Emma Stewart Writes

Writer, Proofreader, Editor and Cat Lady

Month: August 2023 (Page 1 of 2)

This is who I am

Personality Traits: Getting To Know Your Characters

August 30, 2023 / / 0 Comments
This is who I am

Personality Traits

Every character is a person (even if they’re not human!) and that means they have a personality that is uniquely theirs. Just like in real life, everyone has a handful of personality traits that dictate how they behave, how they speak and how they react to situations. For your main and supporting characters, you need to flesh this out quite a bit to make them real people that your readers will love, or love to hate, or feel some kind of way.

There needs to be a balance too. Personality traits can be generally divided into positive and negative traits. Every character should have some of each kind. Yes, your good guys need to have negative traits, and yes, your villains need to have positive traits. Don’t treat this as a box-ticking exercise either, the traits need to feel realistic and make sense in the context of your character’s history.

Where Do I Start?

Think about the characters role in the story. Are they a protagonist, with a goal to reach by the end of the plot? What is their goal? What do they need to overcome to achieve this goal? Then you can think of what traits they should have in order to attain this goal. Are they determined, so they will stop at nothing to reach their goal? Are they analytical, meaning they will assess and calculate the best plan possible? If they need help from someone, are they friendly and charismatic enough to convince this person to help them out?

Remember that even positive traits will have some downsides. Someone who is very determined can also be stubborn, refusing to change things based on new information or advice. Someone who is very friendly might not endear themselves to someone who is very antisocial and wary of strangers. Relate it back to the character’s history as well. Why are they so determined? Why are they so suspicious?

Negative traits can also have upsides. A character who is very suspicious and mistrustful will be harder to take advantage of or fall into a trap by trusting someone. The downside is obviously that they are very guarded and find it hard to form relationships with other people. This kind of trait comes from a past where they have been betrayed by people they trusted or mistreated by a parent or partner.

How To Show Personality Traits

When you’re writing prose, you obviously don’t want to list the traits of your character when you first introduce them. Remember what I talked about before, about introducing a new character. This is where the old ‘show, don’t tell’ advice comes into play. Personality traits will come with associated behaviours and responses. A mistrustful person will ask questions and not take what people say at face value. They will keep people at arms length and avoid revealing much personal detail in conversations.

Someone who is friendly will make small talk with people. They will speak kindly, offer up some information about them freely and make a point of remembering people’s names. They will smile a lot and have open body language, keep their promises and stop to help someone without being asked.

Tone of voice and language choices will indicate personality traits in dialogue. People who are shy will speak quietly, hesitate and use filler words or sounds a lot more and will avoid speaking up in a group situation. A character who is surly and grouchy will snap at people, use one-word responses and commonly be sarcastic and snarky.

Remember that your characters may change over the course of the story and this should be reflected in how they act. One of the major plot points should be your protagonist overcoming a major character flaw in order to reach their goal. It might also be a big thing for your antagonist to overcome their negative traits in some way and see the error of their ways.

Resources and Methods

There’s a ton of good resources out there to help with this aspect of character creation. There’s also a few ways to approach character creation, so you should find the one that works best for you. It might help to plan out the character’s background a bit first. Then you can make a list of their positive and negative traits, relating them to early experiences and even making notes on behaviours and how they speak which will show these traits. You can then refer back to these notes when you are writing to make sure you are staying in character. It’s also important to compare these lists for your characters to highlight possible sources of conflict or relationship development between them that you can include in your writing. Because it’s not fun if the characters get along perfectly well all the time!

A few resources I have found are readily available online. There’s a series of books available as ebooks called Writers Helping Writers, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. The Negative Trait Thesaurus and the Positive Trait Thesaurus are both really useful for this. There are chapters discussing how to write and use these traits for your characters and how to build characters, as well as a huge list of traits with definitions, possible causes, behaviours, thoughts, emotions, positive and negative aspects and examples. They also cover how a character can overcome a flaw and how a trait might cause conflict with other characters. These are so useful, and they have a bunch of other books covering settings, emotions and obstacles. I highly recommend them. You can check out their site here and find links to purchase their books. (Not an affiliate ad! I just really find their books helpful.)

