“If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.” 
― Patrick Rothfuss 

Writers hear a lot about backstory, but if often remains vague, undefined, and maybe something thrown in without any real regard for why it’s necessary other than “to explain the character’s motivations.”  

That’s a good reason, but that’s not the only reason to include backstory. And sometimes writers include backstory that isn’t necessary, which just leads to confusion for the reader.  

Last week, I talked about ways to use dialogue to create deeper meaning in passages, rather than using it as a ping-pong of information between characters.

This week, I’m going to focus on the three types of dialogue, and when to use them.

“What’s up, fam?” 

“How may I serve you, Madam?” 

“Why the hell should I know what that bastard wants?” 

I’ll bet each line of dialogue put a different picture in your mind of a character who might ask the question – what they look like, their age, their overall personality, their mood, their tone... with no other information, we “see” a character very vividly in our heads.  

That is the power of dialogue. 

I’ve seen a meme going around where someone says they saw a review on Amazon that says, 

“It felt like the writer was just making stuff up as they went along.”  

And then the inevitable “Uh, who’s going to tell them?” Ha, ha.  

And it is funny, because, well, we are making stuff up. That’s what fiction writers, anyway, do.  

But if a reader feels that way after reading your book, you have a problem.  

What is your story about?

When someone asks you that question, what do you say?

Often we don’t think consciously about this. We sort of know what our novel is about, but when someone asks, we fumble around.

Sometimes it pays to go back to the basics. In today’s post I want to tackle five areas to work on that can really help your writing pop on the page. Whether seasoned or just beginning as a writer, these are things to keep in mind that will take your work from “okay” to “engrossing.”   

Let’s face it, a LOT goes into creating great scenes. Every scene in your novel has to do a lot of work, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Below is a checklist of the most common issues I see with writers’ scenes, and some brief suggestions on how to fix them. Each of these could be a blog post in itself (and probably will be) but it gives you a place to start in evaluating any scenes of your that fall flat, drag, or cause confusion in your readers.

Novels (and narrative nonfiction) are made up of scenes. These mimic the larger story structure, with a beginning, middle, and end.

It starts with a question or problem.