Writing and Editing
I’m both a writer and an editor. This isn’t an uncommon overlap; while not every writer enjoys editing, or vice versa, there are a lot of people who can get a kick out of either creating or critiquing words. No matter how much I enjoy both writing and editing though, and no matter how much …
I wrote a post recently on punctuating dialogue in which I referenced dialogue tags, and I wanted to take some time to explore these in a bit more depth. Dialogue tags are used to provide a reader with information about who is speaking and how they are speaking. They can be used for clarity, emphasis, …
Dialogue. Speech. Chat. If you’re writing a story, chances are dialogue makes up a decent chunk of your word count. Of course, whether your characters talk all the time or almost never, you want to make sure that what they do say is written correctly, so that it’s as clear as possible for your readers. …
I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for a whole year now. I probably wouldn’t believe it, if not for WordPress sending me a rather sweet little anniversary message the other day. I still feel like an absolute novice with this if I’m honest, but over the course of the last 52 weeks I have managed …
Continue reading "One Year of Blogging, Five Lessons I Learned Along the Way!"
It can be tough, managing a large cast of characters, working out how to give them all the right amount of page time, deciding who needs developing and who doesn’t. One way to look at this is to know how you’re categorising your different characters. There are a bunch of ways to do this, of …
It’s hard to make time for writing, even when our days are just their usual level of jam-packed. Introduce a holiday and it becomes virtually impossible, or at least it feels that way, to get any work done on a writing project. I’ve already talked about some of the ways you can sneak writing time …
It isn’t always easy to draw a clear line between your main characters and your supporting characters or, at the other end of the character importance spectrum, between your supporting characters and your background characters. And that isn’t a problem most of the time; it’s not like you need to be able to sort everybody …
Continue reading "Are Your Supporting Characters Pulling Their Weight?"
Imagine the scene: you’ve sat down to write, you’re trundling along through your scene, happy as a clam, when you run into a stumbling block. There’s something you realise you haven’t explained—about the world your story is set in, or your character’s backstory, or anything really—and you’re not sure you can proceed without saying at …
We live in a world of seemingly endless distractions, and it can be fantastic—whether you want to check out what your childhood best friend is up to on Instagram, look up some Pin-spiration for what to cook of an evening or catch up on the latest Twitter controversy, it’s all there right at our fingertips. …
Industry professionals give them some major side-eye, readers confess to skipping them, but what if you feel like you need one? How do you know if a prologue is the right fit for your story? First, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page (pun totally intended) about what a prologue is. A prologue …
