Tag: Prose

Crafting Effective Dialogue: Writing Between the Lines

Crafting Effective Dialogue: Writing Between the Lines

When I wrote my series on crafting emotional resonance, I promised a future post on crafting effective dialogue. This is another element of your writing that will elevate your scenes and emphasize the emotions your characters are feeling. So let’s get into it.

Character

The most crucial piece of believable dialogue is to ensure that your characters talk like themselves. This comes down to Continue reading “Crafting Effective Dialogue: Writing Between the Lines”

Crafting Emotional Resonance: Part 4 – Precise Prose

Crafting Emotional Resonance: Part 4 – Precise Prose

Today marks the end of this series on writing emotionally resonant scenes and stories! There will be one more related post in a few weeks that covers writing effective dialogue—plus a critique post next week that provides insight into how all of these tips can be applied—but this will be the last how-to post that’s officially part of the series. Today I want to talk about how your prose can make or break the tone and emotion of your writing.

I’ve talked about why I love classic literature before, and one of the reasons is that classic authors took word choice very seriously. They made a point to choose exactly the right words to convey their meaning, connect to their themes, and highlight the emotion they wanted to resonate with readers. Mark Twain said well that,

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

As authors, we know that words have power. This is certainly as true on the micro level as it is true of story as a whole! Yet our specific word choice within stories, within scenes, within sentences is often less careful than it could be, and our stories—and their impact on readers, by extension—suffer for it.

The question is: How do we fix it? Continue reading “Crafting Emotional Resonance: Part 4 – Precise Prose”

5 Tips for Writing Vivid Descriptions

5 Tips for Writing Vivid Descriptions

My brain decided to flip-flop Monday and Tuesday this week, so… this is late. Because yesterday didn’t feel like Tuesday (and apparently I didn’t consult my calendar yesterday). But here we are with a new writing post.

Authors tend to fall into approximately four camps when it comes to description in early drafts. 1) Too little description; everything is dialogue or action. 2) Too much description; we’re overwhelmed by the detail of every blade of grass. 3) There’s the right amount of description… but it just sits there and looks pretty. 4) The magical people who can actually write fantastically vivid descriptions on pretty much the first try (believe it or not, I know people who fall into this category). I usually fall somewhere between too little description and flat description… which is really frustrating since I know the principles for description and when I’m editing description is one of my strong points. But what are those principles? Continue reading “5 Tips for Writing Vivid Descriptions”

5 Tips for Writing a Great Montage Sequence

5 Tips for Writing a Great Montage Sequence

Several weeks ago, a friend of mine asked for advice on how to write a montage sequence and I, having no tips off the top of my head but being aware that I’d really admired the montage in 100 Days of Sunlight by Abbie Emmons, decided to study said montage for some pointers to pass on. So this post is thanks to Maple for the question and thanks to Abbie Emmons for writing a montage sequence well-worth studying. ;) Continue reading “5 Tips for Writing a Great Montage Sequence”