Five not to be missed posts about how to write right
When it comes to writing, there’s always something new to learn. Something that can improve our craft, improve our sales, and improve the chances of giving up the day job.
And thanks to the internet it’s never been easier to get great advice from other authors.
But of course it’s also never been easier to find a so-called writing and publishing guru that is charging you big money to give you advice that might be a complete waste of time.
As one of the oldest digital books aggregators, StreetLib has been around long enough to know how to separate the valuable writing advice from the worthless.
Which means you can check out with confidence these curated excerpts from recent posts from around the writing world, and then click on the links to read the full articles.
We start today’s curation with a topic close to my heart. Dialogue tags.
Dialogue tags?
You can just imagine the scene at the newbie writers group.
“Dialogue tags? What on earth are they,” Jo inquired, a bewildered look on her face.
“I’ve no idea,” replied Freddie.
“Well dialogue means a conversation between two people,” Jo submitted. “It’s the tags bit I don’t understand,” she continued.
“Not necessarily just two,” corrected Freddie. “Two or more, like now when we’re all talking together,” he added. “This is an example of dialogue.”
“Okay, but what about the tags bit?” Jo repeated.
Yeah, that’s what dialogue tags are all about. Tiresome, aren’t they? Almost all of those dialogue tags were unnecessary and just slowed the pace.
But let’s assign this problem to Writers Untapped, a very helpful blog that offers great writing advice. Not just about the use of dialogue tags, but how to get the punctuation right that goes with them.
Let’s start with the basics. When using a dialogue tag, you’ll want to use a comma before or after the tag.
“Let’s eat,” she said. ← You’ll notice the comma goes inside of the quotation mark.
She said, “Let’s eat.” ← Although less common, if you’re using a dialogue tag before the dialogue, the comma will go after the tag and before the quotation mark.
Note: No need to get creative with your dialogue tags. Said and asked are seen as invisible, and when you’re using tags, you’ll want to stick to those more.
Interrupting Dialogue with Tags
“Let’s eat,” she said, “before it gets dark.” ← For dialogue that gets interrupted by a tag, you’ll want to put the comma before the quotation mark and after the dialogue tag. You do not capitalize the second part of dialogue.
“Let’s eat,” she said, fishing her phone from her pocket, “before it gets dark.” ← Even if you combine actions with a dialogue tag, you’ll still use commas to separate the dialogue. You do not capitalize the second part of dialogue.
“Let’s eat,” she said. “I want to go before it gets dark.” < — For two separate sentences, you’ll use a comma to introduce the dialogue tag, then use a period before the second sentence.
Note: Make sure you only interrupt the dialogue where a) a comma would naturally go or b) between two separate phrases/clauses.
Capitalization of Dialogue Tags and Action Beats
Dialogue tags are always lowercase, even if you have a punctuation mark before the tag. Check out this example below:
“Are you hungry?” she asked. ← You’ll notice “she” is lowercase. That’s because it’s a dialogue tag, so even though it’s coming after a punctuation mark, it still must be a lowercase letter.
WHEREAS
“Are you hungry?” She dug in her purse for her phone. ← If you’re using an action beat after punctuation, it should be capitalized.
Action Beats
Action beats get treated differently than dialogue tags, which is the mistake many writers run into. So let’s break down a few examples of how to use action beats in dialogue.
Action Beats? Head over to the OP to find out more.
Next to non-fiction, or more specifically writing non-fiction in a style that will keep the reader hooked, not send them so sleep like some dry old school textbook from the last century.
How To Write Non-Fiction That Reads Like A Page-Turning Thriller is the title of a study by August Birch,. who says:
I read a lot. And there’s little that makes me bristle more than a book that wastes my time. I don’t get more time. I can’t get a time refund if my time got ripped-off. Once my time is spent, it’s gone. I’m a little closer to being dead and your dry book just robbed me. Well, not your book. You know better. But you get the idea.
A non-fiction book can be a page-turner?
Hellz-yes it can. And it should. If we want to deliver our message to the most people, said audience will have to read the book all the way to the end. If we want them to read the entire book we need to give them incentive.
Holding the reader’s attention is the writer’s responsibility, not the reader’s. If we lost the reader in chapter one, that’s on us. Fiction writers have the attention game figured out, but we can steal their techniques to make our non-fiction better too. I’ll give you some simple strategies you can apply to your non-fiction today which will help ensure a page-turner tomorrow.
What makes a good page turner?
Sorry, you’ll need to click through to the OP to find out.
And if you’re thinking that’s cruel and heartless, well, maybe, but actually it’s an example of a cliffhanger in non-fiction, which is what this post is, after all.
Cliffhangers are an essential part of writing a thriller or a non-fiction book that sells.
