I like to plot the stories I’m writing.  I know that isn’t everyone’s style, but it’s the way I typically work.  I say typically because my current work in progress was not plotted.  At least, not fully plotted.  I had a pretty clear vision of the story line, but I hadn’t worked out all the details. So, I’m busy writing the story, taking it in the direction I wanted it to go, and then last night I realized that somewhere along the line the story got away from me.  When I say that I mean, I’m not quite clear where it will go next. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about it either. I had a brief ‘Now what?’ moment […]

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 […]