Dialogue Workshop: "Avoid goofy tags. 'Really?' he ejaculated, or, 'My God!' she blustered don't do much for your credibility. If you have to have anything, use he said or she said. Frankly, most of the time you don't even need that. Your dialogue, if you've been true to it, will speak for itself. I don't object to the occasional he muttered or she whispered. I do always check in those sentences where someone hisses to make sure there was an 'S' somewhere in the sentence he supposedly hissed. You just try hissing a sentence that doesn't contain 'S's."I laughed when I read about the hissing. She is so right, and I would be irritated to read such a thing in a book. So, for shits and giggles, I ran my current novel through a word find, looking for hissed. I found two instances, one where my hero understandably "hissed as he fell back in his chair" and another where the heroine hissed "You've got to be joking!"Well, I apparently had been. Not a single S in there. I would love to hear how she actually hissed that. I smiled to myself and erased the hissed, replacing the whole line with some thing she was doing instead of how she said it. Yes, much better.
I still can't believe I actually wrote that. How inane.
Experts, Professionals, and College: "In writing, too, I learned the things I needed to know about the profession from a brief apprenticeship with Mercedes Lackey and another with Stephen Leigh.Another interesting tidbit:
From Stephen, I learned the nuts and bolts of writing:From Misty, I learned how to be a professional -- and that I learned from watching her. She came home from a full day of work and went straight into her office and wrote her ten pages . . . every day, no matter what kind of a day she'd had. Only when she'd done that did she come out and hang out. She was invariably polite and friendly to her agent, her editors, her publishers, and her fans. She worked on ideas for one project while writing another. She didn't have a shit fit about having to do rewrites -- she just did them. She hit her deadlines. She wrote stories she wanted to write."
- Avoid passive voice,
- Use active verbs,
- Eliminate most adjectives and adverbs,
- Use concrete detail,
- Tell a story worth telling,
- Know your characters.
Honing Your Talent: A Workshop: "But writing isn’t something to do in a day. It’s a life course, a path. A journey, not a destination. You’ll never be as good as you want to be, and every book you write will be the failure of a perfect idea – but as you progress, every day will also bring its rewards. You’ll get closer to expressing your perfect idea."I know I struggle with the "lessons" I learned in my advanced English classes. Looking over my snippets and half-baked novels, it is painfully obvious that I need to simplify my writing.
One-Pass Manuscript Revision: From First Draft to Last in One Cycle: "A scene is a cohesive block without which the novel will not stand, encompassing everything that a novel has to have, but in miniature. A scene has a start and a finish, characters and dialogue, engages at least one and sometimes all five senses, and offers conflict and change. It takes place in one time and in one place. If the time or the place changes, you’re in a new scene. A scene is usually written from only one point of view."
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