Kansas City Star article

The Kansas City Star on Tuesday (April 2) has this nice write-up on The Language of Fiction: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/04/01/4155707/a-kc-writer-takes-the-stuffiness.html   I usually have a very hard time not smiling in photographs, but I definitely managed...

Publication Date

Today, January 8th, is the technical publication date for my new book, The Language of Fiction. In my experience not much really happens on a publication date–the books tend to be available on Amazon before that, and unless it’s a highly anticipated...

Chapter Eleven from “The Language of Fiction”

This is a sample chapter from “The Language of Fiction,” to be published in December 2012. CHAPTER ELEVEN Fragments   I generally advise my students to disable the Microsoft grammar-check function when they write fiction. It’s not an anti-technology...

Introduction from “The Language of Fiction”

INTRODUCTION   When I was in college, a professor loaned me a book of Ernest Hemingway’s selected letters. Because I loved Hemingway, and because I was a little startled that a professor had loaned me a book, I took it home and read it straightaway. For several...

Cutting Room Floor Issue #1–Dialogue Tag Placement, Part III

The third place to put a dialogue tag, you may have guessed, is in the middle of a character’s speech. Usually this happens when a tag is inserted between two of the character’s sentences or clauses, like this: “Sir, I’m afraid you’ll have to step out of the car,” the...