Category: dialogue
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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…
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Friday’s Findings: Creating a scene palette
When creating a scene for the first time, I have a list. And I try to hit as many points on that list as possible: But before writing the rough draft of a scene, I have practiced a step I got from a thin, little book called Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces by poet…
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Friday’s Findings: The Recipe for Interiority
There’s this new term I’ve come across in the fiction craft world: interiority. I had never heard of it until last year when I took Mary Kole’s online class called Crafting Dynamic Characters. Great class. As far as using it as a writing craft term, I don’t know who coined interiority, but Kole built her…
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Say It Aloud
“If you’re using dialogue, say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.” -John Steinbeck Photo by KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-woman-using-laptop-4051170/
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Friday’s Findings: Punctuating Inner Monologue
For a while now, I have been trying to navigate the way to format and punctuate inner dialogue. I’m always asking myself Am I doing this right? when I’m creating a scene. So, I decided to do a little deep dive into unlocking the minds of my characters. Or to be more specific, how to…
Andrew M. Friday 