There is an intriguing article by Carter Wilson on the Writer’s Digest website on how and why to use an unreliable narrator in fiction – dated 29 January 2025.
Carter Wilson is the USA Today bestselling author of nine critically acclaimed, standalone psychological thrillers. He is an ITW Thriller Award finalist, a five-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, and his works have been optioned for television and film. Carter lives outside of Boulder, Colorado.
Carter Wilson
Carter says, “Crafting a convincing unreliable narrator might be one of the most difficult things a thriller writer does. Of course, a narrator doesn’t have to be unreliable. A perfectly dependable narrator is often just what the thriller reader needs. A voice of reason and stability thrust in the midst of chaos. Sometimes we want that level-headed hero to guide us through those dangerous waters.
But sometimes…
Sometimes we, as readers, don’t want stability. Sometimes, in the middle of that chaos, we don’t want to believe anyone, including the voice that’s at the helm. Occasionally the fun is figuring out who to trust, if there’s anyone to trust at all. The best thrillers are often the ones in which the protagonist is not only fooling the reader, but themselves as well.
I specialize in writing unreliable narrators, and when I try to dissect why exactly that is, I can think of a few reasons. There are likely many more, but that may take thousands of dollars of therapy to tease out. But top-of-mind, these reasons stand out.
1) I don’t know what I’m doing.
I mean that with 82% sincerity. I don’t outline, and usually I only have the vaguest notion of a plot idea, or sometimes I only know the first chapter. My stories unfold to me one day at a time, which means my narrator is just as lost as I am. I’m writing from my subconscious, which lends itself to a labyrinth of twists and turns, many of which the narrator has created for themselves. Simply put, my narrator is unreliable because the author is unreliable.
2) Life is unreliable.
If one really considers what makes a narrator unreliable, a few choice adjectives pop up. Deceitful, delusional. In denial. Okay, do those words not describe all of us, at least in some part of our lives? Unreliable is honest. What’s not honest is a hero who can do no wrong, always has the answers, and is always willing to save others before themselves. Is this an admirable protagonist? Yes, of course. But it makes for a helluva boring thriller.
3) The intimacy of the POV.
I typically write from a first-person, present-tense point of view. That means I’m seeing the world through my narrator’s eyes, moment by moment. This makes writing an unreliable narrator most effective, because the reader experiences the thoughts and actions as the protagonist does, and offers a fractured, almost stream-of-consciousness narration. What’s more unreliable in our daily lives than our swirling thoughts, our sudden fears, our whimsical and wholly unattainable daydreaming?
Striking a perfect balance
Writing an unreliable narrator brings me great joy, because I know readers will be lured into thinking one way until suddenly they’re forced to face an altogether different reality. But it’s also a tricky way to write, and the writer has to strike the perfect balance between believability and deus ex machina. An unreliable narrator shouldn’t be approached as a literary device; rather, a narrator’s unreliability should be an organic result of who they are and the decisions they make.
No author should set out and think to themselves, “I’m going to write an unreliable narrator.” That leads to clumsy and shoehorned writing. Rather, the author should pen the novel as it occurs to them from the subconscious, and only after reading the first draft should they themselves realize their protagonist is not to be trusted. The best writing comes from ephemeral, naturally occurring thoughts rooted in decades of life experience and keen observation. The worst writing comes from market-conscious intentions.
In my newest release, Tell Me What You Did, my protagonist Poe Webb’s unreliability is less a device than a simple fact of life. She lies to the audience because she lies to herself. Poe committed a horrible crime in her past, and though that experience has largely informed who she is in the story, she’s suppressed the memory enough that she struggles to even admit to herself what she did until events force her to reckon with her past actions. Her unreliability is, at its core, human.
The final key in writing an unreliable narrator is to avoid coyness. Too many times an author hints over and over that their protagonist is not to be trusted, building up an anticipation that’s so great the payoff never quite satisfies. Rather, the best unreliable narrators are those who never wink at the camera, and when they look into the mirror they’re just as convinced as we are that the person in front of them is telling the truth.
Like I coach all my students, write from the heart, from the soul, from instinct, from the subconscious. From that perspective, an unreliable narrator is not a trick but rather a fully formed individual who is convinced they are doing the right thing, despite all evidence to the contrary. This results in a hero—or anti-hero—who is, above all else, uniquely flawed and morally gray. Just like all of us.”
There is an article in today’s Telegraph, by Claire Allfree that explains how Waterstones became a high street success in the face of on-line giants like Amazon. The article focuses on James Daunt, Waterstones CEO. Excerpts are below.
James Daunt
“James Daunt is running between meetings and apologies for having to dash off for a minute before we can begin our chat. While he is gone I squint at the books in his New York office, but alas the Zoom screen is such that I can make out only one title – a biography of the artist Andy Warhol. Quite what a bookshelf would tell you about Daunt though is a moot point: he reads anything and everything.
“I try to knock through a non-fiction book once a week. I’ve just finished The Quiet Coup by Mehrsa Baradaran [about the market failures of American neoliberalism]. I’m reading a book on inflation. Although I’m having a tough time with novels at the moment. I haven’t hit upon something that’s made me feel ‘wow’.”
On second thoughts, perhaps you can deduce from this that Daunt cares very much about the health of new fiction, and that he is deeply concerned about the economy. Neither should be a surprise: Daunt is, after all, the most powerful man in Western bookselling. His footprint has been all over the books we buy and where we buy them ever since he founded the six-store Daunt Books chain, opening its first location on Marylebone High Street in London in 1990 at the age of 26.
Daunt Books’ Marylebone location is one of London’s most famous (and photographed) independent bookshops
In 2011, he was appointed managing director of Waterstones at a time when the chain was in a seeming death loop of forced branch closures and collapsing profits; by 2024 sales had reached £528.4 million, up 17 per cent on the year before, with profits for the same year soaring by £20 million to hit £32.8 million.
In 2019, he became the chief executive of the then floundering US book chain Barnes and Noble (he splits his time between New York and the four-storey Hampstead home he shares with his wife Katy Steward, who works in health care; the couple have two adult daughters) and has overseen an aggressive reboot and expansion, opening 50 stores last year and with another 50 planned for this.
