“Clothes make the man,” Mark Twain once declared. “Naked people have little or no influence on society.” Unless you’re making a very specific type of movie that Mark Twain certainly wouldn’t approve of, your characters will most likely be clothed as they wander around on the screen. What they wear says a lot about who…
One important thing to remember when creating your main character–which in most cases (though not all) turns out to be the hero–is that they need to be real. What I mean by that is creating a character that is believable, despite all of the amazing–if not fictional–acts and accomplishments they achieve over the course of…
I’ve decided to start an article series focusing on honing your craft as a writer. As a ghostwriter, I get a lot of emails from new writers simply wanting to ask questions about writing in general. Hopefully, by starting up this stream of articles I’ll be able to answer most of the common questions I…
One thing editors frequently get after writers about is the use of active vs. passive voice. Everyone faces this critique at times: “Make this sentence more active, will you? It should be snappier,” or “Passive voice bogs down the narrative.” But what exactly is passive voice, and how should you avoid it? First, let’s clear up a…
Should we consider linguistics and English composition when creating dialogue in fiction? How does syntax function within fiction and set a genre apart? In How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction, Adams and Curzan state that we use “intuition” (169) to decipher the meanings of sentences and determine whether a sentence is structured correctly. For example, two…
Just last night I was sitting on the couch reading through a printed-out manuscript with a mug of tea when my elderly lab hopped onto the couch and laid her head in my lap. I managed to juggle the mug, Kindle, and dog long enough to push her off and settle back against the overstuffed…