Note: The WritingEssentials blog is on hiatus. Meanwhile, favorite posts will be published with updates. Ellen ~~ Dialogue poses challenges for writers, not just in punctuating it correctly, but also in using it to represent speech in an accurate, yet paradoxically artistic way. This post revisits an earlier one on dealing with dialogue. Writers, especially …
Note: The WritingEssentials blog is on hiatus. Meanwhile, favorite posts will be published with updates. Ellen ~~ The New York Times Book Review had a recent essay in which the writer, herself an author of memoirs about her family, poses an interesting definition of a well-crafted memoir that “involves archival research, hours of taped interviews …
The last couple posts have focused on writing books with advice for becoming a writer. Some were general and others specific—for young people, for novelists, for those interested in a writing career writers. Despite their varying focus, they all touched on some basics covered in my post becoming a writer, such as identifying as a …
Writers, especially beginning ones, often struggle with dialogue. There are many aspects to handling dialogue in your writing, including distinguishing between direct quotation and indirect quotation. Since direct quotations repeat a person’s remarks in their own words without deviation, they require quotation marks; for example: Mary said, “I am ready.” Indirect quotations, on the other …