Conclusion

Thank you for reading. I hope this has been a helpful introduction into personality traits and how to choose them. A good well rounded personality makes for a great and engaging character to read about. On Friday, we’ll take a look at relationships between characters, because as the saying goes, “No man is an island.” Subscribe below to get notified when that post goes live. Until next time!

greyscale photography of skeleton

Character Backgrounds: Skeletons in the Closet

August 29, 2023 / / 0 Comments
greyscale photography of skeleton

Character Backgrounds

This week, I would like to talk about character development. As an author, you should know your characters inside out, everything about them and all the skeletons in their closet. The best way to write genuine, believable characters is to make sure you know them inside out. For today, we’re going to look at character backgrounds and history.

Everyone has different methods, however, a lot of people get bogged down in their name, their appearance and a list of merits and flaws. That’s all important stuff, don’t get me wrong, but it is important to know their background. Every single one of us has a unique personality and pattern of behaviour. Our experiences shape who we are. All the good and bad things that happen to us, shape us into who we are. With every new experience, we change a little bit more. We learn from what happened before and we choose our behaviour accordingly.

What Happened To You?

One thing I like to do with my characters is write out a full and detailed bio for them. I’ve done this for years, I spent a lot of my early adulthood writing fanfiction and written roleplay. Anyone who has been one one of these roleplay message boards will have done a character application. The longest section should be the history section. A breakdown of the important events in that characters life, and the effect that these events had.

What this should do is explain their traits and their behaviours. Someone who has been bullied or abused early in life is not going to trust easily. Someone who grew up sheltered and hidden away from the world is likely to be gullible and easily led astray. What led them to the career choices they made? Why are they good at fighting? Were they trained, or did they learn by having no choice but to fight for survival? Do they have secrets or skeletons in their closet?

The history should lead up to who the character is at the beginning of the story. You then continue this throughout the story, shaping the character as the experiences of the plot continue to shape them. A lot of what you will write in the history section will not be included in the book, but little mentions here and there will make your character feel real to your reader. If it helps explain why your character does something a particular way, or why they react to a situation in an unexpected way, all the better. Here is a little bit from one of my character’s background in my current WIP.

How Alonso Became An Assassin

The young elf had spent his whole life in this brothel. He had been born here, his mother had died a couple of days after he was born. The women raised the orphans as a group, putting them to work in some fashion as soon as they were capable. At age seven, Alonso was responsible for cleaning, basic food preparation and clearing up dishes from the bar room.

The owner of the brothel was a horrible man, He was loud, temperamental and violent. Alonso hated him, as did the majority of the brothel’s inhabitants. One of the girls was cooking the owner’s meal in the kitchen one night. Alonso had been collecting glasses and plates from the bar room and was standing on a crate by the basin, washing them.

The owner had been served his meal, but was not happy as the bread had been burnt a little on the edge. Alonso could never understand complaining about food, unless it was rotten. The brothel owner cared. Alonso winced as the door flew open, banging loudly against the wall.

“How dare you burn my food, wench!” the man’s booming voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.

The girl screamed and begged, and Alonso turned, he couldn’t help it. Big blue eyes widened in shock as he watched the man grab the girls wrist, holding her hand in the fire until her skin began to crack and blister. She squealed in pain, begging for him to stop, apologising, struggling. The man held her there for what seemed like hours, although it was really less than a minute, before letting her go and storming out again. One of the other girls ran to her side, helping her up and taking her outside to put cold water on the burn.

Alonso’s eyes narrowed, tiny fists clenched tightly. His heart was racing, his chest felt tight. A voice came from the doorway, and it took him a second to recognise his own name.

“Alonso, boy, fetch the master’s drink,” the barman called.

An idea came to him, and Alonso followed outside, trying not to hear the poor girls sobs. He looked around, finally finding what he was looking for. There was a plant that grew outside, it had looked tasty enough, but Alonso had made that mistake once. It was poison, not deadly, but enough to put a child like him in bed for a week. He ripped off a few of the leaves, sneaking back into the kitchen and grinding them up, adding the sap to the pitcher of ale the master used before filling it. He took it out to the bar, and one of the others took it up to the master’s room.

Alonso went back to work, finishing washing the dishes and taking himself to bed afterwards. The master was absent the following day and the next few days were peaceful and pleasant. All seemed well until one night. He was shaken awake in the early hours of the morning, to find the old matron kneeling over his pile of rags.

“Come on, boy, wake up. Quickly now!”

“What’s going on?”

