The summer solstice this week marked the beginning of summer writing season. It started getting light at 4:45 in the morning and didn’t get completely dark until 9:28 at night for a grand total of sixteen hours and forty-three minutes of daylight. Self-care It’s easy to let all your self-care routines lapse during the summer, especially if you are on your own while your parents are at work. What do I mean by self-care? That includes sleeping, eating, hydrating, exercising, and social media usage. Here’s Dr. Mary’s prescription: Get eight to ten hours of sleep a night; eat enough nutritious calories to maintain good health—not too many and not too…
-
-
Dialog Tags
Dialog tags are those bits of information outside the quotation marks that tell who is speaking. Sometimes called speaker attribution, they help keep straight who is speaking. The problem is they can also unnecessarily weigh down your dialog. Changing Styles What do exclaimed, replied, pondered, whispered, and chuckled have in common? They are all used to identify the speaker. Beginning writers may think they are clever to pepper these synonyms for said throughout their work. But these are not invisible words absorbed by the dialog, they stick out like a blinking neon sign saying, “Look at me, look at me.” A generation ago characters replied, exclaimed, and chuckled their way…
-
Good writers are consistent
Good writers are consistent. They follow the rules, proofread, and take time to revise. Lack of consistency can fail a beginning writer especially in point of view. Consistent POV Point of view lets the reader know who is telling the story. When your main character is telling the story, the pronouns I, me, and my show first person viewpoint. Third person point of view is when the narrator refers to the main character by name, he, or she. Why is this important? Well, in the revision process it’s important to maintain a point of view, otherwise you confuse your reader. Example: She looked like she was tapping out Morse code on…
-
Show Don’t Tell with Sense of Sight
The writer’s mantra show, don’t tell has an obvious partnership with the sense of sight. We show the reader what we see with our eyes. We see shape, size, color, direction, and motion. How best to show these? Comparisons Beginning writers naturally gravitate to the sense of sight in description. We are after all, visual creatures. Be careful not to catalog what you see: the big blue house sat at the end of a long gravel drive. This example includes size, color, and distance descriptors-big, blue, and long. While these all paint an image for the reader, the image is bland and without character. Instead, use comparisons to tease out emotional…
