The Joy of Nuance

The slow death of boring beats One of the things I see over and over again as an editor and critiquer is the two word beat. It looks like this: “Hello,” John said, “how’s it hanging?” “Mmmhp.” Bill shrugged. “Not so good these days. John nodded. “I know what you

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Writing Emotionally Gripping Text

At the beginning of Romancing the Stone, Kathleen Turner’s character is banging away on her typewriter as she bawls her eyes out over the conclusion of her story. A nice scene and one I heard other writers talk about playing out in their own writing life. Here they are finally

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Ready for your close-up?

Jim Bondo rolled under the table with his gun. He always had his gun handy for situations just like this one. He squeezed the trigger and a carefully controlled stream of glue was forced into the space between the loose leg and the rest of the old wooden table. He knew Sara loved this table and fixing it was

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Other Editorial Services

As I have said, I’m not a copy editor, but if you are looking for a copy editor I have a couple of people that I use for my work. Dean C. Moore has worked on three of my four published books. He is an efficient editor and is fussy

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Weight, or Keeping things in Balance

Weight is the term I use to talk about how important something should be in a story. In a lot of stories authors feel that the only way to make their characters real is to create some tragedy that they have to survive. The problem with this approach is that some things

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Getting Conversant with Conversation

If you have more than one character in your story you will have to write dialogue. Even with just one character dialogue is possible. One of my favourite resources on dialogue is Dave King’s Self-Editing for Writers. Actually, it’s a terrific book all round. Here’s a brief dialogue. “Ayyoop, them stars shur

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When is your novel good enough to publish?

I see variations of this question on writing boards all over the internet. It is tempting for me to read a few lines of the book and answer the question for them. “No, it isn’t ready. Go back and fix these issues.” After all that’s really what I’m doing when

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So you’ve finished that novel…

You accepted the challenge of National Novel Writing Month and came out of it with a novel. Everyone told you that first drafts were rough, but you didn’t believe them until you went back and read your book. The first time you read one of your first drafts is always

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