What will your characters do?
From across the country for the past few weeks, we’ve been seeing how people react to needing to give up normal activities.
If you’re writing a novel, that information might prove useful. While I doubt your story involves a global pandemic, you can still apply these insights into human behavior.
If your novel has characters, it’s likely they … Continue reading
Don’t clog your lines with double attribution.
The author didn’t realize she was wasting words whenever her characters spoke.
In nearly every instance, she provided not only a dialogue tag, “Christina said,” but also a “beat” or “action tag,” a phrase describing what the character did as she spoke.
Consider this double attribution line:
“I’m so sorry,” Christina said, … Continue reading
Does the start of your novel offer close-ups?
When I saw at the library the latest novel in an alternative-history series, I snapped it up.
Why wouldn’t I? The previous dozen volumes had not only explored an intriguing premise, but they’d show it to me through the perspectives of an well-developed cast.
Not the latest novel. The prologue, after briefly introducing one character, immediately brought another … Continue reading