When I first started writing fiction, I desperately wanted to be Margaret Atwood. I read several of her novels and, consciously or not (probably consciously), my writing voice started coming out a lot like hers—only minus the talent and the authenticity because… (wait for it) I’m not Margaret Atwood. I didn’t sell a single short story.

          Many years later I decided to write a thing (it was sort of a prose poem but really, it defied genre) completely as “me.” It turned out quirky, funny (if you share my sense of humor, that is), and weird—rather like someone I know. When I finished it, I thought, well, that was fun. Maybe no one will buy it, but who cares? It sold to the first magazine I sent it to and was later anthologized.

Too much has been made of the process of finding your voice as a writer, and I think it gets us into trouble. We believe it’s something that it’s not and then we make it way more complicated than it needs to be.

Contrary to what you might think, voice is not just a way of talking or sounding. It’s a way of being in the world. And how do we ‘be’ except the way we already are?

We never have to think about finding our voice as a person. Our voice is everything about us; it’s who we are, how we see the world. Why would that be any different on paper than it is in real life? When we put pressure on ourselves to “find our voice,” whatever we end up finding becomes more like a persona, a disguise, and then it’s not our voice anymore. It’s fake.

The process is a lot like dating. When we try too hard to be something we’re not, it might work for a little while and then it just…won’t. Because it won’t feel authentic.

Listen to any interview with Margaret Atwood and you’ll notice she sounds in person exactly the way she does on the page. Same with Stephen King. They’re not making up some new entity who they suddenly become on paper. Even though they’ve both created numerous convincing and authentic characters who are completely diverse from each other, we can still identify an Atwood or King novel by voice alone. Why? Because the essential personality of the author shines through those characters. How could it not? They created them.

But is it bad or wrong to copy other writers when you’re just starting out?

Actually, no. It can be a great way to get started—almost like a nudge that coaxes your true voice out.

Another exercise worth trying is to choose your absolute favorite novel and copy it out by hand. I’m not suggesting plagiarism or even mimicry. Instead, this can be an effective learning tool. I once wrote out the first hundred pages of All the Light We Cannot See and was amazed by what I picked up that I’d missed in two readings of the novel. Writing it out by hand allows you to see firsthand how the magic has been created.

But when it comes to finding your voice, the main thing you need to do is stop putting up roadblocks and instead allow the process to happen.

How do you do that? Here are a few ideas.

• Ask yourself: who are your favorite authors? What genres do you like to read? Explore what it is about them that appeals to you. Chances are there are some elements common to all of them.

• Try Natalie Goldberg’s exercises in Writing Down the Bones of keeping the hand moving while you write. What this does is silence your inner critic. If you’re busy writing, they can’t get a word in edgewise, nattering that you should be writing X rather than the Y that you want to write, or telling you that you’re no good or the work isn’t coming out the way it’s supposed to.

• Try Ray Bradbury’s idea in Zen in the Art of Writing of keeping word lists to discover your loves, your hates, your obsessions and fears. This was his way of finding his voice as a writer—which really amounted to nailing down who he was as a person. It might work for you.

Flannery O’Connor wrote: “The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.” What we are able to make live is directly related to who we are and what we love. If what you love is cowboys and westerns, then chances are when you write about them, your voice will sing.

People used to ask Stephen King why he was “wasting” his talent writing horror. Why? Because horror is what he loves. And what exactly has been wasted? He is arguably the best horror writer in the world. If he had ignored his obsessions and tried to be a literary writer, there’s a fair chance he would not have been as successful as he is.

If you want to find your voice as a writer, just be yourself on the page. There’s nobody more suited to the task.

Check out these additional posts about voice!
How Do You Find Your Narrator’s Voice?
Character Voice Versus Author Voice

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post Finding Your Voice as a Writer appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Voice is one of those elements that can make or break a manuscript. If you get it right, the novel will live in the reader’s mind long after they put the book down. Without it, the story won’t quite achieve what you’ve intended even if all the structural elements are in place.

So… how do you find your narrator’s voice?

What Doesn’t Work

Here’s one thing that doesn’t work: verbal tics. How many times can you have your character repeat certain phrases before it starts to get, well, annoying? Not very many.

Here’s another: sarcasm.

Sarcasm is an easy voice to capture, so it seems to be the one many authors lean toward to make their narrator sound different. Cross it off the list. No one is consistently sarcastic, or angry, or melodramatic. When you make your narrator into a type like this, they come across as one-dimensional and unrealistic.

Who Is This Person?

The idea of voice only being a mood or a way of talking misses the bigger picture. Voice is a way of being in the world. For that reason, I would recommend approaching it from another direction: by exploring who this person is that you’re trying to bring to life.

While I don’t think character questionnaires are the way to nail voice, they can be a good steppingstone in getting to know your character—because I don’t think you can capture a character’s voice until you fully know who they are.

Look at how the answers to a few key questions can change the type of person you’re dealing with.

What does your character do for a living?

A baker will have a different way of viewing the world than a plumber or a doctor. They’ll notice different things, use their own analogies, have unique priorities, behave differently in various situations. You’ll know they’re a baker not because the author has placed them in a kitchen wearing oven mitts but because they see ideas for new pastries in the shapes of flowers. They’ll think like a baker.

If you were to read a story in which all you got was oven mitts and cookie trays, you’d feel like you were reading something generic—because the author would not have captured a baker’s way of navigating the world.

How old is your character? What is their marital status?

A twenty-something single woman will have a different way of dealing with people than a fifty-something woman who’s just left a long, dull marriage. Or maybe the marriage was abusive: that would give her another voice. Or maybe she’s never been married, but her sister is in a happy marriage: different voice again. She’ll have to manage Valentine’s Day; she might get upset by seeing couples at candlelit tables for two in a restaurant.

Voice is all about the lens through which your character views the world. One of the most significant things that clarifies this lens is their goal: what do they want in the story? If someone wants respect, they’re going to act in certain ways and say certain things that will be very different from someone who’s out for revenge.

Where do they come from? What kind of family do they have? Wealthy or poor, loving or abusive? Are they the first-born of a large family, or are they the baby? Are they an only child?

Every answer creates a type of person who will act and react in diverse ways. Many of these actions and reactions won’t be conscious, but they’ll be there, and they’ll cement in place patterns of behavior that will (hopefully) cause that character all sorts of problems.

But answering those questions is only step one.

What Next?

Now, you have to put your characters into action: slip on their shoes and see the world through their eyes. Usually that means writing your way into the story in one form or another: by journaling in their voice, answering interview questions in their voice, or (my preference) simply throwing yourself into the story world and getting them moving.

This is why it’s so important to differentiate the narrative voice from the author’s voice. Unless the author is the narrator, they have no business speaking up. Your reader will have picked up a particular book to experience the world from the point of view of a female scientist in the 1960s (Lessons in Chemistry) or a college student in the classics who becomes enthralled with an eclectic group of students with whom he doesn’t quite fit in (The Secret History). The extent to which the author can deliver on that promise also turns out to be the extent to which they’ve captured the narrator’s way of seeing the world, which is… voice.

