Author Interview: Beatrice B. Morgan

Beatrice, thanks for sitting down to chat with me today! Let’s dive right in, shall we?

We’re now getting into book three. Is there anything you’re particularly excited about for the readers going forward (without giving any spoilers, of course)?

I'm excited to get into the second half of the series. We're going to see more of the world and glimpses of ancient history. The story is expanding; Juniper is going to be facing tough choices about herself and her future. And there're dire wolves!

Being a history person myself, I did quite enjoy getting to see the history of the people. Juniper is still heartbroken at the end of book two—do you think this influences some of her willingness to go into battle as she travels north?

Definitely. She feels she's lost everything and has nothing left to lose. She doesn't have the Undercity to return to, and she doesn’t have anyone one—namely Reid—to return to. She is willing to walk face-first into danger. Traveling into Nexon’s den of mages is her only goal at the start, and despite not having a clear path to that, it’s her only goal. She throws everything she has at it. 

That makes sense—if there’s nothing to live for, why not go hard? Tell me, has your favorite character changed for book three?

Hmm… I still love Juniper to death, but I’m glad that we get to meet a few more characters that have until now been in the background, like Henry Julian. Juniper will remain my favorite—that’s why she is the main character, and not Reid or Ison. I wrote a part of my soul into her. 

I’m sure a lot of other writers also feel the same way about their main characters. Let’s switch gears a little bit. We’re going to some really interesting places in this book—was there one that was your favorite to write? 

I love fantasy because I can explore all manner of places, the only limitation being my imagination. I love ancient structures, the ones where we have no idea who lived there or what kind of society it was. All we have are ruins. When Juniper and her friends explore the mountains of Galamond, they stumble upon an ancient city, abandoned of course. That is one of my favorites that I’ve written thus far. There is something mysterious and enchanting about ancient places and the stories just waiting to be told. 

And finally, last question: What can we expect next from you?

My next book is the third and final installment in the Hard as Stone trilogy: Strong as Steel. We’ll see the epic ending to Raven’s story.

We can’t wait to see the conclusion of Hard as Stone, just like we can’t wait for Dreams in the Snow to come out. Join us this Saturday, June 5th, for your chance to win a free paperback copy of Dreams in the Snow at the launch party!

Dreams in the Snow

by Beatrice B. Morgan

After faking her death at the hands of the Watch and escaping Rusdasin, Juniper and Ison are determined to make their way north to face an ancient evil. And the friends they left in the Undercity must scramble to escape the impending raid of their home.

Meanwhile, Squire Reid is beginning a northward quest of his own. To earn his knighthood, the king has tasked him with retrieving Boxel’s Grace, a legendary plant at the edge of the world and the only hope of reviving Prince Adrien from a magical poison.

When grieving hearts collide with the ghosts of their past, can they survive to save the future of their world, or will they shatter like ice?

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Continuing Education: Location, Location, Location

Sense of Direction: Not just for your characters

Kari Donald, A4A Member

Time for more Continuing Education (our series on Continuity editing...get it?) As authors, whether writing speculative fiction, historical fiction, or something in between, you select locations to provide the best settings for your story. Today, we’re looking at why scrutinizing location as part of a continuity check is so important. 

What does location have to do with Continuity?

So why is location so important? It influences the setting and scene descriptions in your story, plus it impacts the plausibility of events. Remember, during our Continuity edit, we look for things that are out of place or could be distracting to the reader. There are many ways your location can cause a Continuity issue, either by itself or when it integrates into one of the other elements of Continuity. Today, we’ll dive deep into the ways that settings and descriptions (that innate sense of direction all writers have...or not) can make or break your story.

How can using an actual place cause a continuity problem?

Using an actual place puts an additional burden on your narrative since accuracy is a must. Some of your readers may be familiar with your chosen locale. For example, an account of someone that drives their car all the way to the Statue of Liberty will immediately surprise any reader who’s actually visited the landmark and knows the only way to get there is by taking a boat.

