So you’re a talented writer. Excellent!. You’re also an overwriter. Not good! You overwrite because you don’t realize how effective something you’ve just written is–and so you add to it, puff it up, emphasize it, repeat it in different words, draw it out, etc. 

Overwriting undermines the effectiveness of what could otherwise be a […]

• Never, ever explain your dialogue. If it doesn’t convey what you want, rewrite it. 
• Paragraph whenever a character starts speaking unless just a very few words precede the dialogue (He looked up.) Don’t bury your excellent dialogue—set it off. Paragraphing for dialogue also makes a dialogue […]
  

People love to pick up on the codes from the signals we all put out, and in fiction it’s one of your strongest forms of reader participation. So the less you explain things to your readers, especially characters’ emotions, the more intense their involvement. There will be times when an explanation will be unavoidable or […]

You probably have a pretty good idea of what mastering dialogue could do for your writing. If you write short stories or novels, you want your characters to captivate and convince the reader. Those characters come to life—or fail to—when they speak. 

Crisp, revealing dialogue that fits naturally into the mouth of its speaker […]

The process of creating interesting and memorable characters whose fate readers can develop a stake in is just that: a process, not an event. You want readers to get to know your characters the way they get to know people in real life—a little at a time. So in the first five pages, writers should […]

The most common mistake we find writers making, albeit with the best of intentions, is to open their novels with some kind of information—exposition—rather than with a scene, something that happens. (Or by pulling the reader’s attention from an opening scene to explain it in some fashion.)

This is often deliberate, the idea […]