Fluff Words: Cut Them From Your Prose, Keep Them in Your Dialogue
Fluff words make a sentence longer without making it say more. Cut them from narration and business writing, and keep the ones that make dialogue sound like real people talking.
Tag: Dialogue
Dialogue carries character, tension, and subtext faster than any other tool a writer has. These posts cover writing conversations that sound real, using slang without losing the reader, and letting what is unsaid do the heavy lifting.
DialogueZora Neale Hurston Day: The Ear She Trained
Zora Neale Hurston was born January 7, 1891, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the town she turned into fiction. She wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks, died broke in Fort Pierce, and waited thirteen years for…
Crime FictionRaymond Chandler Day: The Novelist Who Started at Fifty
Raymond Chandler was an oil company vice president until he was fired for drinking at forty-four. He taught himself to write for the pulps, published The Big Sleep at fifty, and gave American crime fiction the voice it still borrows.
Crime FictionElmore Leonard Day: Leave Out the Part Readers Skip
Elmore Leonard wrote westerns before his ad agency shift, got turned down eighty-four times on his first crime novel, and then spent forty years proving dialogue could carry a book. His ten rules all do one job: keep the author…
DialogueElmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, and Which Ones I Break
Elmore Leonard's 10 rules of writing all keep the writer out of sight so the reader stays in the story. I follow most of them and break a few on purpose, from short teaser prologues to long descriptions of places…
DialogueShould You Only Use “Said” in Dialogue Tags? My Rules for Tags and Adverbs
Readers skim right past dialogue tags, so use the plain ones and don't bury anything important in them. My simple rules for said, tag variety, adverbs and action beats.
DialogueThe Quotation Marks That Get Authors Sued
His father said you will never amount to anything. Or did he? Memory reconstructs dialogue, it does not record it, and the quotation marks are what turn a memory into a claim.
AmericaMark Twain Day: The Voice He Invented
Twain invented an American voice for prose by writing the way people spoke, went bankrupt backing a typesetting machine, outlived most of his family, and produced late work so bleak his estate suppressed parts of it. The cheerful figure on…
DialogueErnest Hemingway Day: The Iceberg Method
Hemingway built a prose style out of omission and spent thirty years being imitated badly by people who copied the short sentences and missed the method. The technique is learnable. The imitations fail because they reproduce the surface and skip…
DialogueDialogue Handbook
Write dialogue that carries what people cannot say. Real speech works on layers, because the brain runs three jobs at once and the oldest one is always
DialogueFilms With the Best Dialogue
Twenty-one films whose dialogue does more than convey information, from Glengarry Glen Ross's desperation as verbal music to Margin Call's technical language as human revelation. Four tests every line of dialogue must pass, with craft lessons fiction writers can apply…
DialogueMastering Dialogue, Voice, and Point of View
Strip the dialogue tags and nobody can tell who's talking. Fix flat dialogue with psychology-driven voice, subtext, and the POV choice that shapes your entire novel.