Author: Laurie Boris

Laurie Boris is a freelance writer, editor, proofreader, and former graphic designer. She has been writing fiction for over twenty-five years and is the award-winning author of four novels. She lives in New York’s lovely Hudson Valley. Learn more about Laurie at her website and her Amazon author page.

Super Italicize Me!

Authors have been pondering this question since Og figured out he could write dirty limericks on the cave walls with a charred stick: Why didn’t I just become a doctor like my mother wanted? Well…that, and how the heck are we supposed to use italics in our manuscripts?

Before we get into when to use or not use them in our books, let’s fix ourselves a nice cup of tea and talk about formatting. You may have wandered around the Interwebs and read a certain manuscript-formatting commandment bequeathed unto us by a variety of literary agents, editors, and publishers: Continue reading “Super Italicize Me!”

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

A local author had asked me to participate in an event sponsored by the Woodstock (New York) Library Forum called, “Four Funny Writers.”

Now, I have this love/hate relationship with public events. A natural introvert, my first instinct is to cringe, lock the doors, and hunker down in front of the television, eating junk food and watching episode after episode of The Big Bang Theory. Continue reading “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”

Will Technology Drive Readers to Demand More?

It rarely happens, but this year, I had the opportunity to go somewhere nice on vacation. Not only was it somewhere nice, but it was on a river cruise, a “cozy” setting where I had a week to get up close and personal with 140 people, pretty much all of whom had disposable income, at least one variety of electronic reading device, and no shyness about whipping out their TBR lists. Continue reading “Will Technology Drive Readers to Demand More?”

Conflict and Why You Need Some

Whether your fiction is plot- or character-driven, what’s really sitting behind the wheel of this bus is the conflict. Without conflict, your story will flop around like a quivering lump of protoplasm, kind of like Jabba the Hutt without the charm. Conflict drives story. It drives your characters to get off their asses and do something about the things that have been bothering them.

To keep the conflict in the forefront of my squirmy writer brain, I keep asking myself, “What does this character want?” Okay, right now one of my protagonists wants chocolate and a shoulder rub. Lovely aims, but hardly enough to make a reader stick around for three hundred pages. The conflict is too easily resolved. She can go to the store to buy chocolate, or pay a massage therapist to tend to her aching muscles. BUT… what if she is driven to the point of obsession to create the most sinfully delicious chocolate on the planet because her mother died in a freak chocolate fountain accident before she could realize her dream of being the next Willy Wonka? What if she is so hideously deformed that all of humankind recoils from her, except for the nice guy down the street…who is marrying a total bee-yotch next Saturday, and our gal is contemplating nefarious behavior involving rat poison and a bear trap?

Now there’s some conflict.
Continue reading “Conflict and Why You Need Some”