Think about voice in terms of style—your voice is your unique style of writing. When we start out, we tend to write like we think writers ought to sound, instead of finding our own sound. This leads to stilted, stiff writing. Here are some tips for finding your distinctive style. …
Avoiding cliches and purple prose
The next item on the Elements of Fiction Editing Checklist packs in several problems we see in novice writers’ voices: ☐ The author avoids flowery or “purple” prose, as well as cliches, recycled phrases, and unnecessarily repeated words. Now, there are some words you need to repeat or you’ll sound …
Set New Goals for 2015
If you haven’t already, this is a great time to set some goals. Not resolutions. We all know how those end up. I’m talking about real, attainable goals for your writing career. Your goal could be time-based, for example, to spend an hour writing every day. Or it could be …
Finer points of voice
Part of the problem in talking about voice is that voice is interwoven with a writer’s personal style. Several points on the list need to be taken loosely, since what is effective can cover a broad range. ☐ Paragraph and sentence lengths are varied in accordance with pace. Monotonous sentence …
Happy Christmas
To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.—Luke 2:11 Blessings to you this day and in the new year. Thanks for letting me contribute, in whatever small way, to your writing journey.
When is it OK to open your novel with “telling?”
Over on Facebook, I got some pushback to last week’s article “The difference between Storytelling and Dramatization.” One Facebook commenter noted that the “before” examples given in show vs. tell articles like mine are “often deliberately and obviously poor by any standards.” She’s talking about examples like the one I …
The difference between Storytelling and Dramatization
In his excellent book The Art & Craft of Writing Christian Fiction, Jeff Gerke urges novel-writers to stop seeing themselves as storytellers and instead think of themselves as filmmakers. As you’re examining your manuscript for telling consider this: If your book were a movie, what would the camera record? In …
Use Narrative Summary Appropriately
Last time, I said Inappropriate Narrative Summary was one of the main “telling” problems I see in manuscripts. Sometimes summary is appropriate. When your hero has to make a long journey, but the journey itself isn’t what’s important to the story, you could put “he traveled across the Atlantic that …
What does ‘show don’t tell’ mean, anyway?
Writers are forever being told “show don’t tell.” I even put it on my Elements of Fiction Editing Checklist: ☐ The author is showing and not telling. But what does this mean? And with every writing instructor in the business teaching this all the time, why do we still see …
Use a voice that’s appropriate to your genre
If, like every good writer, you are reading a lot in your genre, you should have a good feel for what kind of voice is typical. But good writers also read widely. If you have done so, especially if you’ve read a lot of the classics, an “antique” voice can …