Not only can mistakes ruin your credibility, but there isn’t much that will distract a reader faster than the wrong name or detail of a known area. It can be as simple as using “Avenue” instead of “Street,” going the wrong way down a one way street, or having the sidewalk on the wrong side of the road. Add in things like transportation with stops, descriptions of buildings with their surroundings, and events with time of day or seasonal references, and the possibility for errors or misrepresentations becomes endless. Taking these details into account can be a daunting task and probably contributes to the misplaced advice “write what you know.”     

In the words of Roger from Rent, “Zoom in on my empty wallet.”

No problem! Can’t stop by the Live Cafe in person? Writers today have the advantage of a number of tools at their disposal. Google Maps is an invaluable resource for researching locations since you can quite literally immerse yourself in your desired setting. Photo spheres  and street view allow you to take a tour at ground level and see buildings, roads, landmarks, and shops, among many other things. Just be sure to check the date for when the picture was taken. If the photo is dated, some things may have changed, like businesses or the surrounding area. You’ll want to make sure Stuart’s Comic Shop is still open before using it into your story. 

Not only that, but the time of day or year may not match the timeline in your story, so elements like lighting, traffic, and foliage may not be the same. The bottom line here (which is a common theme throughout the Continuity edit) is don’t make assumptions about elements or topics outside your area of expertise. A few minutes of research is worth the investment and often saves lots of editing time later.   

I am using my own world, so I don’t have to worry about location.

If only it were that easy. 

One of the advantages of speculative fiction is that you can create your own world. One of the disadvantages of speculative fiction is that you can create your own world. 

If your location is loosely based on our world, then modeling it after a real place is helpful as all of the details have been worked out naturally. You won’t have to worry about accidentally setting up contradictory situations like a polar ice cap next to an arid desert or a citrus tree growing on top of an alpine mountain. It might work in your favorite video game, but those environments are created to keep a gamer engaged rather than a reader. For example, the fifteen square miles that Skyrim would occupy on our planet makes it easy for a gamer to be a world traveler but is hardly representative of a realistic location. 

It is just as important for world builders to take advantage of the internet to research elements that work for your chosen location. UCB has a pretty good introduction on biomes to get you started.

But my world is totally made up!

Awesome! Some of the most popular series are from made up worlds. You don’t have to be a flat earther to appreciate or accept the plausibility that a story can happen on a flat disc carried about the universe on the back of a turtle (thanks Terry Pratchet). 

The authenticity of characters or situations may be more important, as the focus on them allows readers to lose themselves in your story despite any unrealistic worldbuilding. You just need to put some thought into your location and work out a few details for viability and sustainability. You don’t even need to reveal these details in your narrative, just make sure there is nothing about your location that has contradicting elements or prevents readers from using their imaginations to fill in the blanks. You might have a hard sell that your barren wasteland location can support an abundance of livestock or lush vegetation. 

I am trying to avoid a cliché from a superhero movie about power and responsibility, but you get the idea. Just take into account how the location of the story will fit into your world while you are busy creating. 

Check back next time for some more Continuity tips. Up next: Stellar Cartography.  

 

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Author Interview: Karen Heenan

(Note: Songbird is no longer published with Authors 4 Authors Publishing. We encourage your continued support of Karen and you can find links to her work through her Twitter.)

Thanks for sitting down with me today! We’re excited for your latest book coming out this weekend.  What inspired you to write A Wider World?

I call A Wider World a not-sequel to Songbird. Despite having apparently begun writing one, I’m not always a fan of series books, because I like to wrap up my main character’s story at the end. My workaround for this is to pick a side character (usually the one who talks loudest to me when I’m trying to go to sleep) and give them their own story.

I was doing just that—drifting off to sleep—when I heard Robin’s voice said, “They said I would not end well,” and I sat right up and thought, “Who said? Did you?” And that was it. 

