As 2010 comes to a close, I want to say thanks to all of you for reading and contributing your knowledge, your questions, and your writing to this site. ... Read More

'Tis the season for setting goals . . . here are some suggestions for the next year of your writing life. Finish the short story collection that's been gathering dust, read ... Read More

When writing dialogue, keep in mind the three-sentence rule: give no character more than three uninterrupted sentences at once. You really can trust your audience to read between the lines: ... Read More

In Britain, Boxing Day was the day the upper classes gave gifts to the servants (the timing of the holiday just screams "regifting," doesn't it?). Well, like the vast majority ... Read More

"Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened ... Read More

Because exclamation points often turn up in dialogue (the subject of the December writing challenge), I wanted to re-run this post, which covers a discussion about them that grew out ... Read More

If you're stumped about what to buy the writer in your life this holiday season, look no further. Anyone who did NaNoWriMo this year will certainly love a session with ... Read More

NaNoWriMo's over: now what? How do you go about revising the 50,000+ words you spewed out in November? The first step is to just read your book all the way ... Read More

Realistic dialogue isn't exactly like real speech -- there are a lot of filler words we use, for instance, that don't go in dialogue -- but it should read like real ... Read More

Every December, I suggest that you use your holiday parties to collect dialogue, and this year I'm making the exercise more formal. If you have an office, family, or neighborhood ... Read More

Dialogue is one of the hardest elements of fiction writing to master, and one of the most important. Done well, dialogue advances the action of a story, provides information about ... Read More

As the December writing challenge focuses on dialogue, we'll be reviewing dialogue tips throughout the month, starting with the basics: punctuation. Even people with a flair for writing sometimes hesitate over ... Read More