What’s wrong with dialogue tags? Most writers use them as a coloring book activity. You’ve got some speech and now you want a verb. Said’s boring; let’s try whispered or shouted. The reason behind the urge is your desire to indicate emotion and tone, but result is almost always to yank the reader right out […]

If you’ve ever edited yourself, then you know what this is like. You’re reading through a section of writing and something just doesn’t feel right, except it sounds fine until you realize that all the sentences is starting with the same word, or they sound exactly the same grammatically. The writing starts to feel like […]

Your layout isn’t simply empty paper you fill up with words; it’s a collection of active materials that includes white space. This space shape silence around the words on the page, creating rhythm. It guides the reader’s eye across document so they do not have to hunt for where one sentence ends and another begins. […]

There’s an odd blind spot that comes about if you spend long periods staring at a manuscript. The language fills in blanks. Your brain stops noticing repetition and what you read flows smoothly along. In fact, you may well be reading things many times, like passage “the morning light filtered through,” which occurs six times […]