Hook your readers from the start A common complaint of editors and publishers is that a lot of the manuscripts they see have weak opening lines and take too long to get going. The truth is that potential readers aren’t going to hang around waiting for your story to...
Seven essential rules for proper dialog punctuation You’ve written some sparkling dialogue, so now it’s time to punctuate it. In this section, we’ll go through some of the main rules of dialogue formatting and punctuation. New speaker, new line Multiple paragraphs of...
Point of view, along with tense, is another big decision you’ll need to take in the early stages of writing a story. Point of view is about the grammatical ‘person’ who tells the story. There are three possibilities: First-person – ‘I’ or ‘we’. Second-person...
If there’s one piece of writing advice you’ll get about a zillion times in your writing career, it’s this: Show, don’t tell. Telling is when you give your readers direct information about a character or part of the story. For instance, you’ll say “Joe was really...
Fiction is all about creating the experience of real-life through made-up stories and characters. And because so much of what we experience in reality happens in conversations, it’s no wonder that dialogue is a defining feature of fiction. The following principles...
