Blog

Writing Kick-ass Dialogue Using Fanfiction

Writing dialogue is important. Unless you’re doing a novel on a mute Russian burlesque group, in which case, all the luck to you. For the rest of us, even if you have the best worldbuilding ideas or the hookiest of book hooks, unnatural dialogue will be enough to make someone put your book down. Dialogue must do three things: Sound like a real person Convey information quickly and naturally Tell us something about your character (ie dialogue has to sound different for each character) That’s a lot to ask of every line that comes out of your characters’ mouths, but lucky for you, I have a secret weapon. No, not a chainsaw slingshot (I wish). My secret dialogue weapon? Fanfiction. Write fanfiction, preferably of TV shows, but books work, too. Every book and TV show out there already has a...
Read More

Waiting on the Call

Writers know waiting. That breath-held feeling of waiting for The Call. It doesn’t matter what the call will be: the first feedback on a new book, an agent, a book deal, an award, the latest bestseller list. What matters is that you can’t write the blog post of “your story” until it comes. I woke up that morning, you will write, and I was miserable. I had weathered dozens–nay, hundreds–of rejections and I was starting to wonder if it was all worth it. And then The Call came. I worked as hard as I could work, wrote and revised thirty-three manuscripts, and the call never came. At that point, I realized it was never meant to be, and in the resultant soul searching, I made the decision to marry my high school principle and move to New Guinea to farm...
Read More

New Adult: Too New for Its Own Good?

In my last post, I talked about how YA is overtaking the adult fiction market. Books for 13-17-year-olds are gaining ground even faster than adult books are losing it. So what are we supposed to do when we love the immediate, beautiful voices in YA books, but we’re ready to get rid of the parents and head for edgier themes? What about twenty-somethings struggling through student debt, trying to find their place in a world and an economy that all of a sudden seems to have no place for them. Where are books for them? What if (God forbid) our stories are partially told through sex? I’m absolutely one of this demographic: I moved to YA books because I was tired of gratuitous sex scenes in adult romance novels, and the stilted third person voice so prevalent in that genre....
Read More