There was also the minor matter of someone from A4A (Rebecca) saying that she thought Robin would have an interesting story. I didn’t think so at the time, but it came to me later.

Thankfully, I left myself enough crumbs about Robin in Songbird that I had a jumping off point: choirboy for Cardinal Wolsey, Oxford, travels in Italy, returning to work again for Wolsey, looking toward a future with Cromwell.

It’s always interesting the way characters will speak to us when we think we’re done with them. After writing Songbird, was the process any different for A Wider World? 

I joke that if Songbird was a child, it would be accruing college debt by now, because I worked on it off and on for years. I started writing it just for my own amusement, but somewhere in those years, I decided I wanted to try for publication, and that required a whole different level of dedication, much less editing.

A Wider World was easier in the sense that I knew from the start it would be read by others. I also had some of my characters already developed, since they were holdovers from the first book. I did need to read a fair amount of history, because I knew about the dissolution of the monasteries only in a general sense, and it’s something that Robin is very much involved in, both administratively and emotionally.

The main difference in the writing of these two books was speed. Even with the extra research involved, A Wider World happened pretty quickly. I knew from the first idea that I wanted to tell it in two timelines, Robin’s “present day” arrest and journey toward the Tower, and the tale he tells his captor to distract him and hopefully slow their journey. It was handy because when I hit a wall in one timeline, I worked on the other for a while, and that usually led me right back to where I needed to be. 

That’s really interesting, and a great way to tell a story. Now that you’ve got an (almost) entirely new cast, who is your favorite character?

Other than Robin, who will probably be my favorite character forever, it would be Ned Pickering. Ned’s a well-born second son who works with Cardinal Wolsey, and then with Cromwell. He forcibly befriends Robin and won’t leave him in the peace that he thinks he wants. I think of Ned as a large energetic golden retriever, putting his paws on your shoulders and licking your face. You’re trying to make him stop, but you’re also laughing because his affection and energy are so contagious. 

Ned is a pretty sweet character. Was it more or less difficult researching for this book? 

The research was pretty straightforward; it was mainly getting a handle on a particular occurrence (the dissolution) that I didn’t know as much about. I’m also not religious, so the extremes people went to for one religion over another—when they seemed more or less identical to me, other than the pope—was interesting. Robin takes my point of view, with the addition of a belief in God. He’s got a foot in both camps and mainly sees extremes of belief as the enemy. 

Let’s switch gears a little: What about this time period drew you in?

The Tudor period has fascinated me since I was six, and I kept my mother company while she watched The Six Wives of Henry VIII on Masterpiece Theater. The more I’ve learned about Henry over the years, the less I like him, but the politics and people of the period are so intriguing. 

I can’t say that I blame you—I find that Henry VIII is really just the Real Housewives of the sixteenth century. Finally, what can we expect next from you?

A third not-sequel, apparently. I’ve just finished and submitted Lady, in Waiting, which centers on Margaery Preston, a character introduced toward the end of A Wider World. Her story will take us through the early years of Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart’s return to Scotland, in addition to being a story all about marriage (which was the part of the book I hadn’t really expected).

Thanks again for sitting down to talk with me today. Readers, join us this Saturday, April 24th, for the launch party and a chance to win several prizes! 

A Wider World

by Karen Heenan

Memories are all he has…

Now they could save his life.

Returning to England after almost five years in exile, Robin Lewis is arrested and charged with heresy by the dying Queen Mary. As he is escorted to the Tower of London, Robin spins a tale for his captor, revisiting his life under three Tudor monarchs and wondering how he will be judged—not just by the queen, but by the God he stopped serving long ago.

When every moment counts, will his stories last long enough for him to be saved by Mary's heir, the young Queen Elizabeth?

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Continuing Education: A look at Continuity Editing

Not just another blog about editing!

