Storyville: What We Can Learn From Reading Bad Fiction
What can a bad story teach us? Turns out, it's a lot.
Walter Mosley, Natural Language, and Empathy
By Joshua Isard
Everyday language is a way to understand different kinds of people. Diving in to those differences is vital.
Writing Tips From the Don Winslow Universe
Certain writers demand to be read, and doing so is a class to all who do. Don Winslow is one of them.
Dialogue: The Number One Mistake Newbie Writers Make
There's no lack of online advice about how to write dialogue in fiction. But there’s one issue I see over and over in the dialogue of newbie writers, and I have yet to find one post that tackles it.
Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs
You've always heard the maxim, "Show, don't tell..." but almost no writing teacher ever explains... How. Discover how to strengthen your prose by unpacking abstract and static verbs into descriptive action.
Talk It Out: How To Punctuate Dialogue In Your Prose
Quotations marks, italics, em dashes, or none of the above: these are a few different ways to punctuate dialogue in your prose.
Storyville: Narrative Hooks
In:
Character, Craft, Dialogue, Literary Devices, Narrative Hooks, Plot, POV, Setting, Storyville, Structure
Writing a great narrative hook isn't easy, but it's one way to grab your audience and never let them go.
As I Lay Mostly Dying
The baddest of the prose villains, that one word that, when mis-used, can single-handedly wreck an entire page of fiction for me, if not the whole piece: As.
Writing Effective Dialogue
Writing authentic, compelling and engaging dialogue is one of the most vital yet misunderstood challenges of the writing process.
Nuts and Bolts -- Punctuating with Gesture and Attribution
In:
Dialogue
Smart actors use the stage business of peeling an apple or lighting a cigarette to create a layer of interest that dialogue alone can never convey. Learn to punctuate your dialogue with gesture and attribution to propel interest and achieve better pacing.
Discon nected Dialogue: Part One
In:
Dialogue
The temptation for new writers to answer every question raised in a fictional dialogue with a perfect, clever, instant response is very strong. Chuck demonstrates how this flattens the energy of a scene and what to do instead.
Body Language: Part One
In:
Dialogue
Leave it to Chuck to make an assignment of watching movies with the sound turned off... and have this make perfect sense. This essay explores gesture and movement as an important counterbalance to your dialogue.
![Pure Poe POV with "Ghost Eaters" author Clay McLeod Chapman](https://zerocool.litreactor.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/class-small-promo/images/store/clay_mcleod_chapman_-_pure_poe_pov_jun_15.jpg "Pure Poe POV with "Ghost Eaters" author Clay McLeod Chapman")
