Posts by Lauren Ipsum
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...
Given that you haven't given us a lot of the givens... Not every romance is cliché. There are formulas, to be sure (c.f. Harlequin, Nicholas Sparks, Lifetime), but just because the tropes are hea...
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...
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...
All caps has come to mean shouting. You can have a voice which is harsh but not loud. So no, I wouldn't use all caps to mean something which is difficult to listen to. Describe it as "harsh" and le...
I for one, would love to read a follow up novel about a world ruled by orcs. So let me ask you this: Why not write that book instead? In fact, why not make the orcs the heroes of your story?...
I don't think there can be an answer for this. I don't think you can even have an answer for a given writer. Mercedes Lackey rewrote her first trilogy seventeen times, but now she churns out books ...
Create engaging characters and put them in situations with high stakes. The characters in your first chapter (or prologue) don't even have to be main characters. They don't even have to survive t...
I'll approach this from a different angle than the two great answers already here. Let's assume that yes, your story is too similar to an existing, fairly well-known property. How do you fix that? ...
In the BBC Sherlock fandom there are many lively discussions about how a lot of the story takes place in subtext: Person C is a "mirror" for Protagonist A, water symbolizes emotions, drinking tea m...
The extent to which you can do this varies depending on your audience, but generally, I wouldn't do it with a thoroughly unknown word. Tonitrus is an excellent example. Great word, means what you n...
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 ...
It's a little convenient, but you can get around that a few ways: 1) Hang a lampshade on it. That is, have the characters point out that they found that other MacGuffin at the treasury too, and wh...
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 ...
Digits tend to be read faster and are less important. Spelling out numbers takes longer to read and are emphasized. So there are two things to consider: 1) How do people think of dates? Do you thi...
Set off your part with some kind of identifier: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. ...
It depends on the context. It can be casual, but it's the correct past tense of "to get." I got sick. I got a book for my birthday. I got there in time. Perfectly correct, if slightly ca...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
We faced away from each other awkwardly, as if we were on the first date we never had. A hypothetical or conditional, not a metaphor. We faced away from each other awkwardly, portraying th...
