Posts by Lauren Ipsum
Sure, why not? Get it on paper, kick it around a bit, and then hand it off to an editor to see if it worked.
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 you have supporters following your blog, you might be able to argue that you have an audience who will buy your writing. However, to be meaningful to an agent and therefore a publisher, your au...
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...
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...
I think an author's personal stance can absolutely be a deal-breaker. I won't buy or read anything more from Orson Scott Card now that I know about his raging homophobia. It would be an endorsement...
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...
"Write what you see in your head"? That first takes observational skills. What are you seeing? Are you seeing all of it? Are you also listening, smelling, tasting, feeling? Are you observing your (...
You found a time when you can write. Why on earth would you want to break that habit? Fix your grammatical errors in the morning. Get your ideas on paper when the Muse wants you.
To a certain extent it will depend on your audience, but I think the answer is not "worry about too much detail" but "worry about making it comprehensible to the lay person." If your story is dep...
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...
If you want your story to sound authentic, you must learn and use the slang of the city(ies) in question. The New York Times had a fascinating dialect quiz a few years ago, and the author just pu...
Gerund phrases describe continuous or ongoing action, or action that happens at the same time as another action. Past-tense verbs generally describe a completed action, or a sequence of actions. ...
Your problem is not merely that you want "novels which are well-done." You want writing styles you feel safe reading because you would feel happy imitating them. You are asking someone else, someon...
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...
As long as you don't have a contract specifying that your next N books must be with Copmany A, there's no reason you can't go with Company B. If you mean that you self-published and want to chang...
I've seen it written on the same line in defiance of the "new speaker, new paragraph" rule: "And is this your girlfriend?" Mom asked. "No, I'm not — " "Absolutely not — " we both protested i...
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...
