Posts by Lauren Ipsum
Watch Thor: Ragnarok and pay attention to Jeff Goldbum's Grandmaster. I think he's the kind of archetype you're looking for. You want someone who is not actively malicious, but so self-involved as ...
(A) In a humourous short story about Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, Bertie is talking about a situation involving two strangers and Jeeves suggests referring to them as A & B. When another stran...
I think this is dependent on the convention in the country or location where you are publishing. In the U.S., it's double quotes, but in Britain, it's often single quotes. I believe France and Ital...
If your givens aren't working, change your givens. If Vampirella McExplosia is dominating every scene she's in, then she's too big for this story. Save this draft (so you aren't putting a stake in...
Both are useful. Someone who is genre-savvy will already know the rhythms and tropes of the genre, and can advise you about extra things to add, or say "This theme has fallen out of favor in the l...
Don't write it in. What readers do in their own fan responses is on them, not on you, and you can't prevent people from shipping anyone they like. But if you don't want canonical romance, just......
You might find Scrivener to be useful. Scrivener is a writing program which allows you a lot of control: organization, nesting files inside folders inside folders, tags, summaries, highlights, link...
It's a bit dicey. You'd have to have a good reason for it. If Preston's POV is in the present, but Paola's POV is in the past, is the story happening in Preston's time? Is Paola relating things ...
Give him his own arc. (I am amused that the gender here is the reverse of what's been a problem for a long time, but the advice applies to any character of any gender.) In the 2017 Wonder Woman f...
When it serves the plot. That's really the only reason you do anything in a plot-driven story. If the death serves the plot, do it. If it doesn't serve the plot, then don't. Don't do it for shock...
I am a fan of questioning your givens. You don't want to kill anyone? Fine. But what plot point is served by having your characters physically injured? Does it remove them from the action? Have ...
Change one of your givens. Either change the plot to fit the character or change the character to fit the plot. It depends on which one is more important to you.
Just because you can understand how the villain got that way doesn't mean you have to agree with the villain's actions. Most people can understand how Black Panther's Erik Killmonger turned out th...
I'm personally fond of the term amanuensis, and while I hardly ever get to use it, this sounds like the perfect legitimate need: A person employed to write or type what another dictates or to c...
First off, the easiest way to have your bad guy be less invincible and more defeatable is to make him less invincible. He's your creation. Don't give him so many benefits. Take away some of the phy...
First of all, that semi-colon is incorrect. It should be a comma. Here's why. A semi-colon is used 1) to join two independent clauses (stand-alone sentences) which are related in content, or 2) to...
If your paragraph is a gray wall of text, break it up where it makes sense. You aren't required to break it only on dialogue. And trim your narration too: A figure under the box moved behind Pr...
A screenplay is meant to be performed. A novel is meant to be read. (You can have an audio recording of a novel, but that's still someone reading it aloud, not a radio drama.) A screenplay has ...
Your problem is that your givens are incorrect. You don't need a colon, and you have the question mark in the wrong spot. Stripped of the confusing detail, your sentence reads Should I place ...
This depends on how the character sees himself (or if it's close third-person from someone else's POV, how that character sees him). If he is one sentinel of many — so it's a kind of descriptor, ...
As a female reader of SF/F who enjoys fantasy books with protagonists of whatever gender and plot, my advice is: Make it interesting. It doesn't matter if the basic plot structure is older than ...
Use a courtesy title which reflects your gender. Sign your submission as "Ms. Morgan Meredith." Subtle but unambiguous.
My complaint about Paolini was that he took a reasonably generic plot idea and... wrote it generically. His worldbuilding wasn't original, in any capacity. His characters were boring. His elves wer...
I have seen capital letters after colons if what comes after the colon is a full sentence: These rules have only one purpose: They are meant to humiliate. If you remove the subject and verb,...
Aside from the third item being correct, as others have noted, the punctuation around the dialogue tag reflects how it interacts with your two pieces of dialogue. An ellipsis indicates that the s...