“Pack your things, boy. I saw what you did, but the master will find out when he recovers. I’ve been watching you, young one. If you come with me now, you can make something of yourself. If you don’t, he will put you out on the streets, if he doesn’t kill you first.”

Alonso shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“You will. But you must leave with me now, boy.”

“Okay, Matron,” Alonso said, gathering the handful of possessions he had, a knitted blanket his mother had made, a book of children’s stories and a handful of coins he’d managed to save, delivering letters. Little did he know, this was only the beginning of a colourful career as a deadly assassin.

Alonso Cabiella’s history, by E stewart

Discussion

You don’t need to write it as prose like this, I just thought it would be fun to write it like that so you could see it. You should know these details. Even if you don’t explicitly mention them. Having a summary of important events of your characters past will help you keep them genuine and figure out how they would respond to the situations the plot is going to put them into.

The example above; is the story of how Alonso was recruited by the Assassin’s Guild is the example. In my world, the guild like to acquire them as children, should they show good potential. They go to a boarding school for education and training until adulthood. After that, they are apprenticed to experienced assassins to begin work. The old matron works as a contact for the guild, and she had already suspected Alonso fit the bill, the incident where he poisoned the brothel owner as revenge for the girl was what confirmed it. The quick thinking, resourcefulness and using his own knowledge and experiences to decide what to do.

Conclusion

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, and if there’s any particular examples of this that you really like. Look out for more on character development later this week. For more, subscribe below and follow me on my social media channels for more updates. For other posts covering characters take a look at these: here and here.

Controversy and Sensitivity

August 26, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Sensitivity readers and controversy. Like any other famous person who has become a household name, controversy is almost an inevitability. Being so well known means that every single word and action that is made public, is available for scrutiny and criticism. Roald Dahl is no different to many other authors. He has been accused of anti-semitism and racism during his lifetime. Other well known authors have faced the same, and some of them deserve it more than others perhaps.

Some of these things are easily debatable, some less so. The issue I’m going to discuss today is something that happened earlier this year, back in February. The publisher of Roald Dahl’s works, Puffin Books, hired sensitivity readers to review all of his books and edit them. This has been met with both support and criticism, and certainly from what we know, Roald Dahl himself would not have been happy about the majority of these changes.

What is a Sensitivity Reader?

Sensitivity readers are hired to review works of literature for anything that could cause offence or be considered stereotypes or bias and recommend edits to remove these. See here for the Wikipedia definition. When I first heard of this, I was pretty upset. I am by no means saying that we shouldn’t be careful of bias and stereotyping in writing, and anything that is blatantly racist or discriminatory should be edited. However, upon seeing the revisions made, I found myself quite angry about some of them.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a few things that are problematic, especially when seen through a modern lens. They’ve always been problematic, but now it is easier to call out these issues and address them. That said, there’s a line, and crossing that line can lead you into ‘performative activism’ territory. Making changes to look like you care and you’re doing something, but you’re not really changing things. Like trying too hard to show you’re not racist or ableist or homophobic to the point of singling out the people in these marginalised communities.

When we are combating prejudice and bias, it is vitally important to make sure we are not silencing the people that we are supposed to be supporting. As a white person, I cannot understand what it is like to be black, and I cannot truly understand racism from the perspective of someone who has experienced that. Often these performative activist types are doing just that, claiming they know better and diminishing the voices of the people who are facing these discriminations and prejudices.

The Revisions

The Oompa Loompas have been one of the bigger controversies. They are the workers in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. They were originally written as black African Pygmies and obviously there are serious overtones of colonialism and slavery. Dahl did rewrite them as white skinned in 1972. This, I have no problem with, and I would hope nobody else does. That’s a change that needed to be made.

African Tortoises

However, in Esio Trot, a story that centres around a tortoise, the author’s note at the beginning talks about how garden tortoises were very common pets when Dahl’s children were young. It mentions how they were imported into England by the thousand until a few years ago when this was made illegal. It states that most of them were from North Africa, and this was apparently changed to ‘all over the world’, citing racism.

The problem for me? That’s not racism. It’s a fact. A lot of them came from the Mediterranean, including Egypt (which is in North Africa). Species like the Leopard Tortoise, the Greek Tortoise (also known as the common tortoise and the spur-thighed tortoise) which are found all across North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Gender

Another one I found very odd was in the Fantastic Mr Fox, where the character of Small Fox was changed from male to female. Small Fox being Mr Fox’s child. This just seems baffling to me, because it makes no difference to the narrative, and just sounds like performative anti-sexism to me. They also removed the adjective ‘black’ from the description of a couple of tractors. I could understand if it was used in reference to a person, but tractors? Why is that problematic? Did a John Deere complain about racially profiling farming machinery?

