Posts by Lauren Ipsum
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...
Depends on what the powers are, and what the weaknesses are. Can your character fly but nobody else can? Or can he always parallel-park perfectly on the first shot? Does he have super strength or...
Sophistication and polish and complexity are not for the first draft. Period. Your first draft is meant to be the rough, crappy one. It's getting your ideas out. You are letting the perfect become...
Without having seen your piece, of course, I can only speculate, but I wonder if what you were doing was the opposite of predictability: You signaled you were going straight, or right, when your go...
Sorry, you may have to die a bit. Make a copy of your plot outline. (You have an outline, right? No? Then you'll have to create one after the fact. Read through your existing book and pick out the...
I use Excel. You do have to keep track of your own material — nothing will do it for you — but a basic spreadsheet with columns of Chapter, Scene, Location, Day of Week, Time of Day, and maybe Ch...
Someone who deserves to be smeared over a brick wall doesn't have reedeming features. That's not to say the villain is stupid, or one-dimensional, or his/her only motive is "I like to be eeeeeeevi...
Roughly speaking, acts divide the action into sections. At the end of each act is a turning point. Some disaster has befallen the protagonist(s), who must then choose whether to turn back or go for...
Translation is best done by humans. There is no software available to push a button and Make This Portuguese, and even if there is, word-for-word translation simply can't capture the nuance and mea...
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...
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...
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.
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'...
First of all, let's be clear: "aggressive and angry" is not "emotionless." He's either one or the other. Second, "a bad man redeemed by the love of a good woman" can fall very easily into cliché. ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Fix it now. If you realize you made a mistake, go back and fix it now. Not, I stress, because the last 20K would be "wasted," because no writing is wasted, but because it's clearly blocking you an...
I used to do the same thing when I was first starting out. My sense is that it's because you are excited and inspired by The Thing, and you want more of The Thing, so you make more of it by mimicki...
