Weaving in Context

Even in a novel that has a prologue, the writer will, at some point, need to get more context into the story somehow. (Most novels don’t need a prologue–see last week’s post–and those that do, don’t need the twenty-plus pages that would give the reader everything they might

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Pause-fillers

As I’ve said before, dialog isn’t a transcript of the way people talk. It’s a stripped-down model that takes out the majority of verbal pause-fillers that don’t add meaning most of the time, such as “um,” “er,” “you know,” “like,” “uh,” “well,” etc. The catch is that

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Dialog and stage business

Suggestion-box requests: (1) Dialog, in particular mixing stage business with dialog. It’s been a while since I’ve done a post on dialog, and I have a request for one, so here ‘tis. So-called “stage business” in fiction follows the theater definition; it’s “an incidental action, such as

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Three problems in dialog

First, a public service announcement: the Worldshaper’s podcast which did an interview with me a few months back is running a Kickstarter to fund an anthology of short fiction by authors they’ve interviewed. The URL is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardwillett/shapers-of-worlds-volume-ii The authors involved will be people who  were interviewed in

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Doing Dialog

One of the first tasks most writers face is improving their dialog. This seems to happen in stages. In my experience, beginners start by writing dialog the same way they write narrative, in long, formal, complex sentences without idioms or contractions. Characters frequently speak in paragraph-long speeches

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Writing basics: Dialog

Dialog is a balance of opposing forces. On the one hand, it’s supposed to be two or more people talking to each other, so it can be considerably less formal than most narrative; on the other hand, it’s not a transcription or recreation of an actual conversation,

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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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