The second aspect of dialog, after “what people are talking about,” is how they talk about it. This is where the technical aspects of dialog begin to come into play: word choice, phrasing, idiom, syntax, and punctuation. That’s enough that it’s going to take me more than
Read more →Scrivener is currently one of the best-known pieces of writing software out there. People who use it tend to love it and go all evangelical about it (as a number of commenters noted two posts ago). It occurred to me while reading all those comments that talking
Read more →Writers have promoted their favorite writing tools – each of which is different – for as long as I’ve been in the business, and probably all the way back to when the writers working on clay tablets sneered at that new-fangled papyrus stuff imported from Egypt. To
Read more →The other day, I was looking over two different multi-book series, each of which is easily pushing a million words. Both are quite popular in their respective genres, but they are very different in their approach. Yet it could be argued that both writers make similar mistakes.
Read more →Everybody has too much to do, always. You can tell, because half the time, the first thing people ask a writer is “When do you find time to write?” (the other half the time, the first thing is “Where do you get your ideas?” and the second
Read more →It’s tax season again, which means loads of published writers out there are cursing their lack of record-keeping and vowing to do better next year. Fortunately, early March is usually not so late in the year that the very idea of going back over all the business
Read more →…“and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” -Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Dialog occupies an odd place on the list of fundamental fiction-writing skills. It’s a component of nearly all fiction, but it’s not absolutely necessary (Hatchet and My
Read more →The other day I was browsing writing web sites and came across one that made me blink. Every post for months had a title like “Seven Dialog Mistakes” “Five ways to a Great Scene” “Ten Resolutions for Career Writers” “Twelve Dynamite Endings.” OK, I get that a
Read more →It’s been a while since I’ve talked about viewpoint, and first-person has been on my mind lately. First person seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it viewpoint. I’ve heard folks say that it’s the easiest viewpoint for a beginner to use, that no one should ever use it, that
Read more →One of the things that makes writing difficult for a lot of folks is the notion that they have to do everything at once, on the first try. They’re sure their first draft has to look pretty much like an actual story – maybe it needs some
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