Next to a post titled 8 Mundane Elements You Should Cut From Your Story, which can be found on the Jane Friedman blog but is actually a guest post by Jordan Rosenfield.
If we wrote novels that were hyper-accurate to the “real lives” of our characters — even those that populate fantasy and science fiction novels — they would be thousands of pages long and span a series too big to fit on any single shelf. Reality is full of uneventful, unremarkable, lackluster moments that, on the page, are about as tense and exciting as gray Play-Doh.
Creating tension is as much a function of what you leave out as it is what you put in, but often we can’t see those extraneous parts until someone points them out to us or expresses boredom with parts of the story.
The following tips will help you identify some of those mundane parts of your characters’ lives, and bad habits or techniques that don’t serve the tension of your novel, no matter its genre.
1, Vagueness.
Often when we are first getting to know our characters, we do one of two things: We either model them after people we know, or we make them out of raw clay, little golems who are just generic people (often versions of ourselves). They might not yet have a distinct way of talking, offer particularly incisive observations, or possess a demonstrable personality. We might make them “average height” or “medium build.” These are acceptable for a first draft, but by the time you’re ready for readers to enjoy your story, you have to flesh out the vagueness into specifics with nuance and uniqueness. Moreover, characters should read as distinct from one another.
This applies to supporting and secondary characters, too; every character adds to the realism and plausibility of your story. If you have a generic “cop” or “clerk” or “housewife” or “schoolteacher” who isn’t also a real person with some sort of nuance either externally or in personality, the character will come off as flat and dull, and do nothing to support the tension of any given scene.
2. Excruciating detail…
3. Dreary dialogue…
4. Stage directions…
5. Telegraphing…
6. Thoughts in the midst of action…
7. Melodrama…
8. Over-sentimentality…
As you can see, there’s a lot of valuable advice in Jordan’s post, and unless you are already a successful author with books selling well, then this is a post to study carefully.
We end today with avisit to the Anne R. Allen blog where E.J. Runyon asks:
Writing Rules: Should You Always Write What You Know?
I just finished reading Anne’s March post about how you don’t always want to follow the rule that advises, ‘Write What You Know’.
It made me wonder how many writers understand that it’s only a ‘Writing Rule’ for getting folks started. Folks who long to write but don’t know where to start.
Call them Beginners, or Novices. Newbies, or maybe, You.
It’s a rule for folks to start with ‘what you know’ in their writing topics, settings, or type of characters to tell stories about. Like: A town like yours. High schoolers you may know of or know well. A job just like yours, but written for laughs.
But it’s much less of a rule for folks who aren’t struggling, who aren’t beginners with no idea where to begin. Not for those who are farther along the process. Who want to create, and know just what they want to try doing. Folks like, maybe, You.
No one thinks of that. We see the word ‘Rule’ And figure that one size fits all of us. (Ruth Harris warned us about this kind of thinking in her post about Writing Rules vs. Writing Guidelines.…Anne.)
One thing I found out early about rules is that I don’t need to follow all of them when the writing topic is creating. Sure, grammar and punctuation seems a lot more universal. But rules on What to Write? Nah.
Once I figured that out, I had a brand new way for attacking my writing.
The Writing Rules — Almost
I’m going to show you that today. The Non-rule, or Almost-rule of doing things. A new method, that for me, coupled with the normal way I work, brought up some much deeper and I think, more profound writing.
My normal method of writing works something like this:
Think about stuff for a bit… then,
Remember things: incidents, voices, images, opportunities (taken & lost)
Start taking notes
Ask a lot of ‘What if?’ questions
Twist things that really happened beyond recognition
Plan what I’ll write
Start writing
Stray way afar from my original plans you’d think my guide-dog had run off.
Stick to and enhance some of my original plans
Think about upcoming edits I’ll be doing once my first draft is done
Manage to finish a full first draft.
Think about stuff for a while…
Sense Memory
Today, we’ll just review that second item, Remembering Things. For me it works like this:
At which point… Yeah, sorry, another cliffhanger. Head over to the OP to read more.
You see, fun as it would be to just copy the entire post for your benefit, that’s not how curation works. Even if I fully credited the author and , as is the case here, charged nothing for the content, it would still be unethical, not to mention illegal, to just copy the entire post across.
Yes, copyright applies to blogs just as much as books, and it doesn’t matter if you are not making any money off it, and it doesn’t matter if the author gave the content away for free. It’s still copyrighted to them.
And no doubt copyright will be a topic for a near future selection of posts in the Write Right with StreetLib series, so watch out for that.
Meanwhile don’t forget that StreetLib is there for all your publishing needs, not just getting your ebooks out there and offering curated writing advice, and we have some exciting new announcements looming.
Stay tuned!