Kari Donald, A4A Member

There’s a reason “edit” is a four-letter word. For some authors, it’s the least exciting part of the writing process, but one of the most important steps for improving your manuscript. Editing is so essential there are numerous blogs providing helpful hints about the different types, such as structural, developmental, line, copy, and of course, proofreading. For this, however, let’s look at one very specific part of editing: the continuity edit. 

What is continuity editing?

Continuity is often grouped in with copy-editing. However, I personally think every work can benefit from an editing pass dedicated to looking only for continuity issues. This edit is one where you’re looking at the details in your story and making sure they make sense in the real world. Filmmakers do something similar where they pay people to sit on set and do nothing but observe scene set-ups, watching for things like putting a glass of wine in a different place during a retake, seating characters in the same chairs after a break, and other similar details. Continuity edits on your manuscript are very similar: you’re checking for misplaced, out of order, or other anachronisms and inconsistencies. 

Why is continuity editing so important?

As with any edit, a continuity edit helps to remove potential sources of distraction and make the story the best it can be. It goes beyond basic writing mechanics and structure. We want the reader to stay immersed in your narrative and not wonder why someone that sat down next to the fireplace is suddenly giving an answer from their position standing next to the window. A continuity check also helps maintain the credibility of your story. Try to tell me your character recently visited Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell in Independence Hall and I will cry “Shenanigans!” The Liberty Bell hasn’t been in Independence Hall since 2003. (Or 1976 if you count the time spent in a pavilion next to Independence Hall; I’m all about accuracy; just ask any author whose book I have edited.) The last thing we want to have happen is your book ending up on the literary equivalent of Cinema Sins.

But I carefully planned my book; there shouldn’t be continuity issues

It doesn’t matter if you are a plotter or a pantser. I have done continuity reads on manuscripts from both styles of writing (and those in between), and there is no difference when it comes to the number or types of errors that I find. In my experience, the biggest influencer on continuity issues is previous edits. The developmental edit can be brutal to even the best-laid plans. Adding, deleting, or changing scenes and events in your story can cause problems like eating supper before breakfast, having Monday follow Wednesday, or watching the sun set twice at the end of the day (and no, your world is not Tatooine). You might think it was just a small change, but it can cause a ripple effect throughout the rest of your book. The bottom line: you need to check your book for continuity issues at least once after you’re done with major edits.

I’ve gone through my book several times and I don’t see any continuity problems.

That’s great! But as the author, you’re very close to your story and you know it inside and out. I’m certain that if you were to rewrite one of Gordon Ramsay’s recipes so that it was missing some ingredients or steps, give it to Gordon, and then tell him to execute the recipe you gave him, he would still make the dish the same way he always has (and not just because he would “bloody well do it the right way”). He’s so familiar with the recipe that his brain just doesn’t notice the missing or different parts of the written recipe. When checking your book for continuity, your brain will do the same thing. Since you know what’s supposed to happen, you can miss holes, incorrect details or conflicting events. Because of this, try to find fresh eyes, someone that hasn’t read your manuscript yet, to do your continuity edit. Your person of choice should be someone that is very logical and detail-oriented. However, that doesn’t mean that you are off the hook for trying to look for them yourself, especially during revisions and edits.

Okay, so what should I look for during a continuity edit?

Glad you asked! There are a plethora of factors to look for when checking a manuscript for continuity. Since it would be impossible to cover them all in a single blog (I tried), we’re going to present a series of blogs dedicated to continuity. Each one will do a deep dive on a particular topic as well as provide hints, tips, and resources to help find and resolve continuity issues. So check back for these in-depth continuity topics, and happy writing!

Join us next week for an interview with A4A author Karen Heenan, and in two weeks for our next continuity blog on location.

 

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Editing: Keeping Track of Characters

Wait, didn’t she have blue eyes?

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

I wanted to keep this for the last post because this is a little bit different—it’s more preemptive. Keeping track of your characters will help you edit when it comes down to it, yes, but it will also help you from making the mistakes in the first place. 

