Should 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.
Tag: Voice
Voice is the thing that makes a page sound like you and no one else. These articles cover what voice actually is, why it matters more than almost any other craft skill, and how to find yours and keep it on the page.
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…
AmericaToni Morrison Day: The Reader She Chose
Morrison spent nearly twenty years as a Random House editor building a canon of Black American writing, wrote her first novel at thirty-nine around a full-time job and two children, won the Nobel, and made one decision about audience that…
GhostwritingJoe Sent Me a Podcast About the Golden Rule
Joe Rockey sent me an episode of the H2H Experiment that takes apart the Golden Rule as leadership advice. The same failure is why most ghostwritten books sound wrong. Voice capture is the Golden Rule turned inside out.
AI WritingThe AI Op-Ed Argument Is Aimed at the Wrong Question
Stanley Druckenmiller used AI to write a Wall Street Journal op-ed and admitted it. The argument that followed was about disclosure, and disclosure was never the question. Ghostwriting settled this a century ago: authorship lives in having the thought, not…
FamilyInterviewing Your Own Parent or Grandparent
You do not need a professional to record a parent or grandparent talking about their life. You need a phone, two hours, and the discipline to ask about rooms and objects instead of dates. Record it, do it more than…
MarketingEmerald City Comics, Clearwater: Thirty-Seven Years on 49th Street
Emerald City Comics has sold comics in Pinellas County since 1989 and holds more Google reviews than any other bookstore in the county. Four rows of standing-height back issues, a separate gaming room, and a book club on the first…
GhostwritingHow a Ghostwriter Gets the Slang Right: Capturing Dialect and Verbal Fingerprint
Everyone carries a verbal fingerprint: favorite words, repeated phrases, the slang that surfaces without thought. Those are the raw materials of voice, and getting them right is what makes readers believe the client wrote the book. Miss, and every page…
Business BooksWhy I Always Write the First Chapter Last
Before the full manuscript, I write one chapter, send it over, and ask a single question: does this sound like you? Not is it accurate, not is it well-written, does it sound like you. Voice is what makes a ghostwritten…
Critique GroupsWorld Read Aloud Day
World Read Aloud Day is the first Wednesday in February. From bedtime stories to critique groups, why reading aloud is the best editing tool a writer has.
NovemberNational Authors Day
National Authors Day is November 1. One discouraging teacher, a long climb through ghostwriting, and why becoming an author is something you claim.