So successful have both companies become that rumours are circulating that Elliott Management, the private equity firm that owns them, plan to float them on the stock exchange. Daunt, though, 61, dismisses such corporate gossip as though it were a bad smell. “These are not my plans at all,” he says, reluctant to disclose any further details for both companies beyond their steady and remorseless growth. “Much of it is pure speculation: one sees that a private equity firm buys a business and assumes that five years on, if the business is doing well, they will sell it. To be honest I lack the imagination to see why one would do things any differently to how we do it now.”
Indeed. The success of Waterstones in the UK is a rare, possibly unique bright spot in a retail market otherwise dominated by the collapse into administration of big brands (Ted Baker is among the latest to be plunged into crisis) and declining profits (Asda announced their worst Christmas since 2015, with sales slumping by more than 5 per cent over the festive period).
“What makes us different is that we stubbornly and tenaciously held on in places where other people have left, so you’ll find us in Grimsby and Middlesborough long after M&S have abandoned these places,” says Daunt. The Waterstones vision is as much ideological as financial. “We have a bookshop in Ayr because it matters that we are there.”
So why is Waterstones soaring and everywhere else floundering? Covid helped: sales rose 73 per cent in 2021-2022 as half of adults doubled their reading time during lockdown and an artfully curated bookshelf became a Zoom must-have accessory. “Most retailers appeal to a relatively small demographic – teenagers, or older men and so forth. We sell to everyone.”
“We have huge advantages,” he argues. “What we sell has a fixed price that we don’t set [book prices are set by the publishers]. So we are remarkably well protected from the consequences of excessive inflation.” Fair enough, but that fixed price is creeping up – it’s now common for literary hardbacks to sell at £22.
“But inflation has been remarkably modest in the UK book market, much less than it is in any other. When I first started selling books in 1990, a paperback was £6. Nor do we sell items that go out of date. Also we are aspirational. Our reach goes beyond the middle class bracket. Many parents want their children to read.”
Daunt’s argument is for a system whereby some communities are taxed more than others. “Sensible structures should be put in place so that Marylebone High Street, which is never going to struggle for occupancy, doesn’t benefit in the way Barrow-in-Furness should.” He doesn’t agree that one answer might be for shops to follow the Waterstones model, which places huge emphasis on the social and aesthetic experience of shopping and targets each shop directly at the needs of its local community.
“The problem is not the shop keeper or the environment. You need to provide an environment that allows them to thrive. And if you give an online retailer a massive incentive to open a huge warehouse, then you are stripping employment from local high streets, which is of huge social and cultural benefit. So don’t shout at the retailer, shout at the warehouse, and this has to be something that starts in Westminster.”
“I was a nice middle-class child who was taken down to Caledonian Road library to pick out my books from a very early age and had my nose in a book from the moment I could read,” he says. “Clearly if one is privileged enough to grow up, in my case with library books, it helps foster a love for reading. We were a nuclear family, although because of my father’s job I was sent to boarding school [Sherborne, in Dorset] which is a way of being educated I suppose. I certainly haven’t subjected my own children [Molly, who works for a security and counter terrorism think tank and is also completing a masters in Middle Eastern Studies at SOAS university, and Eliza, who is studying history at Yale] to that.”
Daunt’s argument is for a system whereby some communities are taxed more than others. “Sensible structures should be put in place so that Marylebone High Street, which is never going to struggle for occupancy, doesn’t benefit in the way Barrow-in-Furness should.” He doesn’t agree that one answer might be for shops to follow the Waterstones model, which places huge emphasis on the social and aesthetic experience of shopping and targets each shop directly at the needs of its local community.
“The problem is not the shop keeper or the environment. You need to provide an environment that allows them to thrive. And if you give an online retailer a massive incentive to open a huge warehouse, then you are stripping employment from local high streets, which is of huge social and cultural benefit. So don’t shout at the retailer, shout at the warehouse, and this has to be something that starts in Westminster.”
In person, Daunt has an air of careful affability. He was born in Islington in 1963. His father, who died in 2023, was the diplomat Timothy Daunt, while his mother, Patricia, brought up James and his two younger sisters – Eleanor, who works for a fragrance company, and Alice, who runs Daunt Travel, a high-end travel business. The house was bookish and he remembers school holidays as being “very intellectual”.
Daunt read history at Cambridge and on leaving joined JP Morgan in 1985, until Katy, at that point his girlfriend, suggested that perhaps he might want to do something else with his life. He set up his first Daunt shop in 1990, taking over an antiquarian bookstore on Marylebone High Street. “Running a business is not at all the tradition of the Daunt family,” he says. “Daunts tend to be either school teachers or public servants, and if you are neither of those things, you tend to join the church.”
There is a vaguely ecclesiastical beauty about the original Daunt shop, with its gorgeous Edwardian gallery and lofty calm. It set the image for the subsequent five Daunt stores that followed, which, given their locations (Holland Park, Hampstead, Belsize Park), retain an air of monied exclusivity, something of which Daunt is well aware.
“There has always been the accusations [with Daunt Books] of being leafy or snobby, and it’s a type that we undoubtedly are: you only have to listen to my accent to hear who I am. But the customer I could always identify was the taxi driver. They are and remain a really good customer base for us because they keep lots of books.”
When he was asked to take over Waterstones by its new owner, the Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut, no one thought he could do it. Amazon was selling books online at aggressive discounts, and there were apocalyptic warnings about the rise of the ebook.
Instead, Daunt set about applying the independent Daunt ethos to Waterstones and, in what seemed a particularly kamikaze move at the time, severing its relationship with publishers. No more in-store promotion displays paid for by publishing houses, a revenue stream that had brought in £27 million a year. And no more three for two discount tables either. He cleared out the management at a loss of 200 jobs and handed buying power to individual stores. “I hate homogeneity,” he says. “The idea is that each time you are creating a bookshop for the local community.”
He has his critics. Some accuse him of being ruthless, an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove. Is he? “I don’t know if I’m ruthless but I am single-minded as to what a good book shop is. And I don’t compromise on that and I never change my notion of what that is. I will never let people be useless. The key to that, and the bit people have found a bit ruthless, is that I require my bookshops to be run by booksellers. And if you are not interested in books and you don’t read and you don’t care then work somewhere else.”
With such reach and influence can come accusations of excessive curating, even censorship. Daunt bats them away. “We get accused periodically of going all woke, it’s nonsense. Or you get a bit of outrage from some author who says we are no longer stocking their book. And over the years I’ve been accused of not stocking almost every sort of book.”
All the same, does he agree the book industry is increasingly convulsed by the subject of what can and cannot be published? As leading publishers shy away from books with a gender critical perspective, or books with a pro-Israel stance.
