One of the more difficult things for me to do is give my characters their own unique ‘voice’. I’m not talking dialogue here, at least, not exactly. It’s more about writing dialogue that lets the reader know who is speaking without having to put in tags to tell them. Does that make sense? Let me put it another way… in most dialogue, you get things like ‘Dan said’ or ‘Sally asked’. But what if you have several characters speaking? Or maybe you have a long session of dialogue. Do you really want to write ‘Dan said’ and ‘Sally said’ every time they actually speak? Not only that, but don’t you want to be able to have something said and have […]
Read moreCategory: Irreverent Muse
Does Weather Really Affect Your Writing?
You bet it does. We are currently stuck in our third (or is it fourth) straight week of rain. Yesterday, it looked like we would finally get some nice weather… for about ten minutes and then it started to hail! As much as I like the rain, this is simply too much. To make things even worse, I’ve let the weather get in the way of my writing. I finish my day, face the rain on my way home and when it’s time for me to write, I simply don’t feel like it. That means I’ve only added about 1,000 words in the past few days. Nowhere near what I’d like to have done. So I feel guilty about my […]
Read moreTime to Get Back on the Horse
I try not to get distracted with my projects, but it has been known to happen. Case in point, this past weekend I had full intentions of getting up early, brewing a cup of tea and getting a couple hours of writing done. What actually happened is I got a couple hours of Guitar Hero done. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s value in being able to jam with my Wii… at least, so I keep telling myself. Regardless of the value of Guitar Hero, I still feel like I cheated myself. I should/could have written 5,000+ new words towards the completion of my book. I could sit her and beat myself up, I suppose, but instead, I’m going to […]
Read moreWhere is your Mind at?
I was listening to Tee Morris’ ‘Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy’ (teemorris.com) yesterday and he said something that struck a chord with me. He talked about the difference between writing fact vs. fiction and how you need to get your mind wrapped around the difference. The more I thought about what he said, the more sense it made to me. I do a fair amount of technical writing in my day job and I’ve found that, in order to focus, I can’t be thinking about my fiction writing. I’ve got to keep my mind on the writing at hand or it simply doesn’t happen. It usually takes me 30 minutes or so to get into the mode; time enough to grab […]
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