Today I wrote an email to someone who worked in another department at my company. The subject being a sensitive one, I sent a preview of my text to my supervisor to get her opinion. “You’re too nice!” she joked. “I would just tell the person to do it, not ‘suggest’ it.”
True, I admit. I used language like “you might want to …” and so on. But that’s the kind of things I say when I speak. I think I’m being diplomatic, but maybe I’m just trying to hard to be diplomatic.
This is a reminder of how your characters need to sound different from each other. The readers should be able to tell which character is speaking even if there aren’t any tag lines. The way I would say something in an email would not sound the same way if my supervisor wrote the same message.
And that’s a good reminder to review dialogue in your story and make sure each character has a different way of speaking from each other.
So, here are some articles on writing fiction I came across this past week. Good stuff:
- How Not to Write a Novel: 7 Things That Will Doom Your Novel
- How to lengthen your novel using J.K. Rowling’s outline method
- How to Start a Writer’s Notebook
- Five Mistakes New Writers Make
- MASTER LIST of Gestures and Body Language!
Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels
Andrew M. Friday 