Posts by Lauren Ipsum
The issue with learning a language is that you need to walk before you can run. You need the simple, repetitive exercises so you can learn the building blocks of the language. In high school Fren...
I will cheerfully use "singular they" if that is a particular person's pronoun, but not as a lazy substitute for "he/she." Rewrite the sentence, either as plural or as second-person. 1) When us...
It's totally fine. It expresses a combination of query and astonishment. There was even an attempt to combine the marks into one, called an interrobang, but it never caught on. Using "?!" is neithe...
There are three rules for conversation: 1) Indicate through some mark of punctuation that someone is speaking aloud. This can be double quotes " , single quotes ' , dashes of varying lengths — ,...
1) This kind of formatting may be something which would have to be done manually by the end typesetter/layout person before publication. You would run everything in numerical sequence regardless of...
Maybe enclose the words in some other punctuation? Brackets: "Wow! You [finally listened to] my stinking advice!" Curly Brackets: "Wow! You {finally listened to} my stinking advice!" G...
The protagonist(s) win/s, the antagonist(s) is/are defeated (even temporarily), and the reader can imagine the protagonists continuing on to other adventures, or with their lives, in some positive ...
Any time you get two or more people in a group (or a family) with the same name, they are almost immediately given a nickname or some extra appellation so everyone knows who is being talked about. ...
You might want to break up the three scenes with something else, but generally speaking, yes, it's okay to focus on character development even if there isn't a ton of plot movement. Maybe add in a...
I have never heard of McKee's definition of "beat." I have only heard of and use the filmmaking definition. I have always viewed Event as part of your overall plot structure, and Beat as a granul...
If you move out of the child's POV, make it really obvious. Move that scene to its own chapter. Call it "Interlude" or something. Have the non-child POV scene be the only scene in the chapter. If...
Humans don't all look the same, dress the same, speak the same language. Why should $FANTASYRACE? So you have Legolas elves. You should also have Rhea Perlman elves. You should have Lupita Nyong'...
Yes, you're totally fine. If your tense shift happens between paragraphs — that is, the new tense starts a new paragraph — it should be clear what's happening. If this is a first-person narrative a...
When asked some variant of "Where do I start?" my mom likes to joke "Start at the beginning, go all the way through the middle, and when you get to the end, stop." In this case, that might make sen...
In Game of Thrones there were two sets of stakes: the magical Night King, and the mundane power struggle for the Iron Throne. The characters reasonably decided they had to deal with the magical, mo...
Use Scrivener. My answer here is heavily adapted from my answer to a different question, but I think it will be helpful to you: Scrivener is a tremendously flexible writing program. You can creat...
If your goal is hectic momentum, then two-sentence paragraphs with a visual indicator of "scene change" might work. Colonel Mustard frantically wiped up the table. No one would believe he hadn...
I can think of a TV example where the timelines are not synchronous and it was a big part of the surprise at the end of S1. On Westworld, you have human-identical androids (called "hosts") who are...
I think the main advantage is interior life. You can use narration or thoughts to give us what one character is (or several are) thinking. That's hard to do visually without a cabbagehead character...
Look at her motives. "Tough love" is someone making hard calls or asking difficult things for the right reasons. A parent making you get up at 6:00 a.m. to go to school no matter how tired you are...
You cannot randomly change POV in the middle of a paragraph just to get in that one critical snipe at your main character. You can have a scene break (usually two returns, to create white space) ...
(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 would be fine with either a comma or a semi-colon, although I think I'd prefer the semi-colon. Lists, particularly with sentence fragments, are pretty flexible in terms of content and punctuation...
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...
Punctuation (and spelling and capitalization) in text messages is different from punctuation in other forms of written communication (emails, memos, standard prose). In particular, punctuation, o...