“I don’t recognise that. Of course publishers make missteps. They go and clean up Roald Dahl and it’s just absurd. It was a bit of a stupid thing to do. But publishing is such a vigorous landscape that these missteps are soon corrected.”
Do these “missteps” affect what Waterstones select to buy? “Our job is to curate a sensible array of books. And when it comes to books about the Israel and Gaza conflict, we’ve had some real bestsellers such as The Genius of Israel [by Saul Singer and Dan Senor, about Israel’s strength as a nation]. Admittedly, this has been in areas with strong Jewish communities but it was ever thus. We are not dictating to anyone.”
“Yes, sometimes we make mistakes. We made a mistake with Hannah Barnes’ book about the Tavistock Clinic [Time to Think, an exposé of the Tavistock NHS gender clinics which multiple publishers refused to publish; it was eventually published by Swift in 2023] by underestimating how many copies we would need [when it was first published]. So when it sold out, we had to go back to Swift and ask for more copies. It’s a problem for about 10 days. People say ‘you are boycotting it’. We are not boycotting it; we’ve just sold out our initial order.””
Harry Bingham, of Jericho Writers, sent out an excellent, comprehensive email a week ago last Friday about how to describe the emotions of a character without TELLING.
He said, “Today I want to give a more comprehensive, more fully ordered list of options.
Honestly, I doubt if many of you will want to pin those options to the wall and pick from them, menu-style, as you write. But having these things in your awareness is at least likely to loosen your attachment to the clench-n-quake school of writing.
Let’s say that we have our character – Talia, 33, single. She’s the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at a major London museum, and the antiquities keep going missing. She’s also rather fond of Daniel, 35, a shaggy-haired archaeologist. Our scene? Hmm. Talia and a colleague (Asha, 44) are working late. They hear strange noises from the vault. They go to investigate and find some recent finds, Egyptian statuary, have been unaccountably moved. In the course of the scene, Asha tells Talia that she fancies Daniel … and thinks he fancies her back.
In the course of the scene, Talia feels curious about the noises in the vault, feels surprise and fear when she finds the statues have been moved. And feels jealousy and uncertainty when Asha speaks of her feelings for Daniel.
We need to find ways to express Talia’s feelings in the story.
Here’s one way:
Direct statements of emotion
Talia felt a surge of jealousy, that almost amounted to anger.
Bingo. Why not? That’s what she feels, so why not say it? No reason at all. Some writers will panic that they’re telling not showing, and they’ve read somewhere that they shouldn’t do that (at all, ever), so they’ll avoid these direct statements. But why? They work. They’re useful. They help the reader.
More complicated but still direct statements
Somewhere, she felt a shadow-self detach from her real one, a shadow self that wanted to claw Asha’s face, pull her hair, draw blood, cause pain.
That’s still saying “Talia felt X”, we’ve just inserted a more complicated statement into the hole marked X, but it still works. And that dab of exotic imagery gives the whole thing a novelly feel, so we’re good, right? Even though technically, we’re still telling not showing.
Physical statements: inner report
Talia felt her belly drop away, the seaside roller-coaster experience, except that here she was no child. There was no sand, no squinting sunshine, no erupting laughter.
Now as you know, I don’t love text that overuses physical statements as a way to describe emotion, but that’s because overuse of anything is bad, and because the statements tend to be very thin (mouth contorting, chest shuddering, etc). If you don’t overuse the statements and enrich the ones you do make, there’s not an issue.
Notice that here, we have Talia noticing something about her physical state – it’s not an external observation. But both things are fine.
Physical statements: external observation
Colour rushed into Talia’s face. She turned her head abruptly to prevent the other woman seeing but Asha was, in any case, more interested in the case of funerary amulets.
Here, we’re only talking about physical changes that are apparent on the outside, and that snippet is fine too. It doesn’t go very deep and, for my money, it feels like a snippet that would best go after a more direct statement. “Talia felt a surge of jealousy, anger almost. Colour rushed into her face, and she turned her head …”
Dialogue
“Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …”
Dialogue conveys emotion. It can also provide text and subtext in one. So here, the overt meaning is Talia’s doubt that a mid-thirties Daniel could fancy a mid-forties Asha… but the clear sub-text is a catty jealousy on Talia’s part. And readers love decoding those subtexts, so the more you offer them, the better.
Direct statement of inner thought
“Daniel?” said Talia. “But he’s so much younger. I really doubt that he’d …”
Doubt what? That he’d fancy the glamorous, shaggy-haired Asha, with her white shirts and big breasts and pealing laughter?
The second bit here is a direct statement of Talia’s actual thought. We could also have written:
Doubt what, she wondered. That he’d fancy …
That inserts a “she wondered” into things, but as you see, we can have a direct statement of her thoughts with or without that “she wondered”. Either way, it works.
Memory
Talia remembered seeing the two of them, at conference in Egypt. Holding little white coffee cups on a sunny balcony and bawling with laughter at something, she didn’t know what. Asha’s unfettered, unapologetic booming laughter and all the sunlit roofs of Cairo.
That doesn’t quite go directly to emotions, but it half-does and we could take it nearer with a little nudging. And, for sure, if you want a rounded set of tools to build out your emotional language, then memory will play a part.
Action
When Asha spoke, Talia had been holding a small pot in elaborately worked clay. It would once have held a sacred oil with which to anoint a new bride. Talia felt Asha looking sharply at her, at her hands, and when she looked, she saw the pot was split in two, that she’d broken it, now, after two thousand three hundred years.
OK, is that a bit on the nose? Breaking a marriage pot. Well, maybe, but it’s better than quaking, clenching and contorting all the time.
Use of the setting
They were in the vault now, marital relics stored in the shelves behind them, funerary relics and coinage on the shelves in front. Leaking through the walls from the offices next door, there was the wail of Sawhali music, the mourning of a simsimiyya.
At one level, that snippet is only talking about hard physical facts: what’s stored on the shelves, what music they can hear. But look at the language: we have marital and funerary in the same sentence. The next sentence brings us wail and mourning. This is a pretty clear way of saying that Talia’s not exactly joyful about things. Every reader will certainly interpret it that way.
And there are probably more alternatives too, and certainly you can smush these ones up together and get a thousand interesting hybrids as a result.”
Maris Kreizman has put some advice (for herself) on the Literary Hub website dated two days ago.
