More to say about dialogue
Novels don’t run on 98 percent dialogue. Talking and nothing else just doesn’t move a reader fast enough through the time frame of the story.
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dialogue
How to avoid dialog debris
Dialogue is a part of nearly all books, whether it’s quotes and references in nonfiction or speech in novels. Relying on its strengths only goes so far in a good book. Too much dialogue takes the focus away from the storytelling or reporting in nonfiction. Confident authors know how soon they should introduce a narrator’s
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Ten Rules for Writing from Elmore
A new book on my editing desk promises to be a lot of fun. Small-time crooks without much common sense play big parts in this novel. It’s the kind of world made popular by Elmore Leonard. He wrote well into his 80s, including novels that he adapted from the TV series Justified that a producer
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Make dialogue cleaner, clearer
Your copyeditor or line editor uses the Chicago Manual of Style. But knowing these style and grammar conventions yourself helps your book, too. A manuscript that arrives on my desk with clear writing gets lifted even higher. For example, there’s the use of a single-word utterance. How do you handle something like, “Where?” CMOS says
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Ways to clarify who’s talking
Speaking clearly lets us absorb the dialogue Novels are built on acres of dialogue. You can always point to a book like E.L Doctrow’s Ragtime as the exception, but so very much talking pushes a story forward. You can help your characters tell the story by helping everyone know who’s speaking at all times. Where
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