) investigated blah blah The article from Smith and Johnson (2013) investigated blah ...
If you don't have a non-native or non-fluent cabbagehead character (and they're awfully useful; I don't know why you're hobbling yourself like that), then another reasonable course of action is to ...
Either you're writing a prose piece or you're writing a screenplay. Don't do both. If you're doing some advanced stuff with formatting trying to represent different kinds of media (radio transcri...
That's what a contract does. You, and ideally your agent, negotiate a contract with a publisher. The contract specifies what rights you are allowing the publisher to have in exchange for distributi...
There's no One Correct Way. You can have a list of attributes as if you were creating a D&D character. You can jot down notes so you have guidance for the important parts of your story. You can...
I like @Stephen's idea, which I think you should adapt into a series of exercises. Sit in a park or at a café somewhere and people-watch. Try to write down what you see. You can't know what peopl...
If you are following the daily wordcount rules, NaNoWriMo is explicitly not about quality. It's about committing to getting stuff on paper so you can work with it. So many of us start a novel and ...
If writing long sentences is a habit, you have two options: 1) Break the habit. 2) Write Regency romances, where lengthy and convoluted sentences are preferred. More seriously, it doesn't matter...
The amount of realism in your book is set up by you as the writer. It's up to the individual reader to decide if this is the reader's particular cup of tea. Some fantasy books are so stiff with cl...
I would say you have to attribute the quotes, even if you don't have to cite them flat out. So your first mention would be something like: This scene was in fact shot in Seville, Spain rather ...
A rival, as opposed to a mere villain or antagonist, is someone who is competing with you for the thing, person, or goal you both want. The only place where Malfoy and Harry directly competed was i...
Since your story is in third-person, I think you're fine for that handful of scenes. Susan Elia MacNeal's Maggie Hope mysteries are set up like this: 95% of the scenes are from a specific character...
This kind of thing is always Your Mileage May Vary, of course, but I think if you're doing it in an epilogue (clearly labeled as such), you can probably get away with it. The main story is done, an...
As long as you clearly mark what the date is so that the reader knows your scenes are not in sync, you're okay in terms of clarity. But you should have a good narrative reason for doing so, and not...
Strictly speaking, you don't need an English degree to get writing jobs, nor are you guaranteed any kind of job in writing/editing/publishing if you have said degree. You get hired when you convinc...
If you have "a lot" of differences among the three media, then you have three different stories coming from the same kernel of an idea. Write them in whatever order you like — for pleasure, for mon...
The problem is not verb tenses. The problem is subject placement. You don't quite have a dangling participle, because there is no other person being discussed who could be shaking his or her head n...