The characters in general

Thanks to our illustrious founder Brandi Spencer, I have an information tracker for all of my characters. There is so much information in there that it can sometimes be a little overwhelming, but it’s been invaluable for making sure that I don’t forget names of minor characters or physical features of some of the more frequent characters. 

So what should you keep track of in this section?

Your columns

A lot of times this is information that you as the author will feel very obvious and unnecessary to write down, but let me tell you, you’ll be happy you did if you ever take a sabbatical from your WIP to start another one, or because life gets hectic. And right now, life is very easy to become hectic thanks to the pandemic. So, your very basics should at least be:

• Names—first, last, and nickname

• Birthplace—either their country of origin or city of origin, or both

• Description—this will be their relation to the protagonist(s)

For me, I added a few extra bits of information because I’m keeping track of characters across a series of six books and otherwise, I might forget when the characters appear. These are the extras that I need a little help remembering sometimes:

• Titles—this is both for the military titles and noble titles, and when they change in the series

• Books in which they first appear

Physical appearance

My absolute favorite example to give of why it’s important to keep track of physical features both for yourself—and to hopefully share with your editors or publishers to ensure a cohesive picture—and your readers is from Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series with Dell Publishing. Her main character Claire (Beauchamp Randall) Fraser is very well reported to have whiskey-colored eyes (light brown), but in one of the books her eye color was definitely not the correct one. With this information readily at your fingertips, it will be easier to avoid small mistakes like that. 

I will note, very strongly, that everyone makes mistakes, whether you're self published, published with a small press, or a large publishing company, and these mistakes should not be villainized. Authors and editors alike are human, and there’s only so much you can catch. 

Your columns

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m bad at writing character descriptions and leave them as scant as I can get away with. Unfortunately, you need to know the basics of what your characters look like aside from, “She’s pretty and has brown hair.” So what do you need to look for? Here is what I’ve got to help me keep track of my characters physical appearance:

• Skin

• Hair color, texture, and style

• Eye color

• Mouth

• Nose

• Height

• Build

• Distinguishing features

• Corresponding actor—for those of you who are like me, you might need some visual aids to help you fill out your information or visualize facial expressions on a similar face

Personality Traits

This, I find, is one of the hardest to nail down as an author because a lot of times I want to keep track of characters in “good” and “bad” columns, but that’s just not how the world works in real life, and it’s now how your world should work in your books. Every person has positive and negative traits, and sometimes the positive traits that your characters have are actually negative because of their motivations. These are all the things that make well-rounded characters to make a richer world for your readers. 

Positive

The positive traits are almost always the easiest to come up with because we like to see the good in people. We’re breaking this down into a couple of categories. For your positive traits, you want to look at four things: moral, achievement, interactive, and identity. You might be looking at that list and say, “What in the heck does that mean?” Don’t worry, I’ll give a brief description of each. 

Moral is what influences the mortality of the character, like their loyalty and honesty. Achievement is the characteristic(s) that helps the characters reach their goals, like their adventurous nature, boldness, or curiosity. Interactive is how your characters interact with the other characters in the book, like being flirtatious or courteous. And finally, identity is how the characters truly identify with themselves, like being passionate about things or imaginative.

Negative

For the negative, there’s a little bit less to examine. You want to look at the character’s core flaws and their lesser flaws. There’s also the motivation behind the character’s actions, and you can tie that into both the positive and the negative traits, but I want to tie it mostly into the negative traits because often times we have more motivation for our negative traits than our positive ones, and sometimes our positive traits have negative motivations...which in turn makes them more negative than positive. So what would your core flaw and lesser flaws look like?

Your core flaw is the heart of the matter that will help influence your lesser flaws, like being manipulative and greedy. With these flaws, your lesser flaws would slide into being controlling and inflexible. Things are going to be the way that character wants, no matter what they have to do to get it. 

