Columns: Tag – Romance
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Writing Quips and Tips
Dynamic dialogue lifts a book from the slush pile
You’ve written a really crucial dialogue that will end your characters’ marriage, but it seems … flat, unreal or, worst of all, dreary.
What’s wrong with it? It will change your characters’ lives. Why doesn’t it affect the lives of your readers?
Here are a couple of quick hints that will lift a plain or dreary dialogue and give it dynamism:
Writing Quips and Tips
Journals for Writers
Oh, I know you kept a diary when you were fourteen.
Your awful brother probably picked the lock and read steamy passages to his friends. But even so … a journal kept properly can help your writing in many ways. A journal is a safe place to expose yourself, explore your own responses and to be vulnerable and honest. No-one will see it and no-one can judge you on it.
My mother once told me that I shouldn’t use my diary for teenage venting. “What happens if someone publishes it when you’re dead, like Anne Frank.”
But I believe that’s quite the wrong way of looking at a journal. Don’t imagine an audience – it makes you self-conscious. You can demand that all your journals be burnt upon your death. Or write as illegibly as I do – then no-one will ever decipher a word.
Watch a novel grow
A tale of romance and deceit
Character is plot, plot is character… But what sort of romantic story does my character suggest I tell?
Writing Quips and Tips
Romance – Lesbian vs Straight
Life is a story.We tell stories, not just to entertain and to escape, but as a rehearsal for life. How would we handle this or that? How would we face the trials of our hero or heroine?
Romance novels should provide us with the characters and situations that we can, and choose to, identify with. Lesbian Romance gives gay women the kind of love stories they can be drawn into – that provide them with a “rehearsal for life” in the love stakes.