Why Voice Is So Important

Voice is not the only thing in a novel. But if you don’t nail it, you won’t have used point of view to its fullest potential, nor will you truly know your story—because you won’t know the main actors who are driving it forward. It won’t feel authentic, and your readers won’t feel the same emotional draw that they’ll experience when a character comes to life on the page and says, Let me show you what the world looks like through my eyes.

Isn’t that why we come to fiction in the first place?

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post How Do You Find Your Narrator’s Voice? appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

We’ve all heard about the importance of finding your voice as a writer. Maybe you’ve had a critique from an editor who felt the narrative voice wasn’t sharp enough. Or maybe a critique mentioned the author’s voice creeping into the narrative and you found yourself thinking, huh? Isn’t that the voice I worked so hard to develop in the first place?

Well, yes. And no.

We each have a voice that we write in, and it’s as individual as a fingerprint. A novel by Margaret Atwood will sound different than one by Stephen King, and while this might be related to both genre and characters, there’s an ineffable quality to each author’s voice that seeps into their work regardless of how hard they might try to keep it out.

The trick is not to let that voice break the fictional dream you’ve created in your work.

This can happen in several ways: when the author has an agenda they’re trying to slip into the story; when they inadvertently break the POV by stepping in to comment on something; and when they succumb to the temptation to use what Elmore Leonard calls hooptedoodle.

Having an Agenda

When we write a novel, we often (hopefully) have something to say. Let’s call it a theme, the answer to the dreaded so what? question. The line between theme and message, however, is a thin one, and if you’re not subtle enough about your intentions, your reader will sense you’re trying to teach them something and will back away.

Having something to say should not be the same as telling readers what to think. It’s always better to give readers questions to ponder rather than answers to swallow. So, if you have an agenda, shelve it. Give us something to think about. But don’t tell us we have to think like you.

As Ursula le Guin so elegantly puts it, a story’s job is to achieve meaning; it’s a door that opens onto a new world. Messages are for sermons. If all you see in The Hobbit is a message about greed, you’ve missed the magic.

Let the Narrator Narrate

When the author’s voice creeps into a defined POV, you pull your reader out of the fictional dream. It’s jarring. In fact, this gets to the heart of POV, where consistent character voice is crucial to reader immersion.

In any deep POV you choose, you’ll be seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. That means everything—from what they notice to the analogies they draw—must be filtered through a lens that is not your own. Douglas Glover calls this language overlay, and it’s one of the most useful POV pointers I’ve ever come across. A sailor will not think the same way as a baker, and this difference can run deep. As an example, the sailor might always have one eye on the weather; a baker might be perpetually attuned to smells. Your teen narrator who suddenly knows the Latin names of plants will pull readers out of the story scratching their heads and wondering how this narrator has such easy access to this specialized information. Not to say it can’t work. If the narrator’s mother is a botanist and has been teaching him the Latin names of plants from the time he was a toddler, it will add another layer to his character. But that has to be established in the story.

An objective POV is all about what can be seen on the surface, so the author’s voice definitely shouldn’t be part of that. And in omniscience, there is still a narrator—but unless it’s you, the reader shouldn’t hear your voice.

Avoid Hooptedoodle

Our name might be on the cover of the book we’ve written, but we should never take center stage in our novel unless we’re doing something funky with metafiction. One of the ways we sneak ourselves into our work is with fancy writing that calls attention to itself for no other reason than to wave a flag and say look what I can do.

I’m a huge fan of poetic writing, but I’m also a firm believer in the importance of double duty. Every element in a novel should do more than one thing. A pretty description of the weather should also be a reflection of mood or an ironic foreshadowing or whatever else you have up your sleeve. If you’ve written a whole paragraph about the dark billowing sky, let it also reflect a building dread in the narrator or allow it to serve as a reminder that the body he dropped into the lake might not have been weighted down with enough rocks.

But if that billowing sky is only there for the reader to admire, then it sounds like writing. And as Elmore Leonard also said: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Do your readers a favor: either take it out or give it a second job.

Finding Your Voice

The notion of finding your voice has never made sense to me. Your voice is who you are. No matter whose shoes you’re wearing in a particular novel, your voice will come through. If you don’t believe that, try reading one author’s entire body of work. You’ll meet a room full of characters who might all sound different, but there will also be something humming beneath them that they share: the person who created them.

You don’t have to find your voice. You are your voice.

What you have to do is write. A lot. Learn how to handle POV so that you, the author, remain the silent partner in this weird agreement you make with your readers when you bring a world to life. Don’t remind the reader that they’re reading a story. Allow them to believe in the dream.

As for crafting a character’s voice, well… that’s a topic that deserves its own post. Which it will have next time you see me here.

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post Character Voice Versus Author Voice appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Vocabulary and the way a character speaks are the outer layer of character voice—the icing on the cake. Instead of trying to build character voice from the outside in, get under the character’s skin by revealing how they experience and interpret the story world from the inside out.

Character voice bubbles up organically when every aspect of the story is seen through a character’s-eye view of priorities, perspectives, and agendas. It’s less like cobbling together a latticework of characters, setting, and events than it is establishing a running commentary on how the character views everything caught in that web.

“Running commentary” may sound like something suited for first-person or deep third point of view. In fact, continually inflecting the story with a character’s personal concerns is a fit for any point of view whose narrator is also a character. It’s a seamless way to write. The character voice—with all its attendant observations, judgments, opinions, prejudices, preferences, thoughts, and emotions—effectively becomes your framework for worldbuilding.

The idea of character voice often brings to mind a character’s favorite words and phrases—for example, whether a character calls something neat, cool, lit, or dope. That’s coming at character voice from the outside in. To build character voice from the inside out, start with what the character observes in the first place.

1. What Characters Notice

What you know is inside a room will almost certainly be different from what the viewpoint character notices. What gets noticed depends on who does the noticing. Everyone sees the world through the lens of their own mindset, a potent brew of knowledge, experience, motivations, goals, preferences, hopes, fears …

A musician notes different qualities in a concert hall than an interior designer. A six-year-old child beelines right past the collection of R&B vinyl to get to the puppy. The best friend sees a comfy, lived-in nest while the exhausted mom sees dirty socks and a pile of bills on the counter.

This is where knowing your characters’ histories comes in handy. What memories and emotions are associated with the people, places, and things they meet?

TIP: For deep-level character exploration, there’s no better tool than the Character Builder at One Stop for Writers.

2. What Characters Think About What They Notice

Once you’ve worked out what a character would notice in any particular scene, it’s time to express that observation using their unique frame of reference.

Frame of reference is everything. To a character who spent summers at Grandma’s, it’s not simply the blue couch in the parlor; it’s Grandma’s sacred slab of dusty blue granite. To a carefree bachelor, it’s not a twelve-year-old girl; it’s a whiny tween suffering through Nikes instead of Yeezys.

