Dialogue is a funny thing. It is the voice of your characters, but it is not necessarily always the voice of your narrative (especially when you’re writing in third person). This means that not only do you have to figure out how to give your story a voice, but also each individual character (wow, writing is hard y’all). Anyway, here are a few tips that I’ve picked up as I’ve been writing and revising. Common Problems When Writing Dialogue: Problem: Overly formal dialogue. For

Next up in Adventures in Revising…Deleting WHOLE scenes.These are my lessons in mapping out my story (this can happen either before or after you start writing, I happen to do it after because I am a pantser, so I use it as a revision tool). When I map I use visual aids, either a pin-board with little index cards, or a visual file with all of my plot points: Mapping out your story (A fun editing software could help with this. *cough* someone may have recently written a blog po

So, I don’t know about you guys, but when I decided to write in earnest I just opened a Word Document and let myself go. When I felt like being “fancy”, I used Google Drive so I could have my documents “on the go”. After I got more than 50 pages written, I would have issues finding sections if I wanted to add new scenes. So, I started trying to create things: like writing notes to myself in the document. But when I wanted to send documents to CPs or beta readers, I had to cre

I was reading Miss Snark’s First Victim and Authoress had a really great point about hiring an editor for revisions. To paraphrase she pretty much says that you shouldn’t hire her for her professional critiquing services if your work has never had eyes on it (i.e. a CP or Beta Reader). For one thing, those people read your work for free, for another, they catch some of the small stuff (i.e. grammar, incorrect tenses, plot holes, etc). When you hire someone to edit, you want t

I have a slightly obsessive personality. So when I get into something I do a lot of research and (over) analyze the heck out of it. So when I first began writing and revising, I went a little editing cuh-razy. However, something good came from it, I had a lot of thoughts about editing habits/revising. So, I decided to chronicle my adventures in revising. (NOTE: a lot of this advice caters specifically to the YA genre. Adult and MG genres might allow more liberties in some of