Dialog tags are sometimes tricky to use. When to use them? Why? Where? How much?
I’m not going to assume you don’t know what dialog tags are. I’m not even going to go into grammar and whether you should ever use “said” versus something else. I’m just going to give you four rules of thumb that I give my authors. View full article »
Having just spotted another one, I decided to detail this particular peeve. I can’t say it’s a personal one, because I’ve never met an editor who said they didn’t mind it.
If you send in a query letter and/or manuscript and say that your work is copyrighted, I’m 99% certain to reject it. It’s very insulting and shows that you are an amateur. View full article »
Now, live on your radio, we bring you the latest from the alien invasion. But first, these messages.
It’s been a really busy month for me. I’ve got posts I want to write, but between work and my new physical therapy program (which is doing wonders for my mobility), I’ve fallen behind on nearly everything. I’ll hopefully be caught up next week and start doing more blogging.
However, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the 75th anniversary of the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938. It’s not only a wonderful production (seriously, listen to it if you have the chance; I have it on old-fashioned cassettes, so I should get a digital version myself sometime soon), but it’s even more notable for the panic it caused. View full article »
Sorry, Marvel. ALL heroes are super.
“Superpower” is a technical term used by some writers and editors, myself included. It’s awkward when used in superhero fiction, but generally speaking it’s a great term packed with a lot of information.
Your protagonist must have a superpower. Your secondary characters usually need them too. Your villain always has a superpower, but an antagonist doesn’t always need it. (Yes, there’s a difference between a villain and an antagonist. There’s also a difference between main characters, protagonists, heroes, and viewpoint characters, but that’s another blog post.) It’s advisable to have a kryptonite as well, but that’s not as important as long as you’ve practiced.
So what is this superpower thing? Flight? Super-strength? The ability to leap tall buildings faster than a speeding bullet while running alongside a train?
It can be, but it’s not necessarily supernatural. A character’s superpower is defined as anything they can do better than anyone else in the story. Similarly, a character’s kryptonite is that which forms an obstacle they cannot overcome. View full article »
Just for fun, I thought I’d post ABE Books’ Literary Character Quiz. Who did you get? I got Sherlock Holmes. I am not unhappy with this result.
I can actually see this as pretty helpful when building your own characters. Put them in the quiz and find out who is most like them in literature., and then tweak your characters accordingly. Feel like your character is too much like that more famous one? You can fix that. Want to increase the resemblance? You can do that too.
It’s September 22nd, Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday. This is officially Hobbit Day for fans.
It’s also my niece’s birthday. Happy birthday, Emily!
I just thought I’d share an amusing story for today: airplane passengers take Flight 666 to HEL on Friday the 13th.
I’m not usually one for rom-coms. Of course, I have nothing against them per se — and I’m a complete romantic sap in real life. But your average romantic comedy usually doesn’t appeal to me because they’re generally quite predictable and need to be based around some central element that makes them stand apart. View full article »
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