This personal frame of reference often overtakes more logical, objective methods of description. Only narrators immediately know such details as another character’s exact height or age. The viewpoint character must make a guess: a woman so short he’d need to fold in half to kiss the top of her head, a guy about Mark’s age but with less gray hair.

It would be hard to get too specific with these judgments. People are opinionated. They have beliefs, and hopes, and prejudices about virtually everything they encounter. Don’t be afraid to be judgmental; you’re only letting your character out of the corral.

3. What Characters Are Stewing About

Most people have some sort of agenda at any given moment. What’s on the calendar for today?

This dynamic is supercharged for story characters, who are actively struggling toward specific scene and story goals. Like any of us facing a potentially eventful day, characters mentally and emotionally home in on their goals. Are they on the right track? Is today the day they’ll succeed? Or will all the cards come tumbling down?

Even the smallest actions, such as what a character chooses for breakfast, can be influenced by their goals for the day. If today’s the big presentation, will they eat a carefully balanced meal, pound a half dozen donuts, skip food to avoid nervous heaves, or forget about breakfast entirely? The way your character approaches these details reveals what they think is important.

Filling in the Blanks

Dialogue and thought, including vocabulary and syntax, are the external clothing of character voice. What does the character’s speech reveal about their upbringing, education, and experience? Will readers notice favorite words, phrases, or sayings? This characteristic language creates a neat, recognizable package for readers.

Just don’t forget what’s on the inside, as well.

Peering through a character’s lens into the world is often simpler to carry out after the first draft. Once all the story things are on the page, there’s more room to figure out how the character would view them.

At that point, it’s time to add color. How could you describe every person, place, and thing in a way that reveals something about how the character views it? What do those elements evoke for the character? Dialogue, description, backstory and facts, setting—virtually every element of the writing can be shaded through this personal lens.

Is using character voice to inflect the entire story a characterization technique or a description technique? The answer is yes. #wink

LISA POISSO - Resident Writing Coach

Lisa Poisso specializes in helping new and emerging fiction writers. A veteran of the disciplined world of classical dance, she brings that same practiced artistry to writing—where structure, form, and technique are springboards that give you freedom of movement on the page. Explore her Writing & Editing Resources for valuable tools to develop your manuscript, and subscribe to the Writes of Fiction newsletter to receive Lisa’s hand-picked writing advice delivered directly to your inbox. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Lisa below.

The post Build a Character’s Voice from the Inside Out appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Almost every character should have their own voice—their distinctive way of communicating their worldview.

To illustrate, here are three lines from Harry Potter that reveal Hermione’s, Ron’s, and Harry’s individual voices, respectively.

“Don’t go picking a row with Malfoy, don’t forget, he’s a prefect now, he could make life difficult for you…”

“Can I have a look at Uranus too, Lavender?”

“I don’t go looking for trouble. Trouble usually finds me.”

Because Hermione believes in following rules, she regularly tells Ron and Harry to do likewise, and she’s often very logical about it. Ron, however, tends to be a little coarser than the other two and usually says comical one-liners. Finally, Harry, who is always associated with trouble, often has to defend and explain himself.

When boiled down to its most basic parts, voice is made up of two things:

What the Character Talks (or Thinks) about + How She Says it = Voice

What Your Character Talks About

What someone chooses to talk about (and not talk about) reveals character. It reveals worldview, personality, and priorities. For this reason, it’s often helpful to work from the inside out. Knowing your character’s wants, needs, flaws, fears, and layers, will make crafting their voice easier. With that said, it’s also okay to work from the outside in, especially for side characters. You may craft a pleasing voice that then indicates who the character is.

In The Lord of the Rings, the Hobbits often talk about food. They eat a lot more than other characters so food is a higher priority for them. Because they bring up food a lot, we know it’s what they are thinking about a lot. They don’t casually strike up conversations about advanced battle tactics; they don’t have a war-based background. And any conversation they do have about battle tactics wouldn’t be on the same level as a warrior.

So, their culture, interests, and experiences influence their voices. And because they come from similar places, they talk about similar things. However, each Hobbit still has his own voice (because each Hobbit has his own personality). While Pippin would ask about second breakfast without a second thought, Frodo wouldn’t say anything.

How Your Character Talks

Just as the character’s background and personality influence what she talks about, they also influence how she talks. Education, age, and social circles will factor in as well. You will want to consider word choice and speech patterns, and when appropriate, slang and dialect. The character’s dominating emotions can also play into their voice’s tone.

Listen to how Samwise Gamgee talks:

“It’s like the great stories, Mr. Frodo . . . Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think I do, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. . . . . Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going.”

Notice words like “Mr. Frodo,” and “folk,” help establish Sam’s voice. Pretend, instead, Gandalf said this. The word choices and speech patterns would be different. Instead of “lots of chances” he might say “many opportunities.” He might pause in different places and use different sentence structures. He’s far more educated and experienced than Sam, so he’d say those same thoughts in a different way.

Character Voice in Viewpoint

Whether in first person or third person, most stories today are written from the point of view of a character (usually the protagonist). This means that character’s voice will influence the narration. However, actually getting that on the page can be a little tricky. Here are three quick tips.

Regularly Write in Deep POV

“Point of view penetration” refers to how deep the writer gets into the character’s perspective. At the deepest level, the prose takes on the thoughts and attitudes of the character. This is the most effective place to be to get voice on the page (learn more).

Utilize Similes and Metaphors

What your viewpoint character chooses to compare something to will tell us a lot about him. If he compares the color of the sky to the white static on the television, we know he spends more time around or thinking about t.v. than he does nature.

Add Lines that Speak to Worldview

Watch for opportunities to slide in a worldview your character has about something that comes up. Maybe someone your viewpoint character is listening to references the police. Assuming it suits the passage, go ahead and slide in a brief line that clues us into what that character thinks about the police. To them, are they “pigs”? People to avoid? Or protectors?

Here are some more dos and don’ts of getting your viewpoint character’s voice on the page.

SEPTEMBER C FAWKES - Resident Writing Coach

September C. Fawkes is a freelance editor, writing instructor, and award-winning writing tip blogger. She has edited for award-winning and best-selling authors as well as beginning writers. Her blog won the Writer’s Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers Award, Query Letter’s Top Writing Blog Award and has over 500 writing tips. She offers a live online writing course, “The Triarchy Method,” where she personally guides 10 students through developing their best books by focusing on the “bones” of story.

To learn more, visit SeptemberCFawkes.com and grab her AMAZING free guide on Crafting Powerful Protagonists. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with September below.

The post How to Showcase Your Character’s Unique Voice appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Editing freaks a lot of people out. Drafting is creative and inspirational, and every writer LIVES for that moment when you get into the groove and the words just flow. But editing is kind of the opposite. It’s analytical, with a rigid set of rules that have to be followed. I think this is why so many writers say it’s their least favorite part of the process.

