I follow various agents on Substack, as well as on other social media, because they usually have good advice not just about what they are looking for, but about the publishing industry as well. 

Since they see so many queries - and so many that don’t work - I pay special attention when they talk about query letters. 

What do I mean by deliberate practice? I mean the skills that go into writing: dialogue, setting, character building, elegant description, showing emotion, scene development, and so on. It might be copying passages from a particular book to break down how the author did what they did on the page. 

Recently I was reading a novel where the characters were flat. They talked, they did stuff, but aside from the opening scene (which was pretty compelling), they seemed to be cardboard people propelled around for the sake of the plot. 

We’re always told to write our characters with interiority. And it’s true, readers need to know a character’s thoughts. In most cases, at least in modern fiction, readers want to be inside the character’s head, knowing what they know, feeling what they feel. 

Recently I’ve been editing a manuscript that’s just about ready to go to the publisher. One of the final things I do is go through and search for all the "boring" verbs, which are mainly the ones that describe the five senses or existence directly:

One of the first questions I ask my coaching clients is, “What is the Point?” In other words, the theme of your book. What do you want the reader to take away? It can be very simple, like “Good triumphs over evil” or “Love conquers all” - in fact, the simpler the better, even if it’s a cliche. A million stories have been written around these cliched themes, and nobody has gotten sick of them yet.     

This post was inspired by a question from my 100 Day Writing Challenge group. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it, though. It’s a tricky question. Some will say there are “rules” around it (like, no more than three POV characters per novel) but as with most “rules” of writing, you’ll find those rule-breakers everywhere.  I’m sure you can think of a few!

My answer is: It depends.  

Recently I saw a post in an online forum by a writer who had completed an entire novel, and sent it out to agents with the usual high hopes of representation. The thing is, she wrote it entirely in omniscient point of view.  

“If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.” 
― Patrick Rothfuss 

Writers hear a lot about backstory, but if often remains vague, undefined, and maybe something thrown in without any real regard for why it’s necessary other than “to explain the character’s motivations.”  

That’s a good reason, but that’s not the only reason to include backstory. And sometimes writers include backstory that isn’t necessary, which just leads to confusion for the reader.  

Last week, I talked about ways to use dialogue to create deeper meaning in passages, rather than using it as a ping-pong of information between characters.

This week, I’m going to focus on the three types of dialogue, and when to use them.

“What’s up, fam?” 

“How may I serve you, Madam?” 

“Why the hell should I know what that bastard wants?” 

I’ll bet each line of dialogue put a different picture in your mind of a character who might ask the question – what they look like, their age, their overall personality, their mood, their tone... with no other information, we “see” a character very vividly in our heads.  

That is the power of dialogue. 

I’ve seen a meme going around where someone says they saw a review on Amazon that says, 

“It felt like the writer was just making stuff up as they went along.”  

And then the inevitable “Uh, who’s going to tell them?” Ha, ha.  

And it is funny, because, well, we are making stuff up. That’s what fiction writers, anyway, do.  

But if a reader feels that way after reading your book, you have a problem.  

What is your story about?

When someone asks you that question, what do you say?

Often we don’t think consciously about this. We sort of know what our novel is about, but when someone asks, we fumble around.

Sometimes it pays to go back to the basics. In today’s post I want to tackle five areas to work on that can really help your writing pop on the page. Whether seasoned or just beginning as a writer, these are things to keep in mind that will take your work from “okay” to “engrossing.”