The way your characters talk — in dialogue scenes as well as in first-person narration — can not only help a reader distinguish one from the other. It can actually serve to establish who each of them is. Is he/she an optimist or a pessimist? An extrovert or an introvert? Honest or devious? Well-educated or not so much? Perhaps as important as any of these, does he/she have a sense of humor? I hope no one needs to be told … Read More »

It sounds really obvious, but I’m continually amazed at the number of aspiring fiction writers who don’t seem to pay enough attention to helping their readers tell one character from another. This is really basic if you want to produce a page turner that requires no unnecessary effort or confusion on the part of the reader. Some of the items below may indeed go without saying, while others might bear a bit more thought and planning. Yet all of them, … Read More »

I’ll be completely honest: Doing research is not one of my favorite pastimes. There are lots of things I’d rather be doing than pore over some dry and musty tome with almost as many pages of footnotes as of actual text But as a writer of history-based fiction it tends to come with the territory. Over the years I’ve learned to accept this as a “necessary evil” — and also to develop some less tedious ways of finding out what … Read More »

Attributions are those cues we give to the reader in order to keep him or her oriented about which of the characters is speaking at any point in a scene. “He said” and “she said” are of course the simplest and most obvious attributions, but they contribute nothing extra to the reader’s perception of what’s happening during the scene. And this is a terrible waste of opportunities for character development, plot advancement, and/or mood creation. There are a number of … Read More »

If you’re like most writers you’ve probably found yourself getting bogged down at some point during the process. It’s really frustrating if you’re a novelist and after days, weeks or months you’re already 25,000 or 35,000 words into it. Often enough, everything started out well: You chose an interesting setting or milieu, created solid relatable characters, and involved them in compelling situations or conflicts. You may even have a pretty good idea of how you want it to end. But … Read More »