I’m one of those weird people who love the revision stage. LOVE. IT. It’s one reason I started our monthly Phenomenal First Pages contest. I really like reading a passage of writing and picking it apart, examining it from a macro and micro perspective to see how it can be improved.

In the entries that I critique, I see a lot of the same mistakes, which means I offer a lot of the same suggestions. And one bit of advice that I say A LOT is Read your work aloud. It’s one of those little practices that are so simple but can help your story in huge ways. 

Why Does It Work?

The bottom line is that we can read in our heads super fast. But when we read out loud, we’re forced to form the words with our mouths, which takes more time. This results in a slower process, and when we slow down, the brain can more accurately see what it’s reading. 

Mental reading results in a certain amount of brain processing as we’re seeing, analyzing, and comprehending the words on the page. But reading out loud adds an auditory element as our brain not only sees the words but hears them, too. More processing is involved. More processing requires more brain power and leads to better editing, comprehension, and pretty much everything else the brain is doing at the time.

Bottom line? When you read your work aloud, you catch a lot more mistakes than when you zip through a manuscript mentally. Here are some of the issues that reading aloud can help you see and resolve.

1) Typos and the Like

We’re so familiar with our own stories that when we read them in our heads, our brain tends to see what it knows we meant to write rather than what we actually wrote. The process of reading aloud helps us see (and hear) the typos, misspellings, word omissions, and other minor mistakes that can result in a messy manuscript. So from a simple proofreading level, reading out loud can have a major benefit.

2) Poorly Structured Sentences

When we read out loud, we’re more likely to read the words the way they would be spoken. So when we get to a rambling or wordy sentence, we stumble. That verbal fumbling is a sign that the sentence isn’t clear and needs revision. It’s not as likely to happen when we read in our heads, so reading out loud is great step toward tightening the writing.

3) Repetitions

One thing that catches the reader’s attention in a bad way is repeated words and sentence structures. Three sentences in close proximity that start with I, multiple sentences that are structured similarly, or even repeated usage of a normally invisible word like cold—these repetitions can start to grate on the reader’s ears. Read those passages aloud, and the repetitions will grate on your ears, letting you know which words and phrases need to be rewritten.

4) Confusing Passages

When we’re not mentally racing through a paragraph, it’s easier to be more analytical, and one thing we should always be aiming for with our writing is clarity. Does this make sense? While reading aloud, you can keep questions like this in the back of your mind, and it will become more obvious when something is confusing or vague.

5) Pacing Issues

We all know what it’s like to read a scene that’s a little boring: we’re hit with the urge to skim ahead to the interesting parts. That skimming becomes more obvious with verbal reading because you hear yourself skipping content. Identifying the issues in our writing is sometimes the hardest part of the problem, and pace is one of those sneaky buggers that doesn’t announce itself. So slowing down and reading the words aloud can provide a better opportunity to see where the pace is dragging. (Psssst…it also works on the flip side, for passages with too-abrupt shifts.)

6) Unrealistic Dialogue

Readers are intimately familiar with dialogue because it’s how they communicate. So stiff, stilted, or unnatural dialogue is going to pull them right out of the story. Reading aloud can help you identify places where your character’s speech needs to be refined. Here’s what Browne and King, authors of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, have to say about this:

“We’re used to hearing relaxed, normal speech in real life. much of the stiffness in a passage of dialogue that doesn’t show up when you read your work silently will spring right out at you when you read out loud. You may find yourself making little changes as you read. If so, pay attention to these changes—your ear is telling you how your dialogue should sound.”

One of their suggestions is to have a friend read through a passage of dialogue with you, like it’s a screenplay. You can also record yourself reading a scene’s dialogue. Either way, hearing the dialogue spoken aloud will give you ideas on where it might not quite ring true.

7) Voice Inconsistencies

For me, getting a character’s voice right is one of the hardest things. Just figuring out all the nuances of a character’s individual voice is hard enough, but then you have to write it consistently through the entire story. But Browne and King come to the rescue again, with an interesting solution to this problem.

They recommend reading aloud each character’s point-of-view passages consecutively. By putting them all together, you remove any other character’s narration and can focus solely on one character at a time. This allows you to hear any inconsistencies in their voice.

8) Lack of Emotion 

A common issue that I see in critiques has to do with character emotion—the lack of it, to be specific. If we want to really engage readers, we have to tap into their emotions, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to clearly communicate the character’s emotion. Yet too often, it’s not clear what the character is feeling, so the reader doesn’t know what they’re supposed to feel.

When we read aloud, we tend to naturally read with inflection. If your reading sounds flat and dull, it’s very possible that it’s missing the important emotional piece. Examine your character. Is their emotional state clear? Is it being conveyed in a way that’s engaging for readers—shown, instead of told, through physical cues, internal visceral reactions, dialogue, and thoughts? 

The benefits of reading your work aloud kind of go on and on. I suggest verbally reading your whole manuscript at some point—not all at once, and not even consecutively. But reading every word aloud during the revision process is going to improve your story in lots of small (and not so small) ways, leading to a much more satisfying experience for your readers.

BECCA PUGLISI

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post Want a Stronger Manuscript? Read It Aloud appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Have you ever read a book or watched a movie where the dialogue has been so beautifully written that you are in that moment, experiencing the character’s emotions and hanging on to their every word? Or you know exactly what the character is feeling or thinking because of their lack of dialogue? Great dialogue can make stories and characters shine and, in novels, it’s a valuable tool to break away from writing too much internal monologue and a wonderful way to show readers the relationships between your characters and reveal important information. 

Popular culture is full of memorable movie lines that are quoted the world over. See if you can figure out which movies the following lines are from (extra points if you can name the character!):

A/ Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. 

B/ Here’s looking at you, kid …

C/ Show me the money!

How did you do? A was Gone with the Wind, B Casablanca and C Jerry McGuire. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t know them (as we can’t see every movie ever made!) but chances are you’ve heard at least one. 

Screenwriters are masters of dialogue. They rarely have the opportunity to include a character’s innermost thoughts on the screen so they rely heavily on dialogue to drive the story forward, develop characters and convey a range of emotions. By studying the art of dialogue through reading screenplays and watching movies or TV shows, it will help you develop your own characters and stories.

There’s an array of movie and TV scripts available on the internet for you to read and I recommend you start with the screenplay of one of your favorite movies. I will add that screenplays available on the internet are not pirated, as screenwriters and film production companies often make them available for the public to read after a movie or TV show has been produced. 

When studying dialogue, here are some points for you to consider:

What Isn’t Said

Humans rarely say everything we’re thinking and feeling and neither should your characters. If we’re talking about something that scares us or we’re in danger of being found out or simply too embarrassed to talk about a subject, we change topics or do something that helps us avoid talking about something we don’t want. 

