Check out this article from Digital Book World about a new venture at Barnes and Noble to allow self-published writers to offer print versions in B&N venues, hopefully a step that will help keep them afloat. Chime in with your views on whether this new option is worth a look.
This post from Kristen Lamb’s blog gives some good basic guidelines for using and punctuating dialogue. These principles can be surprisingly hard to master, so a good primer is always helpful. The one I see most often is the use of an action as if it were a dialogue tag. To add to Kristen’s list, I’d say, “Watch out for that darn Autocorrect in Word. If you have it turned on and you accidentally type a period instead of a comma after the dialogue, Autocorrect automatically capitalizes the next letter, so you end up with two punctuation gaffes, not one.
Thanks, Kristen!
Today we are going to talk about dialogue. Everyone thinks they are great at it, and many would be wrong. Dialogue really is a lot tricker than it might seem.
Great dialogue is one of the most vital components of fiction. Dialogue is responsible for not only conveying the plot, but it also helps us understand the characters and get to know them, love them, hate them, whatever.
Dialogue is powerful for revealing character. This is as true in life as it is on the page. If people didn’t judge us based on how we speak, then business professionals wouldn’t bother with Toastmasters, speaking coaches or vocabulary builders.
I’d imagine few people who’d hire a brain surgeon who spoke like a rap musician and conversely, it would be tough to enjoy rap music made by an artist who spoke like the curator of an art museum.
Our word choices are…
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Filed under correct grammar for writers of fiction, ebooks publishing and selling, Editing your novel, grammar rules for writers, indie publishing, Learning to write, Publishing, punctuation for writers of novels, self editing for fiction writers, Self-publishing, style for writers, Writing, writing novels
You might want to check out this list of 31 romance publishers who accept unagented work from Authors Publish!
The folks at Lit World Interviews conducted a survey. See where you fall on the spectrum! I posted my reasons for not finishing a book and for feeling kicked out of the story world; see if you agree!
Recently, we here at LitWorldInterviews.com conducted a survey, “Why do you put a book down?” and through the assistance of the writing community we had a very nice response. Now it’s time to share what we found.
First, I want to say why the survey was conducted. We wanted to help writers by giving them the information they most need. If a reader takes the time to check out your book and don’t like it, they are unlikely to give you a second chance with your next work. First impressions mean a lot.
86.30% of those responding were Female, thus leaving the remaining 13.70% Male. Considering the majority of those reading novels are Female, although not quite this extreme, I’m comfortable with sharing what we found.
There were 34 sub-categories as a result of the survey. Those results were then placed into 5 main categories: Writing, Editing, Proofreading, Taste, and…
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It looks as if it’s time to get serious about Google+. Let me know of your experiences with this platform. What do you find works best?
More than 625,000 People join Google+ EVERY DAY, according to Digital Buzz and Huffington Post statistics. Before I even joined Twitter, GooglePlus (Google+) was my first Social Media network of c…
I’ve responded to this post with the thoughts and comments below. Share your own additions!
I agree on these issues! It’s amazing how many cuts I can find when I know I have to. And the result is almost always an improvement.
I especially have to catch redundancy. It’s a good tool for drafting, since you can try out six different ways of capturing a setting or an emotion. But then come back and pick the best one of the six!
A few points:
- Additional “filler” (or “filter”) words are “**She heard** the wind whistling through the trees” vs. “The wind whistled through the trees,” and “**She saw,**” which works similarly. These are so hard to catch.
- RE spell-check: Instead of turning off spell-check, turn off “autocorrect” functions. You will be notified of typos, but the computer will not try to guess what you really intended. I’ve seen some pretty crazy computer-supplied corrections!
- Also, grammar-checkers are notoriously poor substitutes for your own knowledge. The one on my Word program misidentifies fragments and rails against all kinds of style choices that work beautifully to establish voice.
- Finally, do give “older” books a chance, even if you know that these days, you don’t dare write in an older style. The Victorians, for example, lived in a slower age, but they wrote some of the most gripping fiction you’ll ever read.
I’ve heard varied reports on using Twitter to promote books. Is Anna’s process the best to follow? How do you use Twitter?
Swedish indie author Anna Belfrage reports on her trial to see whether Twitter can sell self-published books and queries whether the return justifies the
Source: Opinion: To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Does Twitter Worthwhile for Self-published Authors?
Check out these software tools from Jean. Do you use any of them? What was your experience like? Do you have others to recommend?
I hope by sharing with you, these posts will stand as a reminder to myself, not to repeat the same mistakes over again.
Mistakes cost when you have to do something over and over, not just in time but often in money too.
I tried to use “workaround” software but that only make the job harder and take longer. You know what I mean like using a shoe to hang a picture instead of hunting down that long-lost hammer in the garage.
No one software does everything. Pick the one that works best for each task.
Listed at the bottom are some of the ones I discovered and love.
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I’ve been writing about this issue quite a bit on this blog, mostly because I’ve been disappointed by a number of the books I’ve picked up recently. My own concern is whether I’m being too curmudgeonly, since the books I can’t make it through often seem to have many fans. Here, I posted about the value of voice for smoothing over glitches that would otherwise stop me. And here, just recently, about a plot device in mysteries and thrillers that made me quit in the final chapters.
Others include what I call “illogic“: people who just don’t act like normal people or events that couldn’t happen because the author needs characters to behave bizarrely or the world to reorganize itself to make the plot work out. Hate that!
And not too long ago I stopped reading a book where everybody was so terminally nice that even when conflict reared its leonine head, everybody smiled and and gave it a gentle hug.
Finally, when I read a scene I could have written myself based on the hundred+ times I’ve already seen that exact scene or read that dialogue (e.g., “I want to be there for you”), I have a hard time pressing on.
Am I being too persnickety? I’m eternally grateful for books that surprise me, even if only just a little, with a view of the world I couldn’t get anywhere else.
Jog on over to the original post and add your thoughts, or share them here.
Here is the first of our LWI Survey Questions. Never a list, just the one. Yes, I know there are two but the second is clarifying the first. The results will be shared, minus names provided.
Make sure to share this post around through social media and reblogging.
Paddy and his mom!
Just Can't Help Writing 