All Write - Fiction Advice

Technicalities In part 1 of Dialogue Dilemmas we looked at the ground rules for creating multifunctional, realistic dialogue.   But what about the nitty-gritty, the technical side of creating dialogue? Where do you start a new line of dialogue? What about internal thoughts, how should they be presented? How do you correctly set out dialogue? What about quotation marks? These questions all relate to the technical side of writing dialogue, the things you have to get right. Unlike a lot of fiction writing, there are no bending rules where dialogue is concerned. The first thing that all writers should learn is how to correctly format dialogue, i.e. set it out correctly. Dialogue Formatting It’s important that you clearly denote who is speaking for your reader, so dialogue must always be clear. There are still lots of writers who don’t use this correctly. Firstly, whenever a character speaks, always start a new paragraph. Don’t make the classic mistake of tagging one c...

Ground Rules Dialogue is straightforward if you know how to do it properly, and shouldn’t present any problems, but lately I’ve seen many self-published books that use incorrect or badly structured dialogue. Writers are still getting it wrong. If you want to go down the route of traditional publishing, i.e. finding an agent or publisher, then it’s paramount that the silly mistakes found all over self-published work isn’t apparent when you submit to an editor for scrutiny. Dialogue should be correct and properly structured, which means writers should be aware of ground rules. Once you know those ground rules, you can concentrate on the technicality of constructing dialogue. Move the story forward Firstly, dialogue is necessary to move the story forward. That means it should be concise, it should get to the point and relay pertinent information to the reader as part of the continuing story arc. Dialogue should never turn into an info-dump - in other words, don’t fill your sc...

In the final instalment of how to avoid bad writing, we’ll take a look at a few more common errors that writers haven’t yet understood, or have chosen to ignore at their own peril. There are quite a few, but I’ve highlighted the ones that crop up all the time in narrative, common errors that can be and should be avoided. Adverbs One of many things that drive me crazy is the use of too many ‘ly’ adverbs (although they’re not to be confused with adjectives that end in ‘ly’).   Adverbs are used to modify a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. They’re words that don’t really belong in the narrative – that’s not to say you have to eliminate all traces of them, because you don’t have to go that far. Some are needed at certain points and can be useful, but on the whole, many are unwelcome. For example: She looked up at him lovingly , his face so fetchingly constructed… This is the kind of stuff found in a lot of romance-style novels, and it’s awful. The use of adverb...

We continue our look at the kind of things that cause bad writing, and ways to avoid them so that they never crop up again. As with most things, once you learn to recognise them, you’ll be better equipped to deal with them when editing. In Part 1, we looked at sequence of actions and separating character actions in order to achieve better sentence structures and avoid some of the flaws which are commonplace in fiction writing. This week we’ll take a detailed look at a couple of more bad writing examples, and ways to eliminate them from your narrative. Unnecessary Speech Attribution There is one thing that many writers still do when it comes to writing dialogue; they continue to get sentence structure incorrect by attributing speech tags when they are not actually necessary.    In laymen’s terms speech tags, or attributions, are a way of identifying the speaker. For agents or publishers it can be especially infuriating when writers do this, because dialogue str...

We’ve all been guilty of bad writing at some point during our writing careers, more so at the start of our writing journey, when it’s all new and daunting and we lack the experience. In fact, bad writing is all part of that journey. We all have to write badly in order to improve and become better writers. That said, there are many aspects of storytelling that writers still haven’t got to grips with, the kind of things that are easily rectified, but more importantly, are easily avoidable. Unfortunately, many writers just can’t be bothered to correct bad writing or, worse still, they ignorantly think it’s okay.   Bad writing may be okay for an oblivious writer, but not for a discerning agent or publisher. And because there are so many misdemeanours where bad writing is concerned, I’ve collated together some that I have come across from time to time while critiquing. Sequence of Actions Writers constantly ask me about this. It seems to foil a number of beginner...

In part 1, we looked at the most common literary devices; the kind that most of us have used regularly perhaps, things like symbolism, metaphor or foreshadowing. There are less well known ones too, ones we may have heard of but probably don’t know too much about. But knowing about them and how they can enliven your narrative is a positive thing, after all, the more knowledge the writer has, the better the writing in general. Therefore, an overall knowledge of as many literary devices as possible is a good thing. So, which are the less common ones, and what do they do? Euphony Connotation Allusion Assonance Motif Euphony refers to pleasant sounds created, particularly with soft vowels and soft consonants. It derives from the Greek word “euphonos”, which loosely means sweet-voiced. In other words, it’s about words or phrases that are noted for their charm, harmony or melody in the sounds that they create. It is often found in literary novels or poetry and ...