Category: dialogue
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Writing With Scene Beats
If plot is the skeleton and character, is the heart. Beats are the nervous system. They carry every signal, every reaction, every emotional pulse through your story. Master beats—and suddenly everything else gets sharper.
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Voices Without Faces: A Dialogue-Only Writing Experiment
I just finished Brandon Sanderson‘s Tailored Realities. It was not what I thought it would be. Yes, I knew it was a collection of short stories, but with surprise me is the inspiration I found through his writing craft observations. My review of Tailored Realities by Brandon Sanderson These nuggets of writing wisdom are found…
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Friday’s Findings: Ways to Start a Writing Session
In my last blog posting, I talked about using copy work to get started for a writing session. The concept goes like this: for five minutes, copy word-for-word, a few paragraphs of your favorite author or novel. Then start your actual work-in-progress (WIP). It made me realize copy work is just one way to warm…
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Friday’s Findings: Audio Annotations
“The point of being a god is to have the joint running to your specifications.” -Guy Vesten, The Hungry Gods by Adrian Tchaikovsky This is just one of several quotes I got from the novella I listened to today, Tchaikovsky’s The Hungry Gods (THG). It wasn’t very long – only five hours – and I…
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Friday’s Findings: Name-dropping
The other day, I typed out a paragraph for the science fiction novella I’m working on, and I realized I’ve had this aching question for years: when do I use a character’s name and when do I use a pronoun instead? Are there formal rules for this sort of thing? When do I use my…
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Friday’s Findings: Beginnings and Ends for a Scene
I’ve been writing a lot of scenes lately, and I am constantly asking myself, “Am I beginning all my scenes the same way?” Am I always starting with dialogue? And what about ending a scene? How can I make sure I’m not always ending my scenes in the same way? Are some of them cliffhangers,…
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What to do if you’re having trouble starting a scene
Photo by Landiva Weber
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Friday’s Findings: My 50K Novel Week 2
As an alternate to NaNoWriMo, I’m doing a 50K word rough draft of a novel in 30 days. Here’s how the second week went: Day 8: My city has the best coffee shops. I’m sitting in one before I go to work and I’m going to outline some unfinished scenes. I swore I wouldn’t do…
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One Way to Write a Scene
So, I’m doing this thing where I am writing the rough draft in a special way: pseudo screenplay. I recommend doing this if you are having trouble getting the scene started. Otherwise, I recommend writing the scene in a normal fashion, a linear development. If that does not work, try to layer in each fiction…
Andrew M. Friday 