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Kindle Notes & Highlights
When you find the thing that’s uniquely you and combine it with your values, it permeates everything you do, all your choices, and your way of being.
Books are more than the sum of their parts and so too is the author’s voice. In simplistic terms, your voice is the sum of all the aspects of your craft.
turn an emotion into a tangible thing by describing the texture of how it feels. Rather than stating your character feels angry, you could describe the flaming ball growing beneath his ribcage, the hot flickering edges singeing his lungs and boiling his blood.
I’m a total fangirl for smell in fiction because it’s such an underused sense—but also smell is closely linked to memory, so it’s super effective at creating imagery. This is a known cognitive phenomenon. The brain’s structured so that smell neurons pass messages to each other very close to the area where your brain processes memory. The resulting effect is that you smell something and it evokes a memory.
You don’t need long, flowery prose to tug on your reader’s heartstrings; a few little words can do the job nicely.
Good writers ensure a balance of all techniques, bending and weaving them to their whims. Once you understand what the techniques are for, it’s much easier to create that balance innately and manipulate them to your advantage.
Good writers use showing and telling interchangeably. You should too.
Dialogue is communication between characters, not communication between the writer and reader.
The other important thing to note before we dig in, is that dialogue should always have a point. Yes, functionally, it breaks up chunky prose. But if your characters have a conversation that doesn’t lead anywhere, doesn’t uncover new information, reveal something or decide a plan of action, it’s pretty pointless. It will come across that way to the reader too. Make sure each line spoken is a knight in shining dialogue that’s earned its right to be there.
There’s a key principle to bear in mind when writing description: where possible, make your description work for you multiple times over. By that I mean, can your description highlight something more than just imagery? A piece of personality, perhaps something symbolic, maybe a character’s belief, their quirk, or a moral quandary.
Choosing the level of detail is a stylistic choice or a tactic for creating a specific effect. Giving a lot of specific detail means your reader will spend more time with that concept in your story. Detail—and I mean specific detail—slows the pace of your story. A valid technique, if you want to create a distraction or red herring. In characterization terms, when something is important to the hero they’d naturally spend longer on that subject.
