• Vividness• Diction• Narrative drive • Fragments for rhetorical effect• Word choice• Eyeball kick• Freeze-frame• Mimic sounds• Physical gestures to show not tell
When writing fiction, you almost always want to show rather than tell. By showing, you infer through a character’s actions or dialogue what one feels.For example, Astonished, Laura said, “That’s no…
Of the five senses, taste is the rarest in stories. The reason is that we’re not eating, drinking, smoking or falling face-first into the dirt as frequently as we are seeing, hearing and smell…
The human body really isn’t meant to perform for hours on end some of the tasks that our modern writing and office equipment demand of it.All too often, our necks cramp from looking at compute…
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” – Stephen King“Say what it is you have to say in as few words as possible.” – Ernst Jones“Listen to what you have written. A dud rhyt…
As Goodreads is the place for readers to hang out, it also ought to be the place for authors to focus a good part of their book promotion efforts. After all, if you wrote a…
• Should you ever co-write your book? Sometimes you come up with a great story idea with another person. Or your discussions and critiques of one another’s works are inspiring. So you decide to co-…