Posts by Lauren Ipsum
This is a Your Mileage May Vary question. There's no way for us to say if it's boring wthout reading it. Write your book, polish it, hand it to a beta reader, and ask if your backstory is boring or...
There's a difference between using elements of real life to help you shape a character and creating a Mary Sue. Drawing on reality, and autobiography, is fine, as long your characters — all of them...
I think right now some publishers are looking for diversity, especially small presses. Li Ang Chang might get a little farther than Susan Brown, and probably quite a bit farther than Joe Brown. I...
It all depends on the contract. (Bear in mind that I'm not a lawyer. This is my amateur understanding of U.S. copyright law.) If the client was foolish enough to purchase the text from the writer...
Sorry, there is no magical app or button or program which will fix your grammar. If you want to learn how to write better, in any language, the only solution is to practice, have your mistakes corr...
My only objection to It Just Happens is when you overload the suspension of disbelief. You can draw on the power of the ancients for magic? great. You can draw on said power for flight, telekine...
It's a Your Mileage May Vary situation, but I think there are two good rules of thumb: 1) Explain only as much as you need for the story to make sense. This will vary depending on your audience, b...
Clothes Smell (cologne/perfume, the scents that may be in clothing or hair) Body language (swagger, creep, stroll, cringing, stride) Attitude (businesslike, flirtatious, bored, scared, tired) Voic...
It's just scene-setting. Your main character gets up in the morning and goes out onto her balcony to enjoy the morning while her caffeine is brewing, and she contemplates all the plants in her gard...
1) Use the ellispses and emphasis, and tighten up the spaces. This man, this...monster...has done something despicable. There's no typesetting reason to have spaces on both sides of those el...
I really like the -ar plural, and I think you should keep it regardless. You don't always have to obey the rules of English if your original word isn't. English is rife with loan words from other l...
Complete chance? Yes. That's a form of deus ex machina, where something outside the hero/ine's actions swoops in at the end to save the day. If something arbitrary outside the plot advances it with...
Beyond time and cleansing your brain-palate, which others have noted here, I found that being a little "off" helps me, oddly enough. A little sleepy (like foregoing my morning coffee), a little hyp...
I think it's a great exercise to strengthen your writing skills. You can focus on one thing to improve — descriptions, or characterization, or pacing, or sentence structure — and just focus on that...
I definitely noticed the alliterations. They stood out, and were frankly jarring. If you were writing poetry, or prose which is echoing poetry, I'd tell you to go for it, but if your point is to te...
I'd be fine with your backstory as a standalone novella which functions as a prequel to your main story. Harry Connolly did this with his Twenty Palaces series. There's a main trilogy, and then a ...
If you've worked out the tech, why haven't you worked out the scale? Isn't that part of "working out the tech"? Just coming up with the idea of "a rocket that goes to the moon" isn't sufficient. ...
When he is introduced in the story, and when he receives a new title, give the full title. If he's being introduced when he walks into an important event or a throne room, it's contextually approp...
The answer to this is "do your research." If you're writing about Ancient Egypt, you start by Googling "clothes in Ancient Egypt." If you're really serious, you find books about Ancient Egypt and ...
you could try Title by Relative with Aparente (I have also seen "as told to," which to me means the person in question sat for multiple interviews and the writer collated and wrote everything ...
I wouldn't object to a half-page of pronounciation key at the front as part of the front matter. A six-page listing of characters, main houses, a glossary, etc. would be too much, but "Here's a qui...
There are different types of critique/editing, and different benchmarks for each. There is content editing, which can be more easily called critique, which deals with the actual story. Then there ...
Well, someone wrote a book without using the letter E, so by default the wasn't used. (according to Wiki, it does slip in three times. Very hard to avoid. Plus technically it's on the cover.) Wheth...
I might italicize them the first time, in narration, to emphasize that they are neologisms, and then have a definition immediately afterwards. Once you've defined the term, though, you don't have t...
If your animals are anthropomorphized, you can come pretty close to describing human-level expressions, depending on the animal in question. If your animals are not sentient, you have to study the...