Maris Kreizman hosted the literary podcast, The Maris Review, for four years. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Republic, and more. Her essay collection, I Want to Burn This Place Down, is forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins.
She says, “Today I have my very first press event for my new book, which is out in July. I, along with three other wonderful Ecco authors, will take part in a lunchtime Zoom meeting with various members of the media and booksellers, during which we’ll be interviewed by Ecco’s associate publisher. I’ve been thinking a lot about what to say, and how to talk about my book in general.
I will not use this space to workshop anything, I promise. I’m not here to sell this book to you. But I do think my many years as a books journalist has primed me to understand what makes for a good talk, and I want to tell you about what I think works, while also reminding myself. Stage fright is real, after all.
I won’t have a script, just a few notes. I know how important it is to actually have a conversation, and that means being present and listening to what other people are saying, too.
The goal is to talk about the book in more detail than the marketing copy that my editor so carefully crafted for me, but to still be pithy and precise. The book has gone through so many iterations, and I have to have a handle on what it is now, after many rounds of edits and much feedback from my agent and editor and a few trusted friends.
In my career covering books, in podcasts and in print, I’ve conducted hundreds of author interviews, and the very best ones featured writers who were able to make a tight, cohesive narrative out of, well, the narrative they’d already written. As an author, getting the story right is the most important part of writing a book, but getting the story of the story right is the most important part of promoting it, of getting readers to want to buy it.
Often the authors who have the best grasp on the concept of storytelling to sell their own work are also teachers, the ones who are used to speaking to an audience in classes and keeping their attention until the end of the session. The biggest pros I’ve encountered have four or five stories that they can trot out for any occasion when they’re talking about the book. Does this mean that every article or interview they do is entirely original? Absolutely not. Do average readers read every single piece of press that’s written about a particular book, even the ones they’re interested in? Absolutely not.
It has just about always been the job of the author to help sell the book long after they’ve finished the job of writing it. I think we like to pretend that in the past authors could simply write a book and then keep their heads down, letting their publishers take care of getting the word out. To be fair, before the technological changes of the 21st century (namely social media) authors could be more passive in the promotion of their books—Philip Roth never had to connect with readers on Twitter or do a bunch of podcasts, after all. But he did have to, in interviews and at bookstore talks and signings, make readers want to buy what he was selling.
Now, in a landscape where books don’t get tons of traditional media coverage and social media overall gets less and less reliable, it’s more important than ever for authors to take an active role in talking about their books (reminder: we love our in-house publicists and marketing gurus, but there’s only so much they can do on a tight schedule with a punishing work load). As icky as it may feel to have to be the chief salesperson of one’s own book as well as the writer, who else has more of a vested interest in making sure the book finds readers?
My hope is that after I’ve discussed my book today, more people in the industry will actually get a chance to read it, and they’ll be able to tell me what they think my book is about. They have more distance from the work than I do, and I welcome their interpretations. In fact I welcome any good faith takes on my book, although because I am also the chief protector of my own sensitive feelings, I may not have the emotional bandwidth to consider them all.”
I agree with what Maris says, and I’d like to add some points:
Her listeners will want to know what the book is about – no more than three sentences: time, place and key events.
They don’t want to hear a summary of the plot.
They will be interested in anything particularly unusual about a key character or event.
You can talk briefly about the development arc of a key character – particularly if it’s positive.
If you had to do some special research (interviewing people/going places), that’s worth mentioning.
They would like to hear from you about what makes you feel good about the book.
How about touching on what motivated you to write the book, and how you got the idea for it.
Harry Bingham of Jericho Writers made in interesting point about unsolved mysteries in his Friday email of 6 December 2024. He calls it the easiest technique in fiction.
Harry said, “Lots of things in writing are hard. One thing in particular is very, very easy… but it’s astonishingly neglected by a lot of writers.
Here’s an example of getting something wrong, using an extract I’ve invented for the purpose. In my mind, this extract might stand at the start of a novel, but it could be anywhere really.
So:
Dawn woke her – dawn, and the rattle of trade that started to swell with it. Barrels being rolled over cobbles, a cart arriving from the victuallers’ yard, men starting to bray.
It had been a cold night and promised to be a cold morning, too. Her feet found the rag mat next to the bed. She washed hands and face briefly, and without emotion, then lifted her nightgown and began to bind her breasts, with the white winding strip she always used. Round and round, flattening her form.
She continued to get dressed. Blue slops. Bell-bottomed trousers, a shirt, a waistcoat, a blue jacket, loose enough for her shoulders to work. Just for a moment, she looked at her hands. They’d been soft once, and were coarse now, hardened off by the scrambles up rigging, the hard toil on ropes.
Caroline – Charles as she was known to her fellow ratings – had been forced to take work as a man when her father died two years ago, right at the start of this new war against Napoleon. She had tried taking work as a seamstress, but the pay had been poor, and she had a younger sister always sickly to look after. In the end, she had found herself forced to dress as a man and work as a man, here at the great bustling port of Portsmouth…
I hope you can see that this passage is kinda fine… and kinda fine… and then disastrous.
The first paragraph here is fine: it starts to establish the scene.
The second paragraph is intriguing: why the flipping heck is this woman (clearly not a modern one) so keen to flatten her chest?
The third paragraph inks in a bit more of the mystery: OK, so this woman works on ships of some sort in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. So why is she disguising herself as a man?
And then –
The disaster –
The writer makes the horrendous mistake of answering that question. The story was just beginning to make fine headway. We wanted to grip our reader and thrust them forwards into the story. Our first three paragraphs set up a fine story motor, which was already starting to chug away. Then by completely solving the mystery, we destroyed almost every shred of momentum we had.
By the end of that extract, we still have an interest in seeing what happens to this woman, but we don’t yet know her very well as a character. We can’t at this stage care very much about her. But we did care about that mystery. And the author just ruined it.
The lesson here – and the easiest technique in fiction is – take it slow. If the reader wants to know X, then don’t tell them X.
That’s it! That’s the whole technique.
A much better approach here would have been to simply follow Caroline/Charles’s morning. I’d probably have given her some kind of problem to solve. Perhaps, she owes an innkeeper money that she doesn’t have and needs to slip away unseen. Or she has to collect some belongings from one part of town but has to get back to her ship in order not to miss the tide.
That way, one part of the reader is asking, Will she get back to her ship in time? But that’s just a top layer to the more interesting underlying question of Why is she disguised as a man?
