by Jason Black
Last month's article covered tips for writing realistic dialogue. That's essential, but it's only half the game. The other equally essential half is writing distinctive dialogue. Your characters cannot all sound like one another.
Ironically, while writing realistic dialogue means engaging your speaking brain while you write, writing distinctive dialogue means escaping your speaking brain.
Read Moreby Erin Brown
10. I Will Not Curse an Agent or an Editor for at Least One Month.
Sure, it feels great, brings stress relief, and keeps you inspired to send out more query letters. But for just four weeks, hold off on the streams of, “Well, screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeww you, Mr. I Can’t Write So Therefore I Agent and Edit and Think I’m All High and Mighty Holding the Fate of the Literary World in My Grubby Little Hands!”
Read Moreby Adam Nichols
Some of what we all do as writers is intuitive, but some of it involves a conscious control of our medium — words. And words get expressed in sentences. So… Here’s a detail question for you:
How many types of sentences are there in English?
Most people’s initial response to this question is: lots.
Actually, there are just four basic sentence types.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
When readers see the little hyphen at the end of a syllable, they memorize that syllable and look for the next part of the word it should stick onto. They know how to do that. The hyphenation situation that causes misreading occurs when writers join two or more unrelated words into a new combination that reads as a single modifier before a noun, and they forget the little hyphen. For example, take the words drive up.
Read Moreby James Thayer
As writers, we are looking for a compelling story. Or, we have a story in mind, but may not know if it is complete.
Orson Scott Card said, “The difference between storytellers and non-storytellers is that we storytellers, like fishermen, are constantly dragging an ‘idea net’ along with us.” But is our idea strong and whole?
Read Moreby Rebbie Macintyre
I lost my voice.
No fever, cough or chills. No stuffy nose or sore throat. I simply lost my voice.
I’m talking about my writer’s voice, of course, and on second thought, I didn’t lose it. I tried to change it, to morph it into something it never could or would be. And in the process, I lost it. For one full manuscript. For two years.
Read Moreby Jennifer Paros
I’ve always thought my youngest son’s proclivity for asking a lot of questions was a great thing – intellectual curiosity and learning hard at work. Recently, however, while watching a movie with him in a theater and fielding so many inquiries, it occurred to me that all those questions and his demand for the answers were actually starting to interfere with him understanding what he was watching. Instead of trusting himself to figure it out, he was bombarding him (and me) with questions. I found myself thinking that if he could just be at peace with not knowing for a bit, everything would soon become clearer to him.
Read Moreby Jason Black
People have very keen ears for dialogue. They know what sounds right and what sounds strange without having to think about it. That only makes sense; all of us have spent countless thousands of hours both talking to and listening to other people.
You’ve probably seen that statistic about how 10,000 hours of practice at anything makes someone an expert. Do the math: You likely racked up that much listening, developing your ear for dialogue, by the time you were five years old.
Read Moreby Sage Cohen
As the holidays approach in a down economy, many people are seeking alternatives to the typical spending frenzy. The good news about hard times is that they challenge us to find creative new ways to give, share and create meaning. Poetry can be a powerful instrument for conjuring such alchemies.
Poetry can’t change our bank statements, but it can change the way we think about wealth. In fact, it is my lifelong relationship with poetry that has taught me that income is one thing, but prosperity is frequently something else.
Read Moreby Erin Brown
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a wonderfully written novel or work of non-fiction that I know for a fact that no one, and I mean no one, will ever want to read. It’s very disheartening to me to see such good writing go nowhere. So I want to share a sage bit of advice (mmmmm, sage: a wonderful addition to your holiday stuffing recipe): before you begin writing, make sure someone—besides you, your mother, and your significant other—give a rat’s patootie about your subject matter.
Read Moreby Christine Venzon
My introduction to social action came in Sister Patricia’s second-grade class, through a practice that Catholics of a certain age will recognize as “saving pagan babies.” Every month, my classmates and I sent money we had saved to “the missions,” to be used to adopt an orphan child in a Third World country: a baby boy one month, a girl the next. We suggested names for the child (always saints names—no Garys or Gingers) and voted for our favorite.
Read Moreby James Thayer
What’s wrong with this? “The muscled, sinewy wrestler quickly wiped glistening sweat from his meaty and haggard face.”
It suffers from modifier syndrome. This is more vivid: “The wrestler wiped sweat from his face.”
Adjectives modify nouns and adverbs modify verbs.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” There are a few of those “close” words lurking about today that it would behoove us all to be aware of, lest they take over our fingers as we write.
One of the most often seen disparities is everyday versus every day. The first one, a single word, means ordinary or commonplace.
by R.A. Riekki
“Your job is to get your butt in that seat.” That’s the work of the writer, because once you sit there, force yourself in front of that computer, the ideas inevitably will come.
I can’t remember who said that. And I will agree that it’s true. But . . .
I want to round out that idea and say that if you really want to succeed, you’ve got to get your butt out of that seat. Maybe even get your butt out of that city you currently live in. I know. I know. You think you can be J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon or Emily Dickinson.
Read Moreby Jennifer Paros
When I was five, my mother put me in a class called Creative Ballet and I loved it. Then, the next year I told her I wanted to continue my ballet studies and she enrolled me in a new class for six year-olds.
I remember putting on my tights and leotard and being funneled into a room with other little girls. We all sat on the floor in a small circle while the teacher spoke and the next thing I knew we were lined up to practice leaping over a pair of ballet shoes.
Read Moreby Jason Black
Experienced writers know how critical it is for readers to get behind our protagonists. Sure, we want readers to like and empathize with our protagonists, but more than that we need readers to be rooting for them. We want readers cheering our protagonists’ successes and lamenting their failures.
Whether a reader will root for the protagonist depends almost entirely on the protagonist’s actions, or lack thereof. Thus, those actions also control whether readers keep turning pages or whether they put the book down because there’s something more exciting on the home shopping channel.
Read Moreby Erin Brown
No.
Okay, okay, let me back up for a second and give this concept of self-publishing a fair shake. Let’s consider the scenarios in which self-publishing would be a wonderful option (I’ve made a vow in my life to start seeing the glass as half full):
Read Moreby Bob Mayer
What do you want to achieve as a writer? How will you develop the courage to both conquer fear and devise a plan to achieve your goal? I recommend becoming a Warrior Writer: use the techniques that make Green Berets the most elite soldiers in the world to conquer the seemingly unassailable world of publishing.
What is the Warrior Writer Program?
Read Moreby James Thayer
Asked how he could possibly create such magnificent sculptures, Francois-Auguste Rodin replied, “I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.”
Perhaps writers could adopt Rodin’s technique: take a dictionary, edit out all the unneeded words, and there’s our novel.
Read Moreby Cherie Tucker
If you have only two things in a sentence, whether they are single words or phrases or clauses, you don’t need to separate them with a comma. A big dog needs no pause between bigand dog. A big, ugly, snarling dog requires the little speed bumps to separate those adjectives. There are three words describing that dog, and more than two items in a series require separation (even requiring the comma before the final and, but that was another column). When there are only two, however, the comma serves no purpose except to confound the reader.
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