The Coen Brothers are brilliant at holding back dialogue that creates tension so that when a character does speak, we’re mesmerized by their words and really want to know what they have to say. The movie No Country for Old Men is a great example. 

No Two Characters Should Sound the Same

They way in which a character speaks is a culmination of their experience, upbringing and beliefs and no two people should ever sound the same. Listen to the way your friends and family talk. People have favorite words and expressions, some interrupt conversations while others sit quietly and wait until they’re asked a question or think a long time before saying how they feel. Others avoid talking about their emotions all together. Imagine a conversation between a teenager and someone in their mid-forties. They’re likely to use different idioms and expressions the other may not understand.

Look at each of your characters and figure out what kind of person they are. Are they a leader, follower, questioner, peacemaker or a troublemaker? How would this be reflected in the way they speak? Their traits will greatly influence their conversations with others. 

Read the Dialogue Out Loud

The best way to discover if dialogue is working is to read it out loud. You can do it yourself or enlist a friend or family member to be the other character or you can use one of the many available reading programs that will read what’s on the page to you. Does the dialogue sound natural or stilted? Are they using the other character’s name too much in the dialogue (a mistake nearly every writer does!)? Are they too wordy? Remember, most conversations between people are short and simple. Most of us don’t use big words and opt for the simpler version to get our message across. We also don’t speak for great lengths of time without being interrupted and neither should your character. 

Don’t Tell Us Something We Already Know

If an event has happened the reader has been privy to, we don’t need our characters to relate the same event to another character. It could be briefly referenced in a way such as “Like what happened last Thursday” and we’ll instantly know what the character is talking about. If you have information to give the reader or another character, do so in an organic way, just like you would inform a friend in real life. 

Be a Screenwriter for a Day

Try writing an entire scene only with dialogue. Then read through and see how the conversation unfolds. Does it sound realistic? Does it flow like a conversation between real people would? You may find this makes it easier to pinpoint the areas of dialogue that need addressing. Of course, once you’re happy with the dialogue you can add in the inner thoughts and descriptions like you would in the rest of your manuscript. 

Get Creative!

There’s a classic scene in Before Sunrise where the two main characters manage to convey how they feel in dialogue but in a unique way. I won’t elaborate here, as you can watch it unfold in the video below. Are there any ways you can creatively use dialogue in your scenes? 

One of the best screenwriters of our time is Aaron Sorkin. He’s written The West Wing, Steve Jobs, The Social Network and A Few Good Men among other TV shows and movies. He’s a master at dialogue and I highly recommend you read at least one of his screenplays. The website Script Slug gives you access to scripts he has written. You can find it here: https://www.scriptslug.com/scripts/writer/aaron-sorkin

Learning how to write effective dialogue can be one of the most interesting and fun aspects of the craft. What’s your favorite movie or TV show that has great dialogue? 

ALLI SINCLAIR

Alli is an Australian multi-award winning and bestselling author whose fact-based fiction explores little-known historical events. Alli’s books have been voted into the Top 100 Australian novels of all time and when she’s not writing novels, Alli is working on international film and TV projects as a screenwriter and producer.

Alli hosts the Writers at Sea cruise retreat for writers, presents writing workshops internationally, and volunteers as a role model for Books in Homes. Alli is an experienced manuscript assessor and loves to work with writers to help their manuscripts shine.
Website | Newsletter | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads

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Writing a novel is flipping difficult. It often takes years to complete your first novel (and even more years after that to write a good one). You heard that right — writers’ first books are usually a hot mess. That is because, as untested authors, we don’t yet know how to write a book. 

On average, most writers pursuing traditional publication write four novels prior to getting a literary agent. In other words, it takes most writers writing a few books to get the hang of things. 

If you are reading this, you are likely curious about how you can shorten your learning curve and write a better book more quickly. Let’s talk about the eleven ways you can improve your novel-writing skills today. 

1. Acknowledge That You Don’t Know Everything and Your Writing Isn’t Perfect

One surefire sign of a newbie writer is thinking your writing is perfection. Nothing anyone can say is applicable because if they have a critique, it means they don’t understand your story. (And not that your story needs improving — certainly not that!) 

I was there, friends. Once upon a time, I thought my books were the next NY Times bestsellers and ready for publication — often after completing the first draft. 

As I’ve said many times before on my YouTube channel, iWriterly: first drafts are not final drafts. According to Terry Pratchet: “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

Therefore, be open-minded to the fact that while you might have a lot of great elements within your story, you have many drafts ahead of you to polish your story and get it ready for the eyes of readers. 

2. Research How to Write a Good Book

As newbie writers, we can’t hope to figure out how to write a book on our own. Or, at least, most of us can’t. Therefore, you will want to do some research to learn about how to write a good book. (HINT: It’s about more than just grammar!) For example, some topics you might want to research include:

• Plot structure
• Character arcs
• How to give a character a unique voice
• Pacing 

Here are a few resources you could check out: 

• Nonfiction books about how to write a novel
• Free articles and blogs
• YouTube: iWriterly, for example, is in a niche called AuthorTube where aspiring and published authors talk about how to write books
• Online courses (Writers Helping Writers has a list of recommendations in the Online Learning Centers section of their Resources for Writers page)
• Formal education at a college or university 
• Fiction books by the greats in your genre

Keep in mind that many of these options are free. You don’t have to immediately pull out your wallet. However, if you are going to pay for a product or service, always research whether or not the person teaching the course has applicable experience and is an expert in their field. 

3. Consider Outlining Your Book before You Write It 

(One Stop for Writers Story Maps)

If you haven’t yet heard of plotters and pantsers (or architects and gardeners), allow me to enlighten you. A plotter (also called an “architect”) is a writer who plans out their story prior to writing it. A pantser (someone who “flies by the seat of their pants” — also called a “gardener”) is someone who doesn’t plan prior to writing. They write and see where their muse takes them.

There is no right or wrong way to go about writing. However, a pantser has a lot more work to do in the editing phase because they didn’t plan out anything in advance, such as big plot beats. Therefore, consider checking out things like beat sheets or different types of plot structure prior to writing your book. (Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and Jami Gold’s blog have a lot of beat sheets writers use.) You don’t need to plan out your novel in advance, but it might be worth jotting down the big plot points you want to reach at certain places in your story. 

4. Work with Critique Partners and Beta Readers 

Critique partners and beta readers provide feedback on unpublished manuscripts. However, their roles are slightly different.

• Critique partners are writers who provide feedback on your work, usually by request (to exchange chapters or full manuscripts).
• Beta readers are people who read your manuscript as a reader first (rather than a writer). Most of the time, beta readers are not writers.

Without outside feedback, we can’t improve the stories. This is due to a writer’s blindness to our own story’s flaws from being too close to it. We can see it so perfectly in our heads, but it doesn’t necessarily translate well onto the page. It’s the job of a good critique partner and/or beta reader to read a story and provide feedback and suggestions for areas of improvement — thereby helping us make the best story possible. 