Indeed, we’ll study the whole rushing-about-town episode with extra interest, because while we’re not that fussed about whether she misses the tide or not, we are interested in that second question – and we read about these ordinary story incidents as a way to uncover clues about the bigger issue.
The key fact here is that readers love solving mysteries. They like reading a text to find clues and hints and suggestions that lead them to an answer. I think for most readers that process has an extra impetus if the mystery is embedded in something very personal to a key character.
The Daily Telegraph has an article in its 29 December 2024 issue which I find distressing. (I could not find an author attribution.)
Homer, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey classics
The article says, “Homer’s epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey have been hit with trigger warnings by a university for “distressing” content.
The University of Exeter has come under fire after telling undergraduates they may “encounter views and content that they may find uncomfortable” in their Greek mythology studies.
In what has been branded as a “parody” and “bonkers”, students enroled on the Women in Homer module are told material could be “challenging”.
With references to sexual violence, rape and infant mortality, undergraduates are also advised they should “feel free to deal with it in ways that help (eg to leave the classroom, contact Wellbeing, and of course talk to the lecturer)” if content is “causing distress”.
However, the advice, which was obtained by the Mail on Sunday via Freedom of Information laws, has been ridiculed by both classics-loving Boris Johnson and experts alike.
The Iliad depicts the final weeks of the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by Greek city-states, while The Odyssey describes Odysseus’s successful journey back to Ithaca, set over multiple locations, timelines and alternative homelands.
Mr Johnson, who read classics at the University of Oxford and is a fan of Homer, said the ancient works provided the “foundation of Western literature”.
Reacting to news of the university’s warning, the former prime minister described the policy as “bonkers”, telling the paper: “Exeter University should withdraw its absurd warnings. Are they really saying that their students are so wet, so feeble-minded and so generally namby-pamby that they can’t enjoy Homer?
“Is the faculty of Exeter University really saying that its students are the most quivering and pathetic in the entire 28 centuries of Homeric studies?”
Historian Lord Andrew Roberts said students shouldn’t be “wrapped in cotton wool and essentially warned against ancient but central texts of the Western canon”.
Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, added: “A university that decides to put a trigger warning on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey has become morally disoriented to the point that it has lost the plot.”
Jeremy Black, the author of A Short History Of War, said the measure “can surely only be a parody”.
A spokesman from the University of Exeter told The Telegraph: “The University strongly supports both academic freedom and freedom of speech, and accepts that this means students may encounter views and content that they may find uncomfortable during their studies.
“Academics may choose to include a content warning on specific modules if they feel some students may find some of the material challenging or distressing.
“Any decision made to include a content warning is made by the academics involved in delivering the modules, and these help ensure students who may be affected by specific issues are not subjected to any potential unnecessary distress.”
The warnings on Homer’s work come amid an increasing number of works being slapped with trigger warnings.
Last week, it emerged that John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was removed from the Welsh GCSE curriculum for the “psychological and emotional” harm caused by its racial slurs.
In October, the University of Nottingham received similar criticism for warning students of The Canterbury Tales’ “expressions of Christian faith”.
Earlier this year, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland were amongst a collection of children’s stories that were handed trigger warnings for “white supremacy” at York St John University.
In 2023, a disclaimer was added to the republishing of Nobel Prize-winning Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Whilst deciding not to censor the book, publisher Penguin Random House’s note made clear the reissue did not constitute an “endorsement” of Hemingway’s original text.”
I remember that as a child my mother reading both the Iliad and the Odyssey to me and that I particularly enjoyed them, knowing that they had been written 2,800 years ago.. Are today’s young adults really so vulnerable to distress? If so, trigger warnings are necessary for 90% of the current news!
Beth Kander has an article on Writers Digest website dated 12 December 2024, about how she entered a writing contest at the last minute an won more than the contest!
Beth Kander
Beth Kander is a novelist and playwright with tangled roots in the Midwest and Deep South. The granddaughter of immigrants, her writing explores how worlds old and new intertwine—or collide. Her work has been described as “riveting,” “emotional,” “expertly crafted,” and “habit-forming.” Expect twists, turns, and secrets, with surprising heart and humor. Beth has too many degrees and drinks too much coffee. Her favorite characters are her dashing husband and their two lovely kids.
She says, “This book definitely has a non-traditional origin. I was knee deep in another project when a friend texted to let me know that the pop culture site Hey Alma was having a Hanukkah movie pitch competition. Eager to procrastinate on my existing project, I checked the pitch competition deadline—and found out it was the very next day. Long story short (literally), I threw together a pitch for I Made It Out Of Clay, a quirky romcom-with-a-golem concept, submitted it at the 11th hour, and ultimately won the competition.
Industry folks started reaching out to me to inquire about film rights. My literary agent, Alli, passed along some great advice from a film agent colleague: “Write the book first, not the movie.” So, I set aside my other book projects and prioritized writing this novel. The story immediately provided myriad unconventional opportunities to explore big topics: grief and family dynamics and identity and adult friendships and turning 40 … I got to write about these heavy things while laughing and making monsters. What a gift.
I won the pitch competition in December 2022. I was so inspired, I drafted the novel in two blurry months. My agent took it out on sub in February 2023. It sold at auction in March 2023, and publication was set for December 2024. So all told, a two-year-process from idea to publication. That’s fast—often, the writing alone can take longer than that! I’m grateful that although the acquisition happened fast, I had a great editor and plenty of time to revise the book, several times over. I loved spending the time really developing the story and connecting with each character.
I’ve learned so much in the process of publishing this book that it’s honestly hard to even know where to begin, and there have been plenty of surprises along the way. But if I had to pull out the biggest lesson, it’s this: You just never know.
You can spend years working on a story you really believe in, only to have it languish and eventually fade away. You can have an overnight idea that becomes the story everyone’s eager to read. You can’t trust trends or tricks. You just have to keep trying. I think a lot about this two-panel meme, where the first panel is labeled “what people think success looks like” and shows an arrow moving steadily forward and up, and the second panel is labeled “what success actually looks like” and it shows a tangled mess that a forward-facing arrow finally re-emerges from… which feels relevant to the publishing process. But I’ve been over-the-top lucky to work with my agent, Alli, to navigate every detour along the way. And working on I Made It Out Of Clay with my editor, April, and the team at Mira/HarperCollins, has been a delight. Sometimes, gracefully and gratefully, the puzzle pieces slide into place.
