Writing Tips

A few weeks ago the internet decided curly quotation marks are a sign a robot wrote your book. Somebody posted a warning about it on Threads, screenshot and all, and the comments filled with writers promising to switch to straight quotes immediately. First they came for the em dashes. Then the Oxford comma. Now curly…

Half the romances on the shelf run on a secret, a lie, or a crossed wire that one honest conversation would dissolve. Readers catch it around chapter three. They keep turning pages, but they stop worrying, because a worse question has moved in: why doesn’t she just ask him? A misunderstanding can carry a book…

Somewhere in your draft is a death that changes nothing. The characters grieve for a scene, the plot pauses to notice, and then it resumes exactly as it was. The test is direction. A working death bends the story somewhere it could not otherwise have gone. A survivor makes a choice she would never have…

A slow manuscript and a fast one usually fail the same way. Whole stretches pass where nothing changes. Pacing is change per page. Every scene should alter something the reader can point to afterward: what somebody knows, what somebody wants, who can be trusted. When pages turn and the answer is “nothing,” readers call the…

Ask a hundred authors whether they need an editor, and ninety-nine say yes. Ask whether they need a cover designer, and half of them reach for a design app. While nobody was watching, the place readers meet your cover moved. It’s under an inch wide now, on a phone, mid-scroll. The cover’s job is to…

“That”s are usually dead weight. In most drafts, most of them come out. “She said that she’d come” works as “She said she’d come.” “I knew that it would rain” doesn’t need the word either. The that is a hitch in the breath, a habit borrowed from speech, and it slows every sentence it sits…

My sister who lives in Tulsa is a doctor. My sister, who lives in Tulsa, is a doctor. One of those sentences tells the reader I have at least two sisters. The difference is a pair of commas. Grammar calls them restrictive and nonrestrictive, which helps nobody. In plain terms, a clause without commas is…

Every manuscript has a scene the writer could recite in her sleep. She has read it so often it has gone glassy. The beat arrives exactly on schedule, and nothing surprises anyone. Before restructuring anything, walk into that scene as a stranger and ask two questions: what doesn’t somebody here know, and what is somebody…

When a horror scene stops working, the culprit is usually on the page. The writer showed the thing. Teeth, mask, face, the full inventory, nothing left in the dark. Whatever frightened us for three chapters becomes a prop the moment it’s lit. Shirley Jackson knew better. In The Haunting of Hill House, the scariest scene…

A bedtime story looks like the least promising place to build comedy. The plot is a wolf chasing a hen across a farmyard. The audience is five years old and has opinions about everything. William McCleery built Wolf Story on that flimsy frame in 1947, and it’s still one of the funniest books in print….

Two people share a kitchen, agreeing about the guests, the traffic, and what time the pie goes in. Nothing is wrong with the dialogue. Nothing is wrong with the pie. The scene is dead anyway, because they agree on everything, and they agree because they know the same things. Scenes run on gaps. Odds are,…

The usual way to deliver backstory is confession. A character finally sits still and tells us what happened. It works, but the reader hears the truth at the same moment the character does, and you lose the thing backstory is best at: the delay. Sharon Creech found a better vehicle, and it happens to be…