How it gets said #2: Punctuation

The workhorse of conveying tone and delivery within dialog is punctuation. Dialog certainly can follow the standard English rules for punctuation, but often it doesn’t. The differences are as much about leaving out “required” punctuation as they are about adding more or less of it than the

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What gets said

There are three things to consider when writing dialog: what is said, how it is said, and what the people in the conversation are doing while something is being said. Of the three, the one that seems to get the least attention in most how-to-write books is

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Dialog in general

Dialog is the little black dress of fiction. Almost every story includes some, and it’s not uncommon to find dialog occupying a large chunk of important scenes. Sometimes the entire scene, or even the whole story, is done in dialog (and I’m not counting plays or screenwriting).

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Nonlinear process

I’ve been thinking a lot about process lately, which is common when I’m in the middle of a book. It’s especially understandable this time, because this book isn’t working the way my process usually goes. Normally, I’m very much a linear writer. I start with Chapter One

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Actions speak loudly

The term “action,” like many terms in writing, covers a lot of ground. Some is obvious: a chase scene is action; so is a boxing match, a brawl, a battle, a gunfight. The scene where one guy is clinging to the railroad trestle and the other guy

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Managing subplots?

“How do you manage your subplots?” somebody asked me a while back. “How do you decide when and where to put in a subplot scene, and how long to wait between them?” Apparently, her novel had about eight different subplots, and she was worried about going two

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Deteriorating quality…or not

The other day, I was talking books with a non-writer acquaintance who eventually got around to the perennial complaint about how Mr. Long-Time Professional Writer’s work has gone horribly downhill, paired with a certain amount of bewilderment as to how an experienced professional could ever make so

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Keeping Moving

One of the things I remember from my high school physics class is Newton’s First Law of Motion, also called the law of inertia: “An object in motion tends to remain in motion; an object at rest tends to remain at rest.” It applies to a lot

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