Few storytelling elements in a novel are as powerful as dialogue. Writing good dialogue is a crucial way of letting characters speak for themselves outside of the narrative voice, and it’s one of the best ways of conveying personality and flavor. And, as with any powerful device, it can be abused. Over-use of dialogue has […]
Writing Advice
Don’t force your characters to ask leading questions just so you can deliver exposition
Over-reliance on dialogue continues to be rampant in the manuscripts that come across my desk. In fact, over the past year it’s supplanted perspective issues as the #1 issue that plagues the not-yet-published, at least from my vantage point. When writers rely on dialogue too much, problems can really cascade. There’s often not enough physical […]
Can you see what is and isn’t on the page?
Bad fiction usually boils down to this: the writer isn’t giving the reader the information they need to conjure a scene. Sometimes this means the writing is generic or imprecise. It might mean a writer is being so intentionally opaque the reader loses interest. But very often it’s because the author has lost sight of […]
Close off your protagonist’s easy off-ramps
Great plots in novels are defined by protagonists who want something very big and difficult and proceed to actively go after that thing. In genres like mystery and fantasy that big and difficult thing might mean a perilous quest (slaying the dragon, catching the bad guy, destroying a ring atop a rather unpleasant mountain), for […]
Don’t let your opening cement in your mind
I’m a big fan of self-editing novels while I’m writing them. You can stop problems from snowballing, looking at previous stretches can spark new ideas that become useful later, and you ultimately have less work to do when you’re finished. But there is one significant danger in re-reading your work in progress: every time you […]
What is the “narrative voice?”
In this day and age of streaming TV/movies and social media video, so many aspiring novelists think about their novels solely in terms of dialogue and gestures. Characters talk, maybe there’s some action, they sigh and look at things, they talk some more, and that, in their minds, comprises a novel. They aren’t thinking enough […]