For more information on finding critique partners or beta readers, check out Critique Circle or look for local groups via the blogs for different genres, such as SCBWI or RWA.

5. Be Open to Critiques/Feedback on Your Work

It’s not just about getting feedback from critique partners and beta readers. If you are not open to making changes to your story, then getting feedback is a pointless exercise. Do your best to look at your story objectively and listen to what critique partners and beta readers are saying. 

6. Look Closely at Your Weakest Points

Did your critique partners and beta readers seem to have a consensus about what aspects of your writing could be improved? Those are most likely your “weak spots” as a writer.

For me, I’ve always struggled with info-dumps. Most recently, I’ve struggled with too much internalization (vs. dramatization). Simply knowing where you aren’t strong as a writer is helpful so you can teach yourself to spot the issues — perhaps even before you make them. 

Listen to what the consensus is for feedback. There is always the outlier — one critique partner or beta reader who has a completely different take on your story — but if there is a consensus, pay close attention to it. It more than likely is an issue you will want to address.

7. Edit the Book on Your Own MANY Times

As I mentioned earlier, the first draft isn’t the final draft. Most authors edit their books dozens of times before it gets to the version you see on the bookshelf. Personally, I edit my manuscript two to five times (front to back) by myself before sharing it with critique partners. After that, I work with critique partners and beta readers through many drafts (and self-edit in between).

Consider working with more critique partners and beta readers after you have edited your book and implemented the previous round of feedback. Ideally, you will want to work with them on several drafts of the book. The exact number of times beta readers and critique partners read the manuscript is going to be up to you and them. 

8. Brush up On Grammar

While good grammar doesn’t make a good story, bad grammar can pull readers out of one. As such, you will want to be able to write with proper punctuation, sentence structure, spelling, and so on. 

9. Read Books by the Greats within Your Genre

Dissect the books you love. Try to determine what it is you enjoyed about them and what that author excels at. In addition, think about ways you can emulate (or perhaps imitate) some of those skills in your own writing (without plagiarizing!!). 

10. Write Often to Sharpen Your Skills

According to Malcolm Gladwell, it takes 10,000 hours (or approximately 10 years) of practice to become an expert. While you don’t necessarily need to be writing books for 10 years before you are deemed “ready,” you do need to put in the time to practice your writing skills in order to become a better writer. 

11. Write the Next Book 

Going along with our previous point, the best way to be a better author is to write many books. That is because the more books you write, the better you will get at it. 

From my experience, writing a book isn’t something you can teach. Sure, you can learn the principles of writing a good book or learn how other authors write theirs. But you must learn how you as an author operate through the process. How you do it is going to be different from other people’s process. Therefore, the only way to glean that knowledge is through experience. 

Happy writing, friends!

MEG LATORRE

Meg LaTorre is a writer, YouTuber (iWriterly), creator of the free query critique platform, Query Hack, co-host of the Publishable show, blogger, and she formerly worked at a literary agency. She also has a background in magazine publishing, medical/technical writing, and journalism. To learn more about Meg, visit her website, follow her on Twitter and Instagram, sign up for her monthly newsletter, and subscribe to her YouTube channel, iWriterly.

The post Improve Your Novel Writing: 11 Tips For Newbies appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

When I first started writing, I was fresh out of university with a degree in English literature. I was determined to be a literary writer. To me, this was what being a writer meant. Never mind writing about the things that suited my personality. I would write big important novels for adults, and short stories with lots of sentence fragments. And never mind finding my own voice; I wanted to sound like Margaret Atwood.

Well, the short version of this story is: I am not Margaret Atwood. It turns out, big important novels for adults are not my thing at all. I write young adult novels, because the voice that most suits my personality is a teenage one. It took a long time to reach this point, however. I did not understand the wisdom of Mr. Ollivander in Harry Potter’s world, nor would I have accepted it. But like it or not, Mr. Ollivander was right: the wand chooses the wizard.

Flannery O’Connor had her own version of the wand merchant’s wisdom: “The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live…” I tried writing two important adult novels. They were utter failures. There was no magic in them, no spark. They weren’t me.

Seeking Your Own Inspiration

Having misconceptions about writing serious literature is one aspect of this problem. You will also no doubt encounter well-meaning friends and family members who advise you to write about vampires because they’re popular right now. Or you’ll have that uncle at the Christmas party who corners you with a story that would make a great novel and you should write it.

Writing what you (or other people) think you should be writing simply doesn’t work. Unless vampires are your obsession, unless your uncle’s story made all the hair on your arms stand up, chances are you’ll only be writing with half a heart.

Besides that, jumping on the market bandwagon is a recipe for disappointment. By the time your book is ready to meet the world, there’s a good chance the fad—whatever it is—will have passed and the market will already be glutted.

Uncovering Your Passion

What do we bring to life most effectively? The things we are passionate about. The things that keep us awake at night.

These are not always easy to pin down. If you had told me even ten years ago I would be writing historical fiction, I would have laughed. I’m not a history buff. But I have a mother who lived in Germany during World War Two and then in what became East Germany. I grew up hearing stories about her life. When I finally realized I needed to write about East Germany, I didn’t care if novels about East Germany were popular. I had a protagonist with a story that was bursting out of me, and I had to write it.

We don’t usually choose our obsessions. They’re built-in, ready-made. You don’t need to justify a love for dragons or aliens or cowboys. You just need to own it.

People used to ask Stephen King why he was “wasting” his talent writing horror. Why? Because horror is what he loves. And what exactly is being wasted? He is arguably the best horror writer in the world. Should he have ignored his obsessions and tried to be a literary writer? Would he have been as successful if he had?

Finding Your Wand

But what if you stumble into Mr. Ollivander’s store like the young Harry Potter, unsure of who you are and what you might be good at? There are a few things you can try:

• Pay attention to what you like to read. That’s often a good clue about what you might like to write. Include a list of your favourite movies and TV shows. Keep an eye out for what they all have in common.
• Try Ray Bradbury’s exercise of making lists of nouns to see what floats to the surface of your mind. What might these lists consist of? Memories. Things that frighten you, or amuse you, or puzzle you. He contends that this exercise was what lifted his work from imitation into originality.
• Do some journaling about the ideas you find yourself circling. If you look at many writers’ bodies of work, you’ll see they keep coming back to the same themes like a dog worrying a bone. Chances are you’ve got a few of those lurking in the background of your thoughts.

Above all, don’t apologize for what you write and who you are. Anything true, anything original and authentic, comes from this deep place.

Michelle Barker is the award-winning author of The House of One Thousand Eyes. She is also a senior editor at darlingaxe.com, a novel development and editing service, and a frequent contributor to its blog for writers, The Chopping Blog. Her newest novel, My Long List of Impossible Things, comes out in spring, 2020, with Annick Press. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and her website.

Set in East Berlin in 1983, The House of One Thousand Eyes is a young adult historical thriller. Seventeen-year-old Lena’s beloved uncle, a famous author, has disappeared.

