Writer’s tips
- Say the “Writers dance” when you want to describe how the writer uses good word play.
- Is there enough emotion in your piece? Highlight emotion with a highlighter. Also, it's good to know what the character’s pain is; for each character, and what their struggling against.
- Be careful with characters delving out money from out of no where, especially if its cash.
- Note why a writer recollects on another character over and over again like their mother, question whether this is necessary.
- Be careful if something is supposed to be secret, if it’s secret it’s secret, there’s no gray area as far as who knows and who does not. For example If there in a cubicle and their mindful of who is listening, and then later in the scene their not mindful it doesn’t make sense.
- A call came in from someone who claimed they witnessed it- a line like this brings you farther way from the narrator when you don’t indicate who, exactly, the call was from.
- Going back and forth between characters needs to be real tight.
- The writer Checkov, is good at having his characters do exchanges, and one person is not really listening as another character says some pretty random things. Note that its not always important in dialogue to have a character understand exactly what the other character is saying.
- He was no where near tickled about the precipitation. This sentence doesn’t show the emotion of the character. Be careful with difficulty with negatives like the word NO.
- Prepositions are relationships between objects, too many prepositions are too many relationships that the reader has to keep track of, and too many prepostions indicate a run-on sentence.
- Parenthesis listed after a real long aside can have readers lose track of what the parathensis are used for.
- The beginning gets us to ask a question in short story, and the ending should answer that question. Choose one theme and run with it, like the sea, or a song, that has to run throughout the course of the story, don’t have too many themes.
- Be careful of professions and hobbies and what those individuals can do. Scuba divers can’t dive far, so if you’re talking about diving to the bottom of the ocean you might use but a deep sea can.
- For generalizations, careful how you phrase things in dialogue, to make it seem that this is what the character thinks and not the writer.
- Good to use reflections. Especially when your characters feel guilt.
- Think about the significance of a scene, and how much you lead into it.