Now, this is where I think tying the motivations in the negative trait is a lot more useful to understanding the character compared to the positive traits. Let’s take the negative traits listed above and explore some internal and external motivations for why your character is the way they are. Greedy and manipulative could stem from growing up in poverty and wanting to better themselves by any means necessary, such as manipulating others and hoarding wealth so as not to lose it.

If all this sounds great, you can download a blank copy here.

Join us in two weeks when we start a series on another branch of editing: Continuity. 

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Editing: Cutting the Fat

Snip, snip, snip.

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Ironically, I already cut the fat from this blog series. Originally instead of the three posts, there were going to be four, one of which covered unnecessary words and phrases. You’ll notice that it’s one of the sections in this blog post. Cutting the fat doesn’t necessarily mean you have to get rid of everything, but that you must trim it down to be more purposeful.

Kill Your Darlings

In our Misused Writing Advice series last year, we had a post about this you can read here. As you’ll read in the post, killing your darlings isn’t about killing off your characters. (Though you might need to do that too.) These are the scenes or large sections that don’t add to the plot or character development, no matter how much fun you had writing them. They will weigh down your novel and make it more difficult for your reader to get through your work. 

One really good example of this is getting attached to a chapter in another character’s POV that could be easily summarized in a paragraph. Let’s call these Character A and Character B. Character A has the main POV through the book, but Character B has a chapter where they witness some important information happening. It’s great that we have the information, but because the reader and Character A only need that bit of info to move the plot forward, we don’t need to have a 3,000 to 4,000 word chapter to give a paragraph’s worth of retelling.

Like in the dialogue post, each scene and bit of information must have a point. It absolutely must push the plot forward toward the conclusion of the book or the series. There might be some bits that you can recycle that would be better in smaller chunks or even in another book, and please, by all means, do it. 

Just don’t be afraid to take out the knife and slice away because you’re too attached to a scene. 

Get Rid of the Clone Army

No one likes killing characters, except maybe George R. R. Martin because he subsists on his readers’ tears. In this section, however, I’m not talking about killing off characters that drive the plot forward or give your protagonist a driving point, motivation, or affects their character arc. I’m talking about the characters, or the Clone Army, that just in general don’t need to be there because they’re redundant, don’t drive the plot forward, or really make any difference whatsoever to your protagonist, or even antagonist. 

Your first thought might be going to the “sexy lamp test” that was proposed by comic book writer and editor Kelly Sue DeConnick, but those characters are better served by developing their characters rather than taking them out. If you haven’t heard of this test, Sexy Lamps are usually female characters who do nothing to affect the story by their actions and could be replaced by an inanimate object with changing the plot.

A great example of this is right in one of our founder’s own works. In book two, Kiss of Destiny by Brandi Spencer, she combined the roles of the captain of the guard and the prison warden into a single character because one was redundant and didn’t need to be there when the second character could do the job of both without feeling the loss of either one. 

Another example is when you’ve got a character that shows up only for a scene or two that doesn’t play a role in later books in your series disseminating information but there’s a way for an established character that does affect the plot to give this information instead, get rid of the dead weight.

Unnecessary words

Remember that recycling I talked about in the first section? Well, here’s a great example. I’m recycling an entire blog post into here. 

Let’s talk a little bit about unnecessary words: they shouldn't be there unless they’re in dialogue and it’s the way your character speaks. There are plenty of us out there that don’t speak with the eloquence most of us strive for.

There are two categories that I think all authors need to look at in their edits. The first is looking at a sentence and seeing if you can say the same thing with fewer words while still conveying the same meaning. If you can, cut those words. The second is using the find function and getting rid of words like: 

• That

• Just

• Like

• Probably

• Most likely

• Literally

• And your hedging verbs that don’t need to be there for anything other than clarity.

Redundancies

Redundancies are one of the first things that I look for when I get a new manuscript from our authors to nip in the bud. These are things that we all put into our manuscripts without thinking, but once you review them, they’re implied. Here are a couple of examples of phrases I take out to make things more succinct and take out the implied portions. 