You just never know.
This was the fastest writing process I’ve ever undertaken. To go from a paragraph-long idea to a 90,000-word novel in two months is… well, not something I’d necessarily recommend, honestly. Thank God for coffee.
But what I realized is that I didn’t speed-write this book in a vacuum; it wasn’t an anomaly, or a fluke. It was a culmination. All those years, all those other stories; that was my training for this manuscript-marathon. I doubt I’ll keep that pace up with many subsequent projects, but I’m definitely holding fast to the lesson that even the projects that don’t pan out help shape the ones that will fly.
There’s so much I hope that readers will get out of this book—catharsis, cackling-laughter, genuine enjoyment, a sense of release. There’s some strange stuff in the story (an actual monster!) but it’s really rooted in characters that I hope are relatable in all their imperfections and deep desires for something better. Most of all, I hope this book gives readers permission to laugh in the midst of sorrow or acknowledge sadness even as they dance for joy; to let complicated, conflicting emotions exist alongside each other on the page and in our lives. The publication of this book intersected with a profound loss in my own life, and I’ve become so grateful for anyone and anything that acknowledges that we can feel many things at once. If readers come away with that affirmation, I’ll be thrilled.
Write the book you want to rewrite—because most of writing is revising! Don’t agonize over every word in a first draft; that will only slow you down. Just write the story. Get it onto the page. Drafting is the stage where you capture the idea. Revising is where you figure out how to really tell the story well.”
On the Writers Digest website, September 2, 2024, Abigail Owen has some excellent ideas on how to begin a story in a way that captures the reader’s attention.
Abigail Owen
Abigail Owenis an award-winning author who writes NA/YA romantasy and paranormal romance. She is obsessed with big worlds, fast plots, couples that spark, a dash of snark, and oodles of HEAs! Other titles include: wife, mother, Star Wars geek, ex–competitive skydiver, AuDHD, spreadsheet lover, Jeopardy! fanatic, organizational guru, true classic movie buff, linguaphile, wishful world traveler, and chocoholic. Abigail currently resides in Austin, Texas, with her own swoon-worthy hero, their (mostly) angelic teenagers, and two adorable fur babies.
She says: “Let’s be honest, in this social-media-driven world where our collective attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, grabbing a reader’s attention is getting harder. Or maybe, it’s more like not losing their attention is getting harder.
Without a beginning that hooks them right away, they might not read the rest. So, if we’re all agreed that beginnings are very important, the next natural question is how to make beginnings great.
Twelve years, 50 books, and countless workshops and craft lessons in, I’ve gathered a list of tips over time that I hope you’ll find useful. Here are my top 4 tips for writing great beginnings.
TIP #1: FIGURE OUT WHERE TO START
Figuring out where to start a book is sometimes the hardest part. Starting too soon in the story you’re confusing the reader and not ground them. Starting too late and you’re giving large info dumps and backstory. Your opening scene is perhaps your most important, so let’s look at a few ways to approach it.
Show the “Before Picture”
Open with where the character/world is starting from but be deliberate about the snapshot you are showing. What does this moment say about the character or world they are in? Why does the reader care? What impact does this moment have on the character, the conflict, or the inciting incident? How will it be different from the “end picture”?
Make the “Before Picture” Not Boring
The reader isn’t going to care about a random character sitting around having coffee with their best friend. Not yet. So try one of these tricks to up the interest level:
Surprise the Reader: Do start with what looks to be a boring, day-in-the life moment, and then surprise the reader with unusual dialogue or characterization.
The Best Day Ever: The character is having a great day. Show the reader what the character is about to lose with the inciting incident, so it makes that moment more emotionally impactful.
A Very Bad Day: The character is having an “everything that can go wrong does” kind of day. Bonus: Make the worst day count by having it feed into the inciting incident in some way.
Drop Into Action: I’m not saying start with a battle, unless it works for the genre or story (look at every Mission Impossible movie ever). But give the character action. They aren’t just sitting and talking or thinking.
TIP #2: CONNECT TO THE MAIN CHARACTER
Many readers will put a book down if they don’t like the main character immediately. Even if your character is going to start from an unlikable place and grow, readers aren’t patient enough to read that far. Some things to try include:
Give the MC a Compelling Voice
Give your character a voice right off the bat. Show their personality through action, through dialogue, through short bursts of internal monologue, and through reaction.
Create Complex Motivation
Motivations, such as love, power, revenge, or self-discovery should be strong enough to drive the MC to action. Even better if their motivation conflicts directly with their own personal desires or needs or is tied to their conflict or to the inciting incident.
Give Them a Fatal Flaw
If a character is perfect, they have nowhere to grow. Also, perfect tends to stir up feelings of resentment in readers, rather than interest. Give the MC a relatable flaw which you can then tie to their character arc and even to the conflict.
Make Them Sympathetic
Give the reader a reason to take the character’s side. For example, we are naturally more sympathetic to a person who gets knocked down, and even more when they get back up.
“Save the Cat”
The well-known Blake Snyder technique. Give the character an action that shows them doing something “nice.” If they show even one tiny moment of empathy, kindness, thoughtfulness, or even astuteness, they immediately become more relatable and likable.
Show What They Love Most / What They Might Lose
Show the character with the person or doing the thing they love most. Even better, make it the thing they could lose when the inciting incident hits.
TIP #3: MAKE THE SCENES DYNAMIC
The biggest mistake I see in beginnings is paragraphs or pages of the same thing. Just internal monologue, or just exposition, or even just action, which can be disorienting. Even worse if all that same doesn’t drive the story forward. Here are a few ways to make sure you are keeping your writing as dynamic as your plot and characters:
Focus Beyond the First Line
A first line can be used to shock, to draw in, to set tone, to establish a compelling voice, and more. But often writers end up focusing so much on the first line, what comes after isn’t as good. Fine tune the entire beginning first, then go back and create that amazing first line.
Limited & Purposeful Backstory
James Scott Bell, gives this tip: Highlight any lines about the backstory a bright color. This will give you a visual clue where you’re spending too much time on it. Then whittle. Decide what’s most important for the reader to know right then to either ground them in the story so they aren’t lost, or to move the story forward. Trim the rest.
Every Scene Gets More Than One Purpose
Every scene should have a purpose that drives the story forward—establishing character, plot, conflict, tone, theme, setting, and so forth. But it’s even better if there’s more than one purpose to a given scene. Add layers of purpose!
