Wednesday;s Writer's Tip brought to you by Janet Lane Walters - Tag lines #amwriting

How a writer chooses to identify who is speaking can be problematic. In the heat of writing an exchange between two people some problems can occur. I know I've found this in my writing. The rapid exchange goes down with no bother to say who is speaking. Then going back and trying to discover who says what can suddenly seem not so bright. If the writer can't figure who is speaking, think of the reader. I've seen this in contest entries and even in published books and have to go back and try to decipher who is saying what. Sometimes I find speaker A has said something two times in a row. Calls for revision.

Another problem in writing a scene heavy with dialogue is the creative use of tags. The simple said, asked, answered are avoided for fancy words. Shouted, yelled. Suddenly a pattern evolves and the reader begins to wonder what tag the writer will use next. I've read books like this and I suddenly become more interested in seeing what the next tag will be. Not great for enjoying the story and maybe an excuse for the reader to put the story aside never to be seen again.

What about those lovely adverby. "She said quickly. He replied angrily. She asked softly. Here another pattern can arrive and the reader enters into the adverb alert. Another reason not to read on.

But just using said, though generally invisible to the reader can also become boring. There are ways to avoid this usage. Try a little action, using the speaker doing something. Mark's eyebrown arched. "What are you doing? "I don't care." A gruffness entered Ray's voice. Doing this becomes very important when writing scenes with a mutitude of cnaracters, making it easy for the reader to know who is saying what.

Making things easy for the reader to want to continue to be involved with the story is what it's about. Falling into patterns that turn the reader's attention to seeing what clever tag the writer will use, or having the conversation look like "follow the bouncing ball" can lose readers. So, whatch your tag lines and during the revision stage check to see what patterns if any you have put into your story.

Meandering on Monday with Janet Lane Walters #amwriting

I'll be giving a short talk in a week plus at a library branch in a mall. Interesting concept that. My bit is about the state of publishing and how to get published. Years ago - 1968 - I sold my first short story. Markets abounded and I was able to send the story to about 20 places before it was bought. Then the market, the paying one, dried up and I turned to novels. There were many publishers for both mysteries and romances since those where what I was writing at that time. The first romance I sold went out 17 times, only four of these were repeat sends. At that time the publisher wanted the entire mss and the editors also sent sometimes pages of suggestions for making the story better. The novel sold but the greatest thing was the amount of writing advice I'd received. Priceless. I returned to nursing and came back to a whole new world. Not as many publishers and all wanted a query and an partial. Another thing to learn. They publishers began to dwindle and soon the only way in was to meet the editors at a conference or to have an agent. The publishing world has changed again. There are scads of markets but few pay advances. There are the NY publishers plus Harlequin, the electronic with or without paper copies and the self published.

Enough about that but it's a start on the talk I'm going to give. As far as my own writing, I'm still working on two stories, one a novella somewhere between 30 and 40 thousand words when complete. Maybe a third there. The other is the old story now called the Goddesses of Er. That's going slowly but that's all right. What it consists of is pulling the gems from all the beginning writer pages. Hope to have it ready by the end of the year.