Lena will stop at nothing to find him—but she must do so in a society of ruthless surveillance and control. Who can she trust to help her find out the truth?

Have you ever found yourself writing something that “wasn’t you?” Let us know in the comments!

ANGELA ACKERMAN

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post Writers, Remember: The Wand Chooses The Wizard appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

After we’ve been writing for a while, we’ve heard our share of writing rules. Sometimes we’re taught to avoid certain techniques, like prologues. Or we might be told that some storytelling approaches are too risky, such as using second-person point of view.

We might struggle with the balance between following the rules and stifling our voice. Or we might fear we can’t write the story we want to write because it doesn’t “fit” what’s expected.

However, for every rule, we can probably think of an exception that managed to break the rule—successfully. So what “lesson” should we really take away about writing rules?

Should We Ignore the Exceptions or Try to Learn from Them?

For many writers and editors, the lesson has usually been to ignore the exceptions: “Just because so-and-so got away with it, doesn’t mean anyone else can.” We might assume they succeeded just because they’re a big-name author or they caught a bit of lucky lightning in a bottle.

But if we look closer, we can often learn from the exceptions:

• Yes, grammar rules are important, but if we know the rules well enough, we’ll know how and when to break them on purpose for voice, style, character, dialect, etc.
• Yes, good writing is important, but good storytelling—an often nebulous concept that includes voice/style, pacing/narrative drive, premise, character goals, conflict, etc.—can overcome the weaknesses of bad writing.
• Yes, a strong plot is important, but an engaging voice can keep readers entertained enough to turn pages, even when not much is happening in the story.
• Yes, readers’ emotional experience is important, often focusing on a reader’s connection to a character, but other story aspects—the premise, situations, messages, etc.—can create an emotional experience for readers as well.

Exceptions Can Be Exceptional

I’m currently reading The Fifth Season, a Hugo Award-winning dystopian/apocalyptic fantasy by N. K. Jemisin. This story is amazing despite—or possibly because of—how many “rules” she breaks with her writing. (Read the prologue and first chapter with Amazon’s Look Inside feature.)

For a few examples, The Fifth Season starts with not only a prologue, but a long prologue—with seven scenes/snippets in several different settings and POVs—much of which isn’t in media res, such as these lines:

Here is a land.

It is ordinary, as lands go. Mountains and plateaus and canyons and river deltas, the usual.

The author even emphasizes how much readers aren’t meant to connect to the characters yet, saying the specifics, including this character’s appearance and emotional state, are irrelevant:

None of these places or people matter, by the way. I simply point them out for context.

But here is a man who will matter a great deal.

You can imagine how he looks, for now. You may also imagine what he’s thinking.

Then the first chapter’s opening line takes another character from the prologue and flips their POV for the rest of the book from third person to second person:

You are she. She is you.

However, the other characters’ chapters remain in third person, so readers need to adjust to second-person POV and back every chapter. The technique shouldn’t work. It should be too jarring, too disruptive to the reader’s experience.

None of these choices should work, given the “rules” we know. And yet, considering this story’s well-deserved awards, they do.

How Do Exceptions Successfully Break the Rules?

Rather than focus on the rules a story breaks, we can instead pay attention to what makes the exceptions work. What do they get right—so right that they overcome the usual problems?

Many point to Twilight’s storytelling strengths as the reason it succeeded despite the weakness of the writing itself. In the case of The Fifth Season, I’d point to the voice, premise, worldbuilding, and overall writing quality as reasons why it succeeds “despite.”

The very first line:

Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.

More interesting than the end of the world? What could that possibly be? We’re hooked.

The last lines of the prologue similarly grab readers’ attention:

This is the way the world ends.
For the last time.

For the last time? *shivers*

In other words, the main lesson we might take away from exceptions—and how they get away with breaking the rules when we can’t—is this: Our writing must have more strengths than weaknesses.

If our writing is strong enough, we can break the rules. If we can’t successfully break the rules that make sense for our story to break, maybe the problem isn’t the rule. Maybe we just haven’t yet strengthened our writing enough to make the rule-breaking work, and we need to try again. *smile*

Do you have any questions or insights about writing rules—or breaking them?

JAMI GOLD - Resident Writing Coach

Jami Gold put her talent for making up stuff to good use, such as by winning the 2015 National Readers’ Choice Award in Paranormal Romance for her novel Ironclad Devotion.

To help others reach their creative potential, she’s developed a massive collection of resources for writers. Explore her site to find worksheets—including the popular Romance Beat Sheet with 80,000+ downloads—workshops, and over 1000 posts on her blog about the craft, business, and life of writing. Her site has been named one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers by Writer’s Digest. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Jami below.

The post Rules? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Rules appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

As many of you know, I run a monthly critique contest here at the blog, where I offer to read first pages and share my feedback. People are so grateful to win, but I have to ask: who’s the real winner here? I get to read story openings no one else has access to with full permission to tell their owners what I think. In the words of Chandler Bing, does it GET any better than that??

Anyway, I’ve been doing this for a while now, and you can probably guess that when it comes to problems with first pages, I see the same things over and over. Because we all struggle with the same issues in our openings, I thought it might be helpful to write up a post highlighting these frequently seen problems and information on addressing them. So here goes…

Starting in the Wrong Spot

This is the advice I like giving the least, because no one wants to hear You’ve started in the wrong place. Because that means Rewrite your opening. But this is honestly one of the biggest problems I see. And I get it. It’s super tricky. Start too early, and your reader is wading through a flood of backstory and telling. Start too late, and they’re dropped in the middle of a confusing world and storyline going Huh? Unfortunately, the opening sets the tone for the whole story; if people are bored or confused, they’re not likely to read for long. So this is really important to get right.

Resources:
Finding the Sweet Starting Spot
Action Too Early
Setup Essentials
Opening Scenes: 3 Critical Elements

Too Much Telling

Show, Don’t Tell. It’s one of The Writer’s Ten Commandments. We all know that there are places where telling is ok, but your story opening is not one of them. The reason? It’s BORING. Telling drags the pace and pulls readers out of the story as they have to slog through long passages of passive narrative explaining how magic works, or the history of Couldntcarelessia, or why your hero’s parents’ divorce ruined his life.

Once your reader is fully crushing on your main character, you can get away with manageable bits of telling here and there. But the first pages are like a first date: what you see is what you’re gonna get, just way more of it. So when you find telling in your story opening, have no mercy and burn it like the kudzu that it is.

Resources:
Show Don’t Tell Part One
Show Don’t Tell Part Two
7 Ways to Find Telling in Your Story
Show Don’t Tell Master Page

Wordiness and Weak Writing

This happens when writers just aren’t concise enough with their prose. Rambling sentences, repeated words and phrases, redundant words—wordiness slows the pace and creates more work for the reader. They won’t verbalize it as such, but it will wear on them. And editors and agents have very little patience for it.

