If you prefer to listen to this article, click the audio player below. Voice. Authors have to cultivate it—it’s one of the major things that builds reader loyalty, especially in a saturated market. But what exactly do people mean when they talk about an author’s voice, usually in statements like these: “Make sure your editor […]
Read More »Category: Writing Tips
Writing Tips for Authors: Using Ellipses to Punctuate Phone Convos
One of the struggles authors have is presenting dialogue so that it’s both understandable and engaging. Phone conversations can be especially problematic. Scenes where you show both sides of the conversation are fairly easy—you just handle them like regular dialogue for the most part. But what about one-sided convos? A convention I really like is to use an ellipsis […]
Read More »Writing Tip: Show vs. Tell—the Natural Pause with Dialogue
Using “paused” as an action beat seems a little like an oxymoron, but I digress. If you use an action beat or a dialog tag, you have inserted a “natural pause” into your dialog. What do I mean by this? Basically this: if we’re reading dialog and the character stops speaking and does something, or […]
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