Ever had critique partners question a sentence like this? The waiter that spilled coffee on my new dress offered to pay the dry-cleaning bill. Some will say you shouldn’t use “that” for a person. But Garner’s Modern American Usage and other expert sources say it’s acceptable. Are your critique partners …
Category: Writing
Collected resources for writers
I added a couple of new pages: you’ll find them under the “Resources” menu. The Freebies page is a collection of my downloads, including cheat sheets and the manuscript formatting guide. The Recommended Reading page will look familiar to anyone who’s taken one of my seminars. It’s a list of …
Don’t hide the POV character’s identity
One of the most common point of view errors we see in amateur novels is what I call Hidden Identity Syndrome. This seems to be an attempt on the part of fiction writers to replicate something we see in movies: A nondescript figure walks into a darkened room, rifles the …
How to tell a good story
I’m taking a blogging break this week, but here’s a little something: Ira Glass of the radio show This American Life discusses the elements of storytelling in this series of videos from Public Radio International. Glass is speaking of nonfiction, particularly short nonfiction for broadcast. But the principles apply in …
Mid-Winter Conference Preview
The Florida Writers Association’s Mid-Winter Conference West and Reading Festival is coming up next month. I’ll be teaching three classes:
How to format different kinds of quotations
When you’re incorporating quotations in a nonfiction work, there are two ways to do it. Short quotations can be placed inline, in which case you use quotation marks. Longer quotations should be placed in a block format, in which case you don’t need the marks. For example, a short quotation …
Q&A: What to make of those -ic and -ical suffixes
Hi, Kristen— What about the usage of terms such as: Historic vs historical Geologic vs geological Biologic vs biological etc.? Thanks, —John Great question, John! Odd pair of suffixes, those, and between them they form a mountain of adjectives that may or may not differ in meaning.
When to use single or double quotation marks
Considering that the rules for quotation marks are relatively simple (I mean, compared to something really complicated like the comma), it’s surprising how often we see errors with them. In dialog, stuff that’s said aloud goes in quotation marks. “I can’t believe she said that.” (Stuff that’s not said aloud …
Fiction Q&A: Using italics for character thoughts
Hey Kristen — Sorry to pester you, but I didn’t know who else to ask. I was going over a critique someone gave me, and they mentioned that top editors teach to never use italics, even with internal thought. Some say never to use italics at all. Here’s my concern. …
The ‘rules’ about exclamation points
Much advice about the use of exclamation points in fiction comes in the guise of “rules.” I’ve heard several: Never use exclamation points. You may use one exclamation point per book. Only use an exclamation point if the character is shouting. By now you know me well enough to know …