story line

Dialogue is the fastest way to improve a manuscript—or to sink it. When agents, editors or readers see crisp, tension-filled dialogue, they gain confidence in the writer’s ability. But dialogue that is sodden and undistinguished has the opposite effect.

Fortunately, the fixes are simple. First, make sure you can “hear” every character in a distinct voice. A great way to do this is to create a voice journal: a free-form document written in a character’s voice, talking to you, the author, on a variety of topics. Develop these documents until each character sounds unique, and then apply what you’ve learned to your manuscript. Second, compress your dialogue as much as possible, cutting fluffy words, whole lines or even entire exchanges.

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“Chief among the most common problems, in first chapters especially, are scenes presenting characters who are perfectly happy in their ordinary worlds. The writer thinks that by showing nice people doing nice things, readers will care about these pleasant folk when the characters are finally hit with a problem.” ~ James Scott Bell

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“Nearly always in my mind a story begins with a character or characters. This holds good though the main interest of the story may be incident or the surprise of its plot. Making the story is with me the process of providing these people with things to do and say which will express them. I never began with a title (they are my plague), or a setting. Once or twice with a situation. Occasionally with a sentence which came into my mind from heaven knows where.” ~ H. C. Bailey

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Know Your Genre

This goes hand in hand with knowing your audience. There are key elements that fans of certain genres will expect to find when they start reading your work. More often than not, genres can be divided further into subgenres that accommodate very specific motivations and plotlines. Keep it consistent. It is possible to write a successful cross-genre story, but you don’t want to mix it up too much. A supernatural romantic thriller, for example, could end up alienating fans of all three genres.

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“Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.” ~ Margaret Atwood

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“Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.” ~ Elmore Leonard

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“Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.” ~ Elmore Leonard

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“”Always carry a note-book. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.” — Will Self

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Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window. ~ William Faulkner

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“I have a cheat-sheet for each one of my characters about their personality, the way they look, etc. So there is no possible way that I could have writer’s block.” ~ R.L. Stine

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