Resources:
Weak Writing: The Usual Suspects
Self-Editing for Writers
Crutch Words Tip Sheet

Failure to Create Empathy

Sometimes I’m reading an opening and there’s nothing technically wrong with it. It’s clean, polished, things are happening, but I just don’t care—and usually, it’s the character that I just don’t care about. When it comes to hooking or enticing readers, we’ve got to get them empathizing with the protagonist, otherwise, why will they keep reading?

Resources:
Tips for Building Empathy in the First Few Pages
Writing Endearing Characters

Overdone or Not Enough Emotion

If you’ve been following Writers Helping Writers for any period of time, you’ll know the emphasis we place on character emotion. Adequately conveying your character’s feelings in a way that engages the reader is one of the best ways to pull them into the story and keep them invested in the character. But this is another area where striking the balance isn’t easy. Emotions are often 1) overstated, seeping into the melodramatic or unrealistic range, 2) understated, leaving the reader not feeling anything for or with the character, or 3) written poorly, in a way that doesn’t engage their emotions.

Resources:
Fresh Ways to Show Emotion
Dive Deep with Emotion
Capturing Complex Emotion
First Pages and Character Emotion

Too Many Details

This one’s primarily for the fantasy and sci-fi writers who are tempted to throw in all the need-to-know information about their made-up world in the first chapter. But it also applies to any writer who struggles with the tendency to include too many details in general. Check out the resources for more info on how not to do this.

Resources:
Too Much Going On
Choosing The Right Details

Character Voice

I can hear the lambs screaming, Clarice. Before you freak out, I’m not talking here about your unique authorial voice; I’m talking about your character’s voice. You start talking about voice and everyone gets a little tense, but here’s the thing: to write a good story, the character’s voice doesn’t have to be spectacularly awesome. It just needs to be consistent. And this is where a lot of people fall short—even on the first page. Every word the character speaks, every memory recalled, analogy used—filter it all through their point of view, and you’ll have done most of the work.

Resources:
Finding Your Narrator’s Voice
Build a Character’s Voice from the Inside Out
3 Ways to Differentiate a Character’s Voice

Other Helpful Resources on Strong Openings

Jim Scott Bell’s List of Things to Avoid
6 First-Page Inclusions to Pull Readers In
3 Critical Elements for an Opening Scene
First Pages Tip Sheet
How to Craft a Powerful Set-Up

Other Mother Lode Posts

If you found this collection of resources helpful, you might be interested in some of our other compilation posts.

How to Write about Character Occupations
How to Show (Not Tell) Character Emotions
How to Write Conflict that Has Maximum Impact
How to Write about Your Character’s Pain
How to Write about a Character’s Emotional Wounds
How to Choose & Employ Your Character’s Talents and Skills
How to Use Amplifiers to Stress Characters & Elevate Emotion

BECCA PUGLISI

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.

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Some of my most enjoyable teaching experiences were with my friends Donald Maass and Christopher Vogler doing Story Masters, a four-day immersion in the craft of fiction.

For my day of instruction, I started off showing a clip from the amusing Albert Brooks film, The Muse. It’s the story of a middle-aged screenwriter facing a career crisis (which, in Hollywood, is almost redundant). Early on, Brooks is having lunch with a studio honcho who is about fifteen years his junior. Brooks has submitted an action script and wants feedback. The exchange goes like this:

Honcho: Let me put this in a form that’s not insulting, because I tend to be too direct. All my friends tell me that. The script’s no good.

Brooks: That’s the form that’s not insulting? What would the insulting form be?

Honcho: What’s wrong with the script … is you. You’ve lost your edge.

*Insert Brooks’ practically trademarked existential-angst expression*

Honcho: Oh, and the studio needs you to vacate your office so Brian De Palma can have it.

Brooks: You can’t give Brian De Palma my office!.

Honcho: It’s not really your office. We’re all just using space here. I’m where Lucille Ball used to be.

Brooks: Too bad you’re not where she is now.

In short, the lunch does not go well.

After the clip, I told the class part of the reason they were at Story Masters was to avoid ever being subjected to a conversation like that. How? By finding and keeping their edge. Which every writer has, by the way. The challenge is to dig it out and give if form on the page.

Just what is the edge? It’s you. It’s what sets you apart from every other writer. You are a unique human being, a package of singular experiences, passions, joys … not to mention DNA. The trick to this edge business is marrying your distinctiveness with craft mastery and an overall strategy for your novel.

Yeah, that’s all.

I then showed the students a quote from a former acquisitions editor at Penguin, Marian Lizzi. She was writing about the things that cause a house to say no to a manuscript. One of these is that the book is not “remarkable/surprising/unputdownable enough”:

This one is the most difficult to articulate – and yet in many ways it’s the most important hurdle to clear. Does the proposal get people excited? Will sales reps and buyers be eager to read it – and then eager to talk it up themselves? As my first boss used to warn us green editorial assistants two decades ago, the type of submission that’s the toughest to spot – and the most essential to avoid — is the one that is “skillful, competent, literate, and ultimately forgettable.” 

These words are more important now than ever. We all know about the “tsunami of content” competing for attention and repeat business, even though so much of it is (how do I put this in a form that’s not insulting?) no good.

However, a lot of it is good. Over the last nearly quarter-century of teaching the craft, I’ve seen the level of competent fiction rise significantly. With all of the teaching and critique-grouping and editor/agent-paneling and craft books and blogs out there, anyone with a minimal amount of talent—and a whole lot of grit—can learn to write competent fiction.

Which means we have to be more than good to stand out from the morass. The edge is critical to getting us there.

An old preacher once told his ministerial students that a sermon is no good unless it makes the congregation sad, mad, or glad. There is much truth in that. So try this exercise:

Write down three things that make you sad, three that make you mad, and three that make you glad. (Note: just for variety, try skipping anything political this time around!)

Next, take each of these nine items and write one page about why you feel this way. Go deep. Use your life experiences, how you were raised, what you’ve observed, specific scenes from your past. You never have to show these pages to anyone, so rant and rave and cry all you want. Hot tears forge sharp edges.

You now have nine pages of emotional information, unique to you.

When you develop your main characters, give them a set of sad, mad, and glad responses. They don’t have to overlap yours, but certainly may. Now create backstory to justify each feeling, keeping at it until you feel it too.

Your edge will emerge. Follow it, put it in the sinew of your characters and the tension of your scenes. If you do that, there will be no need for an uncomfortable lunch.

You can finish your book instead.

What are some of the things you do to push your writing past the merely competent?

JAMES SCOTT BELL

Jim is the author of the #1 bestseller for writers, Plot & Structure, and numerous thrillers, including Romeo’s Rules, Try Dying and Don’t Leave Me. His popular books on fiction craft can be found here. His thrillers have been called “heart-whamming” (Publishers Weekly) and can be browsed here. Find out more about Jim on our Resident Writing Coach page, and connect with him on
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