“What is dialog?” “Dialog is written speech.” “How do I write really good dialog?” “First, you have to understand that dialog is more than just people talking. When you write dialog like this, with no ‘tags,’ you run the risk of your scene turning into talking heads.” “Tags? Like, graffiti?” […]
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What is action? Put in the simplest terms, action is merely the inclusion of verbs in your narrative. He charged. She swung her sword. Easily identifiable as actions. In a deeper sense, however, action is plot. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that plot is action. Or […]
Description is one of those concepts in writing that is easy to grasp, harder to execute. For me, the key to learning how to describe well was understanding just what the goal of description is. When I was starting out as a writer, my tendency was to either put in too many […]
One of the things that gets repeatedly drummed into a learning writer’s brain is “Show don’t Tell.” If you’ve taken a writing class, or read a book about writing, or even inhabited the same coffee shop with other writers, surely you’ve heard this adage. On the off chance that you […]
A recurring pattern in this blog series seems to be that we do a lot of things instinctively when we are learning how to write fiction, without having a clear understanding of what they are and how they work. Instinct will only carry you so far. It is my hope […]
In the last post, I talked about how learning the definition of a scene, and then really gaining an understanding of that definition, gave me better control over, and perspective on, my larger writing projects. Today I’m going to talk about what makes a scene good. Even after I learned […]