Dialogue vs exposition: finding the balance So, here’s the trouble with showing and not telling: showing usually takes a lot more words. There’s a wonderful quote from Anton Chekhov that goes: “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” I love it and I use it a […]
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When (and how) to use fragmented dialogue in fiction You know how real conversations rarely sound like perfectly polished sentences? People um and ah, interrupt each other, trail off mid-thought, or just don’t quite say what they mean. So why would fictional dialogue want to look like a grammar textbook? I’ve talked elsewhere about how
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Dialogue tags: What they are and how to use them Dialogue is one of the most powerful tools in a writer’s arsenal—but it’s also the tool that causes the most anxiety in emerging writers. Keeping your characters’ conversations flowing while injecting expository information, managing each individual voice, avoiding clunky phrasing, and charting a path around
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The importance of the narrative climax in storytelling Ever set off a firework and instead of soaring majestically into the air and exploding into all the colours of the rainbow it just kind of… fizzles? I mean… no, neither have I. I’m actually scared of fireworks. But I’m imagining it, and I bet you can
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How much backstory is too much? You may have heard it said that prologues are falling out of favour in the publishing industry. Like just about every rumour of its kind (“Publishers and agents are fed up with first-person present-tense narratives!” or “Young Adult dystopian fiction is on its way out…”) this one isn’t really
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How to make sure your protagonist’s character arc is doing what it needs to do When writing your story, one of the most crucial elements is your protagonist’s character arc. Readers want to see growth, transformation, and evolution—it’s part of what turns a series of interconnected events into a narrative. So… how do you make
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How to find your author voice When I start working with a new class, I get them to do an exercise in our first session. It’s a deceptively simple writing task: I ask them to describe, in no more than two or three sentences, the room that we’re sitting in. I use this exercise to
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Stop Self-Rejecting: How to Get Past Self-Doubt and Start Submitting Your Novel Once upon a time, I was an unpublished author with a story that meant a lot to me, but wasn’t getting any traction no matter how many places I submitted. Then one evening, my mother handed me a page she’d torn out of
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How to Know When Your Novel is Ready to Submit to Agents and Publishers They say that art is never truly finished — it’s only ever abandoned. Sometimes, the moment of abandonment evolves naturally as the final revisions conclude and the creator takes a deep breath, steps away from their creation, and nods with tired
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The Final Read-Through: A guide to catching sneaky typos before hitting “submit” So, you’ve finally done it. You’ve completed the final draft of your shiny new manuscript. You’ve fought off self-doubt and writer’s block; you’ve conquered plot holes and procrastination. Your protagonist’s character progression forms a perfect arc, your narrative beats are as tightly choreographed
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