He shrugged his shoulders. → He shrugged.

He nodded in agreement. → He nodded. 

He stood up. → He stood.

He sat down. → He sat. 

All of these can also be combined with whatever sentence is coming next.  For example:

Shrugging, he went into the next room. 

Join us in two weeks for the final blog in this mini-series where I talk about keeping track of your characters. 

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Editing: Cleaning Up Dialogue

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Ahh, the dreaded dialogue. I wanted to start with editing your dialogue because it’s simultaneously the easiest and the hardest thing to do. A lot of us struggle writing dialogue in the first place, and now we’ve got to edit to make it better? Gross. 

You don’t need every dialogue tag

Let’s start with the easiest part of cleaning up your dialogue, and that’s with the tags. 

What purpose do tags serve, you ask? Well, their most important purpose is to easily let the reader know who is speaking. It also lets the reader know how the character is speaking—but these aren’t always necessary. Let me give you a few examples of what I mean and how to clean them up.

“I can’t stay here anymore!” Alan yelled. “I can’t take it—I’m leaving.”

Now we know who’s talking in here, but Alan yelling is implied by the fact there’s an exclamation point. You’re better served by either taking out the dialogue tag altogether or using an action beat instead.

“I can’t stay here anymore!” Alan grabbed whatever he could and threw it into the open suitcase. “I can’t take it—I’m leaving.”

It’s more effective for setting the tone of the scene and how frustrated Alan is while he’s planning on leaving. Now let me give you a less clear example of where you can either keep or change the tag: 

“What do you mean you’re leaving?” Charlotte asked quietly, her lip quivering. 

If we take out the qualifier of asked, the dialogue tag becomes redundant and we don’t need it. But, with that qualifier, it’s telling us the intonation in which she asks, and becomes a little more important. However, I’m still a believer that it can always be improved:

Charlotte’s lip quivered. “What do you mean you’re leaving?” 

This cuts the unnecessary dialogue tag while still, to me, implying that she’s saying something quietly because she’s emotionally distressed. And don’t be afraid to move your action beat or tags around to make your dialogue more impactful!

Tone

Tone is one of the harder ones to fix, because it’s often a more pervasive problem throughout an author’s manuscript. Your characters need to have their own developed voices so that they become distinguishable from each other, and if there’s a narrator, the narrator’s voice. This is not only important for the readers, but the author to develop story arcs and series arcs for the characters.

My suggestion for keeping track of this is to create a character sheet with basic information about their personality and character arcs planned throughout the book or series so you can easily reference what kind of character they are.

Context matters

The context in which your characters speak to each other really matters. If you have a mother and daughter talking to each other, they might be a little more blunt and gossipy as compared to coworkers or people they’re trying to flirt with. Switching back and forth between the two might make it feel like there are some character discrepancies, so looking at the context in which things are said will help you determine if you’ve created a problem you need to edit away.

What’s the point?

Every piece of dialogue needs to have a point. While people will talk to fill up the space, your characters shouldn’t. Every bit of their dialogue should serve a purpose to move the plot and their character development forward. 

The biggest test of whether or not you’ve written your dialogue with purpose is if you can remove an entire scene of dialogue, or a sentence here and there, and the plot will remain the same. 

Keepin’ it Real

The way that we speak in real life is not the way that our characters talk in books—and for good reason. Truly realistic dialogue is going to sound inane and not going to interest your reader into “listening” to a conversation they could hear on the street or in their own living room. Like mentioned in the previous section, your dialogue must have a point that moves the plot forward. 

So when you’re going through your edits, take a close look at your dialogue and if your characters are stumbling over their words without purpose (like they’re naturally shy speakers and can’t get through a few sentences without saying um or pauses), take it out or change it to have purpose. 

Join us in two weeks for our next post in this series where I talk about cutting the fat.

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