Mix Up Your Narrative Modes
Use a quick hitting mix of exposition, description, internal reflection, internal monologue, dialogue, and action. Think of it as a playing a piano. If you hit the same note over and over, listeners will tune you out quickly. The goal is to play lots of different notes in a way that makes music.
TIP #4: MAKE THE INCITING INCIDENT HURT
This tip I got from a fantastic Pandemonium on Beginnings. The inciting incident is the moment that the character has the tables flipped on them, their world turns upside down, they are given an impossible decision, or what they love most is ripped away. It’s what sets that character on their journey and starts the conflict. Already this is an important moment. But you can punch it up by taking advantage of all the ways it impacts the MC.
Make It the Worst Possible Thing
By now you’ve established who your character is and what’s important to them. If the inciting incident can be the worst possible thing to happen, based on that characterization, it will hurt more.
Changes to Future, World, and Sense of Self
That fatal flaw you established earlier, was it involved? Does the inciting incident directly impact who they see themselves to be? What about their motivations or their internal conflict? Does it tie to their backstory? What is going to change about all those things?
Add Insult to Injury
Now make it worse. Find a way to add insult to injury and rub salt in that wound. What if the inciting incident is their fault? Or it’s served up by their worst enemy? Or it takes away the thing they care about the most?
If you didn’t know before, now you know that I’m a fan of lists. LOL. I hope a few of those were good arrows to add to your arsenal as a quiver. Now go out there and write your own great beginnings!”
There is an article in today’s Telegraph by Ben Wright, which argues that AI is making a degree in humanities more valuable than ever.
Ben Wright
Ben Wright is a columnist and associate editor for The Telegraph. He was previously business editor and before joining the Telegraph was City correspondent at the Wall Street Journal and editor of Financial News.
Ben said, “Some might call it a tragedy. The number of students taking English literature at A-level dropped from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 last year. The number applying to study the subject at university dropped by a third over a similar period. Some pessimists believe the English literature degree could die out within a decade if the subject doesn’t make a better case for itself.
It’s not hard to understand why. For years now, we’ve been telling students to focus on Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects in the belief that a strong knowledge in these areas was the key to gaining entry to a whole range of industries. When you work in the money markets (or law courts, or Silicon Valley), what use are the novels of Wordsworth gonna be, eh?
That’s not complete nonsense but now the pendulum is in danger of swinging too far. And I’m not just saying that as one of the dwindling tribe of English literature graduates huddled together for warmth under the shrinking shelter and capricious protection of the media and publishing industries. Many employers, including those at the very cutting edge of tech, are coming to the same conclusion.
Strangely, a chronic problem has become acute with the advent of artificial intelligence. Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI, caused a bit of flutter earlier this year when he tweeted: “The hottest new programming language is English.” What he meant is that increasingly you don’t need to be able to code to code.
A friend of mine who works in the tech industry points out that the deep learning algorithms and transformer models created by the likes of Google, Meta, and OpenAI among others in the past few years didn’t create Large Number Models; they created Large Language Models (LLMs).
Anyone can therefore write prompts for ChatGPT and their ilk. “Natural” language is therefore becoming the “user interface” for artificial intelligence. (That sentence alone illustrates why Silicon Valley might need some help with the transition.)
As my friend put it: the invention of the iPhone put a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket, but LLMs give all of us the ability to program it. In many ways this is great news. It means that technology is becoming more democratised and accessible. It opens up a host of opportunities for those who are skilled in the use of language. The problem is, that’s not many recent graduates.
Anjney Midha, who is on the board of several AI companies, says he often sees very bright Gen Z kids struggling to write clear prompts because they mostly communicate through broken or pidgin English: “Translating thought to language is insanely hard for them.”
Ethan Mollick, a professor studying AI at Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, says this means that – in an inversion of the old order of things – experienced managers are becoming better coders than bright young things fresh out of university.
Nor is the problem confined to the world of tech. Universities are finding that many students arrive having never read a whole book from cover to cover. This is leading to a massive deficit in old-fashioned skills that turn out not to be so old-fashioned after all.
For the past few years, Kingston University has been asking businesses what skills they need but currently aren’t finding in potential employees. Top of the list are the ability to communicate, analyse, adapt, problem-solve and think creatively.
What’s more, it turns out that computers can learn to code far quicker than humans can. They can easily be taught how to ace exams in maths and science. But even the most sophisticated generative AI struggles with English literature papers. There’s a clue here.
In a recent interview about AI, the mathematician Terence Tao said: “I think at the frontier, we will always need humans and AI. They have complementary strengths.” So, contrary to the prevailing doom-mongering about the relentless rise of AI being about to damn the humanities to perpetual irrelevance, might the very opposite be true?
With such a large supply and demand mismatch, you’d assume the market will eventually correct itself, but perhaps things can be helped on their way. Colin Hughes, the head of the country’s largest exam board AQA, argued the GCSE English language needed to be rethought because it was “not very inspiring” and “a bit too mechanistic”.
One obvious way to update the syllabus would be to teach the writing of clear, succinct and unambiguous prompts for artificial intelligence chatbots. English literature could also be made more relevant.
That is not – repeat, not – about bemoaning the canon for being too “male, pale and stale”, as Sharon Hague, the managing director of Pearson, recently did. Nor should we point the finger at “wokeness” for killing off the English degree.
Such tensions have always existed in the discipline. So academics can continue with their squabbles about which voices are most marginalised, but only after pointing out that studying literature is a crash course in empathy, that almost all careers require an element of storytelling and that the only way to learn how to write well is to read lots.
Anyone can therefore write prompts for ChatGPT and their ilk. “Natural” language is therefore becoming the “user interface” for artificial intelligence. (That sentence alone illustrates why Silicon Valley might need some help with the transition.)
Harold Bloom argued that deep reading fostered higher order thinking. An education in the humanities or the liberal arts also makes students more adept at dealing with nuance and expressing opinions based on value judgments. These are useful skills for dealing with an unpredictable future and a world composed of various shades of grey.
None of this is going to result in an immediate stampede of people signing up to study English literature at university. You don’t need to understand Chaucer to write clear AI prompts. What’s more, you shouldn’t really need any better argument for studying great art other than for its own sake.
But if reading whole books and writing essays is no longer a given, then those who can will have an edge over their peers. And if more students can be persuaded that’s a good way to become more employable, a reasonable proportion of them will go on to study English literature at A-level and a reasonable proportion of them will go on to do so at university.
