News & blog

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...

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 release,...

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 statement—I’m...

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...

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...

Placing a tag before the line of dialogue is not as common as the first method, but in some ways it conforms more to the traditional syntax of American English. Using the style I discussed last time—putting the tag after the dialogue—actually creates an inversion of...

My upcoming book, The Language of Fiction, deals with a variety of grammatical and stylistic issues that fiction writers of all levels of experience have to confront. The problem is, grammar and style are such enormous subjects that it’s impossible to cover most—or...

My next book, The Language of Fiction, will be published in Fall 2012. The book begins with the premise that fiction writers use language differently from writers in other genres, and that anyone wanting to write good fiction should think about language in specific,...