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Jun 24

Seven tips for designing meaningful dialogue

As writers, we’re extremely lucky to be able to engage in behaviors others might find a bit abnormal.

We get to listen to the “voices” in our heads, and we get to make imaginary people talk to other imaginary people. All of this in the pursuit of our “craft.”

I was thinking about this recently while considering what makes good dialogue. Here are a few tips that might help you as you write your own dialogue.

  1. Build your knowledge of your characters. Just as you invent your characters, you must create their conversations and interactions. The more you understand your characters, the easier it will be to invent their dialogue. Read more

Jun 23

It’s raining concrete: the #1 rule of writing, Part 2 of 2

Over the years, I’d trained myself to be an observer of life’s details and to use those concrete details in my writing. (I do have an MFA in people watching). But I’d never done the opposite—never thought about turning details into abstractions as Ayn Rand suggests we do in her book The Art of Fiction.

I’m sure at some unconscious level, the details and abstractions ran parallel lives in my mind but I wasn’t consciously aware of them. I never thought, “What do the moles on my mother’s neck represent?”

While on vacation earlier this year, I sat on a white sand beach on the island of Kauai and thought about Rand’s advice. She suggests we practice seeing the abstractions within the concrete details in order to make our minds supple and easily able to notice both the abstractions or premises in our work and how to show them through details. Read more

Jun 22

It’s raining concrete: the #1 rule of writing, Part 1 of 2

I didn’t discover I was a writer until college when I fell in love with poetry. Fortunately for me, my first poetry professor was big on concrete. No, he didn’t have a weekend job laying sidewalks or foundations. But he did pound it into us that our effusive abstractions needed to be transformed into concrete images.

Some of my first poems were pure mush and raw emotion. When I blathered on about feeling lonely in a foreign country, he asked, “What color is lonely? What does lonely smell like? Was there a specific place or location or city where you felt the most lonely?” He explained that through the right details I could evoke those feelings in my reader.

I can still remember the rush of satisfaction when I finally captured the essence of that poem into specifics. Read more

Jun 21

4 Comments

Read well to write well

You’ve probably heard it before. To write well, you must read. Reading excellent literature will inspire you (even if the style or genre is different than what you write). It’s part of the magic of writing. Somehow, something you read sparks a connection in your subconscious.

Reading critically helps you analyze other writers’ techniques and see how you might apply them in your own unique way. If you recognize meaning and nuance in other writing, you’ll be more aware of how to create those moments in your own.

These tips will help you make the most of your “reading practice.”
1. Adopt an analytical mindset. Go into your reading session with a different frame of mind than when you sit down to read for pleasure — not that this type of reading isn’t pleasurable. I find reading even more rewarding when I make a new connection or experience a flash of discovery.
Read more

Jun 20

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What makes a good metaphor?

We’ve all heard them, read them, sometimes written them—those cringe-worthy similes and metaphors that make us wonder what planet the authors came from. Bad metaphors make for good comedy. We get emails with laugh-out-loud examples from student essays, such as:

  • He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
  • She was as easy as the “TV Guide” crossword.
  • The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
  • She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

You get the idea. During my beginning years as a writer, I confess that I too occasionally dipped into the bad-metaphor well. Embarrassing, right? But then I got better. I worked at it. I practiced. When I made the leap from writing poetry to writing stories and books, I made another major discovery about what makes a good metaphor. Read more

Jun 17

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Lost in the jungle? Five steps to move your story forward

Ever feel like your mind is a jungle and your manuscript is a reflection of all those tangled vines and spongy mosses? Ever feel stuck in a bog of your own making? In her book, On Writer’s Block, Victoria Nelson says that one of the biggest reasons writers get blocked is because at some subconscious level they know that something isn’t quite right with an aspect of their writing—whether it’s a character, subplot, theme, or even the original story idea.

Before I read Nelson’s book, I spent far too much time lost in my own overgrown and disorderly jungle, paralyzed by fear. Now when I recognize the block is happening—for me it’s when I feel like I need to do anything else but write (clean out the fridge, make another “to do” list, scoop the litter box)—I stop and ask myself a few questions.

The 5-step process below gets me back on track and allows my creative energy to spark and flow again. You can adopt this process or use these steps as a springboard to make the unconscious conscious: Read more

Jun 16

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Are you a writer in waiting?

Are you someone who wants to be writing but can’t really call yourself a writer because you aren’t really writing anything? It’s easy to let life get in the way. But if writing is important to you, you must pursue it regularly despite what life flings your way. Whether you write three sentences, 100 words or 1,000, it all adds up. The days have a way of slipping by, and you don’t want to wake up someday and regret what you didn’t do.

Be conscious of your time and how you’re spending it. Have you designed your life to fit your desire to write? Are you spending your hours on your most important priorities? Most writers — published and unpublished — have many commitments to juggle, not to mention day jobs. But they still fit writing in. Read more

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