Setting: Know Your Character’s Home to Write Better Dialogue
A technique to use a character’s home to help refine dialogue.
Dialogue: Two Writing Tactics for Mystery Writers to Engage Readers
Two writing tactics to write dialogue that engages readers and fits in the scene, moving the story forward.
Dig Into Dialogue
Dialogue is story action. Dig into your characters so they say the words that move the story.
How To Make Dialogue Come Alive
Learn the techniques of character goals and feelings to write dialogue unique to each character that creates tension in your mystery.
Your Mystery’s Supporting Characters
5 basics to creating supporting characters. How they interact with your sleuth and suspects to move the story forward.
Suspects and Subtext
Subtext is any content which is not announced explicitly. Baffle your sleuth and your reader with suspect subtext.
Dialogue Adds Character to Your Characters
Who Is Talking? How your characters speak reveals their personality. Especially in mysteries, characters reveal their character, even when they try to hide it. The challenge for writers is to make the language each character uses, appropriate to that character and distinct from other characters in the story. That way, readers understand who is talking.Dialogue is a verbal action. When a character speaks, they are actively moving the story forward. When the language, rhythm, a […]
Characters Don’t Speak in Semicolons
Dialogue and Narrative Grammar is essential to good storytelling; it keeps the reader from getting lost. When writing narrative good grammar is essential. But when your characters speak, they talk like human beings. People don’t speak in semicolons and neither should your characters. Robert Harris wrote a trilogy about the great legal orator Cicero: Imperium, Lustrum,…