Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
by Anne R. Allen Learning to write effective, believable dialogue is one of the toughest parts of learning to write narrative — whether fiction or memoir. We don’t want to simply transcribe the way people actually talk, with all the pointless “ums” and stammery filler-things we say in real life. But we also don’t […]
by Ruth Harris One of them is lying. Or are both of them lying? You mean maybe both of them are telling the truth? Could be, couldn’t it? No matter which answer is the correct one, what people say and the words with which they say it, will immediately bring your characters—and your book—to life. […]
…and How to Solve 9 Common Dialogue Problems. by Anne R. Allen I’ve been looking over some of my much-rejected early work and discovered my old stories have way too much dialogue. This is something I see in a lot of newbie fiction. I remember a guy who came into the bookstore where I […]
by Anne R. Allen I get a lot of bargain ebook newsletters: BookBub, Fussy Librarian, Kindle News Daily, EBUK, etc. Often a book intrigues me enough that I click through to look at the book’s full details on the retail site. But I almost never buy. Sometimes the full blurb or a review will […]
by Ruth Harris You’re happy, even delirious. You’ve finished your first draft! Then you read it. OMG, you think, did I write that?Yes, you did. 🙂 It stinks. It sucks. It’s so rancid it threatens to warp the time-space continuum. Think you’re alone? Here’s Hugh Howey in a blog post: “I suck at writing. Watching a rough […]
by Anne R. Allen I’ve been looking over some of my much-rejected early novels recently and discovered they have something in common with a lot of other unpublished fiction: way too much dialogue. They’re too LOUD. The characters need to shut up already and get on with the story. And yet, in all the […]