It’s only common sense that if you are worried about the rise of machines and robots stealing our jobs, it’s better to lean into the stuff that AI finds trickier to do. The not-so-secret ingredient is right there on the packaging; they’re called humanities for a reason.”
Hannah (she doesn’t mention her last name) has a very good article on her website (Between the Lines Editorial) that provides a sensible rethink on several pieces of popular writing advice.
“I’m Hannah, an editor, author, and writing coach. I love helping writers like you polish their stories, enhance their craft, and chase their publishing dreams.”
She says, “There’s a lot of great writing advice, both free and paid, online these days. Whether you like to hang around the writing community on Instagram, surf Pinterest for new writing tips, browse your local bookstore for writing craft books, or find blogs (like mine!), there’s endless information available.
And while a lot of this advice is great, it’s not as black-and-white as many people make it out to be. I’m always talking about how writing is a gray area, and that’s true when it comes to certain popular pieces of writing advice.
We all work differently. No writing advice is ‘one size fits all.’ There are often elements that you can take and use, but nothing is absolute.
Let’s break it down into how some of the most popular writing advice isn’t absolute and what you can take away from those tips.
#1 “Real writers write every day.”
I’m not sure where this started, but you don’t have to write every day to be a “real” writer.
Writing every day can be helpful, and it’s great if you simply enjoy it! But it’s not realistic for everyone for multiple reasons. We don’t all live the same lives nor have the same amount of spare time to work on our craft. We also have different life obligations and energy levels that impact our writing time.
And yet…
You do have to practice if you want to improve your craft, and you definitely need to get words on paper if you want to finish your projects.
But taking days off–whether for school, a day job, family time, or a simple break–doesn’t mean you’re a ‘fake’ writer. Don’t stress out about writing all the time!
Not Great: Real writers write every day.
Underlying Nugget: Practicing your writing consistently is important to improve and get projects done! Find a pace and balance that fits your life.
Pro Tip: Even if you enjoy writing every day or are working on a big project, make sure you’re taking care of yourself and doing other activities outside of writing.
#2 “Show, Don’t Tell”
I’ve written an entire post about this one, but what this boils down to is that writing is about balance. That includes showing vs. telling!
I think this one is used a lot in beginner’s creative writing classes as a way to encourage newer writers to practice showing detail and emotion. That’s a huge part of how you build a scene. But what’s often neglected is that telling is okay sometimes–and it’s even encouraged when you need to add context or simple explanations!
Not Great: Show, don’t tell.
Underlying Nugget: Showing is really great, but don’t try to rework every sentence to be ‘showing.’ It’s okay to show and tell.
Pro Tip: Go read my other blog post about this for more details!
#3 “Writers must suffer for their craft”
This is said not just about writing but about art in general. Artists must suffer mentally, physically, and financially to be real artists, right? They must turn all of that pain into their art!
I think this is one of the most toxic things people say about writing and creative professions/pursuits. It’s not that writers don’t experience pain–as humans, we all do. It’s the idea that writers should or must be in pain to write good stories that’s the problem.
If writing is causing you excessive anxiety, depression, or other complex feelings you’re having trouble working through, I encourage you to speak with a mental health professional.
That being said, it’s okay to find inspiration from life and the journey you’ve been on. Great books and stories are about the human condition and how we can overcome struggle and pain to reconnect, grow, and heal. We can be happy, healthy, and handling life while also telling engaging, meaningful stories.
Not Great: Writers should suffer for their craft.
Underlying Nugget: The human condition will always be part of storytelling, and it’s okay to take inspiration from your life journey as you write.
Pro Tip: If writing is causing you excessive mental pain or discomfort, speak with a mental health professional in your area.
Pro Tip #2: If you find yourself talking really negatively about writing, try reframing it. For example, instead of saying. “writing sucks and it’s why I do it,” try saying, “writing is hard some days, but I do it because it’s important to me.”
#4 “Cut all adverbs”
There’s no denying that most of us overuse adverbs in the early drafts of our work. (Y’all don’t want to see some of the paragraphs I’ve self-edited in my current WIP!)
There’s even that famous quote about adverbs paving the path to hell.
As your friendly neighborhood editor, I want to remind you that you should cut unnecessary adverbs from your writing. But that means sometimes adverbs are necessary and totally fine!
Not Great: Cutting all adverbs from your project.
Underlying Nugget: Eliminate unnecessary adverbs, but keep ones that add to the meaning of your sentence. If you think there’s a verb that can be more descriptive/precise, use that instead.
Pro Tip: Search (Ctrl + F on Windows) your document for “ly ” (yes, include the space!) to find most adverbs in your manuscript. Make note of how many words it highlights, then evaluate each instance to decide if you should revise further.
#5 “Replace ‘said’ with strong verbs”
I see this advice often, and I think the idea is that strong verbs will make your writing more engaging.
While strong verbs are great, simple dialogue tags like “said” and “asked” are nearly invisible to readers. They’re a simple signal that doesn’t slow down the text like “shouted” or “murmured” can.
And obviously this section comes with the opposite advice as well. I see some advice urging writers to “avoid strong verbs and always use invisible tags.”
The truth is, there are many great ways to tag dialogue. Sometimes it’s with a strong verb. Sometimes it’s with a simple verb. And sometimes it’s actually no tag, or even using a sentence of action in place of that ‘said’ verb!
What’s really important is finding a flow and the right pacing for your scene.
Not Great: Replace ‘said’ with strong verbs.
Underlying Nugget: There are many great ways to tag dialogue, and you should strive for some balance that achieves the right flow and pacing for your scene.
Pro Tip: If you’re going to replace ‘said’ or ‘asked,’ try to use precise speaking verbs. In my editing work, I see verbs used as dialogue tags that don’t quite equal speech. This can risk readers being pulled out of your story to re-read your sentence. Just something to watch out for!
Bonus #6 “You have to be published to be a real writer”
Your writing is valid no matter why you’re doing it or what stage you’re at in your writing journey.
Hobbyist? Great!
Like to post fanfiction? Wonderful!
Want to self-publish? Awesome!
Agented and on submission? Very nice!
Sending out query letters? Amazing!
All of the above–and whatever is in between–makes you a writer. You don’t need to sell 50,000 copies of your book to be ‘legit.’ You don’t need to publish to be a ‘real writer.’ Work toward the goals you want to work on at whatever pace you want.
William Peace Blog 