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: Writing Tips
The craft decisions that change the work rather than decorate it. When to break a rule, why resolutions collapse in February, what editing is really for, and what a long writing life looks like from inside it.
MemoirWriting Your Worst Moments in a Memoir: Show the Evidence, Skip the Verdict
Memoir drafts are full of verdicts the writer hands down on himself, and readers trust a self-condemning line no more than a self-flattering one. How to replace each verdict with the scene behind it, using a copied ecology report from…
MemoirCitations in a Memoir: Endnotes, Footnotes and Fair Use
A memoir can cite research without reading like a journal article. Here's how I handle sources in memoirs and ghostwritten books: endnotes in Chicago style, footnotes for asides, citations collected as I go, and my rule on quoting.
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…
CommunicationInternational Literacy Day: The Readers Books Lose
International Literacy Day falls on September 8 and has been observed since 1967. UNESCO counts 739 million youth and adults without basic literacy, and the share of American adults at the lowest reading level rose from 19 to 28 percent…
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…
Fiction WritingShould Your Novel Have a Prologue? When a Cold Open Earns Its Place
A good prologue works like a TV cold open: a short scene that hands the reader a question and walks away. A bad one is a history lecture before the story starts. Here's how to tell them apart, with examples…
Character DevelopmentPlot Armor: Signs Your Hero Is Too Safe, and How to Fix It
Plot armor is the invisible rig that keeps a protagonist alive, lucky and competent because the story needs them. Here are the four kinds readers spot, from wounds that don't count to choices that never cost anything, and how to…
NonfictionHow Long Should a Chapter Be? Manuscript Habits That Save You Later
A chapter is as long as one complete thought, and a thousand words is plenty when the thought is finished. Keep with next and real heading styles stop a manuscript from fighting you through every revision.
AI WritingThe Back of the Book: Index, About the Author, Acknowledgments and Back Cover Copy
Everything after the last chapter serves a reader who already bought your book, and the back cover sells it to one who hasn't. I cover indexes, author bios, acknowledgments and back cover copy, and what I recommend for each one.
Book MarketingPreface, Prologue, Foreword or Introduction: What Goes Where
A preface tells readers why you wrote the book, and most of them skip it. The introduction is the two to four page sales tool that decides whether they buy. This piece covers what each opening page is for, where…
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.