Commentaires de EternalTeaTime sur What small change can I make to my writing, that increases the quality greatly? Elmore Leonard's rules for writers. Using adverbs is a mortal sin 1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want. 2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. 3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. 4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. 5 Keep your exclamation points under control. 6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". 7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. 10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
What Good Writing Is. Write Like a Girl (or Guy) If all the characters you create talk exactly like you do, no one but your mom is going to want to read your book—and maybe not even her if you haven't called recently. That's why you need to understand how to write dialogue that sounds authentic, even when your character differs from you when it comes to their age, region, education level, social status, background, personality, and/or gender.
Each of these factors plays a role in how a person (real or fictional) speaks, and you need to consider all of them to make your characters’ dialogue sound truly legit. But today we’re focusing on gender. Let’s preface this whole shebang with a disclaimer: Like anything involving differences between sexes, this can be a bit of a touchy subject. The first studies in 1922—not exactly the golden age of feminism—used what linguists call the “deficit” approach, so named because women’s language use was considered deficient compared to men’s. Things have improved significantly. Handling problems. Top 10 Storytelling Cliches Writers Need To Stop Using. Cliché is the enemy of good writing. We, as writers, are trained to kill clichéd phrases in sentences. But that's not the only place they can hide—they can infect the spaces between the words, too.
Clichés can infect storytelling techniques. Need to build some tension? Have a time bomb with a digital readout slowly ticking down to zero! Is your narrator a dick? Blame it on abusive parents! Want to get all writerly in conveying the plot? These are storytelling devices that pop up again and again, crutches for the writer to lean on and help move the story along without actually having to stretch their abilities. 1. Why it's easy: Describing a character when you're writing in the third person is pretty easy when the narrative voice is omniscient. Why it's a cop out: It's lazy, it's been done to death, and anyway, no one looks in a mirror and takes stock of all their features in severe detail. 2.
Why it's a cop out: This is the "little did he know" principle of storytelling. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. "As long as you can make another human being say, Writing Advice from H. P. Lovecraft.