While some people find it a breeze, I have always found writing dialogue difficult. If you are in this same boat, there are things you can do to build this skill.
Writing Dialogue
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Monthly Archives: June 2013
Lessons from my week
Playing with tense
Try rewriting a piece of your writing, perhaps just a paragraph or so, using different tense: past, present, future.
Redundancy
Becoming more effective in your writing can require getting rid of redundant words. Sometimes I describe in a flourish of superfluous language, my characters talk in meandering waffle…and it all gets a little too much. Today I’m taking a piece of writing I did in my blog from 17th February 2013 and am cutting it down, to make it more succinct, more effective. This is an experiment really, to see if my writing is improved by paring it back, being more mindful of what I include and what I remove.
Novelling
A few things have happened since I last blogged: 1) I finished my Masters degree (yay me!), and 2) I arranged my novel into chapters! Both occurrences have significant consequences.
Novel critique
Notions of genre are increasingly slippery and difficult to pin down in contemporary novels. To what extent does Michael Pryor’s Hour of Need draw on features of more than one genre? What are the effects of such intermingling of genres and especially their ideological implications?
Creating fantasy
This process of writing a novel is a totally fascinating experience: watching the ebb and flow of my creativity and motivation, working out what time of day I am most productive, learning how to be flexible with my routine, realising the importance of keeping some way of recording flashes of inspiration with me at all times, spending more time with my characters than my friends (or at least it feels that way!) and having it dawn on me that a novel contains a hell of a lot of words…and I have to write them all!