Final Thoughts

I agree that there needs to be sensitivity in literature and authors and publishers do need to be cautious. However, I definitely believe a lot of these revisions are performative, unhelpful and pointless. Changing to gender neutral language and removing the word ‘queer’, which has obviously changed definition since these books were written, absolutely. But randomly switching the gender of a character for no reason? Avoiding saying anything came from Africa in case it is seen as racist?

It’s a step too far in my opinion. Especially given that Roald Dahl is no longer around to have any involvement in these decisions. They waited over 30 years to do this, as he died in 1990. We need to be aware of situations where people may be offended, but we also need to listen to the people who actually belong to the groups who are being discriminated against. Let the LGBTQIA+ community speak for themselves, let BIPOC people speak for themselves. Those of us who are not these people should be elevating their voices, not talking over them.

Language is always evolving. Society is always changing too, not always for the better. Things are better but there is still a long way to go, and we have moved backwards. Instead of focusing on literature and changing nursery rhymes, perhaps we should be focusing more on dealing with the inherent issues. For an interesting take on tokenism, I’d recommend watching South Park Season 25 Episode 2: “The Big Fix.”

Conclusion

Thanks for reading. I know this is a controversial topic and I don’t claim to have all the answers or know everything. Feel free to join the conversation and tell me what you think. Subscribe for more updates and find me on my social channels.

grilled meat on black ceramic plate

A Little Dark – Roald Dahl’s Work

August 23, 2023 / / 0 Comments
grilled meat on black ceramic plate

One thing I mentioned on Monday was about how some of the subject matter of Roald Dahl’s work is a little dark. Even in the children’s books, he didn’t shy away from showing that not everything in the world is sunshine and rainbows.

The other giants in the BFG literally eat children. Miss Trunchbull threw a child over a fence by her hair. The Grand High Witch sings an entire son about how her poison would result in hundreds of children being turned into mice, being killed by mouse traps and the teachers sweeping them up.

A Product of Our Time

My generation is no stranger to this kind of darkness. Bambi, the Lion King, Watership Down, anyone? Parents may want to shelter their children from this kind of thing, but it’s important to remember that in real life, horrible things happen all the time. People die, disasters happen, cruelty exists in our world.

I will never forget coming home from school on September the 11th, 2001 to find my dad watching the news on TV. Seeing those towers collapse, watching the rising death toll as rescue efforts continued. Hard to believe that was almost 22 years ago now.

The Covid pandemic has been a huge collective trauma for all of us. Just last week there were massive wildfires causing horrific destruction in Hawaii. Floods, earthquakes, nuclear disasters like in Fukushima. War. Murders, sexual assaults, women and children going missing from Native American communities. Political unrest.

Dark Humour

Some people will find humour amid the darkness in our lives, others will be highly offended by it. Dark humour is a coping mechanism though, and it can be a way for some people to self-regulate their emotions to cope when things are stressful or upsetting. I have a very dark sense of humour, and many of my former colleagues in veterinary medicine do too. When you work in such a stressful, demanding and emotionally charged environment, a little dark humour can make it easier to cope.

That brings me to the particular short story I want to talk about today. This comes from a compilation of Roald Dahls short stories called ‘Tales of the Unexpected Volume 1.’ I have had this book for years, and I first read the story in English class in high school. It’s called ‘Lamb to the Slaughter.’

Lamb to the Slaughter

I’ll summarise the story briefly, but you can read it here. A housewife is preparing for her husbands arrival home from work. It is established early on that her husband is a senior policeman and that she is pregnant. He is very dismissive of her and he tells her something. It is not outright stated what he says but it is implied that he plans to leave her.

She decides to prepare the evening meal, despite his protests, and fetches a leg of lamb from the freezer. He tells her again not to make supper for him and she swings the frozen leg of lamb at the back of his head, killing him. She puts the meat in the oven, tidies up her appearance and goes to the grocery shop to purchase vegetables and a dessert. She returns home to find him dead, and calls the police. They investigate and ask her questions, even going to the grocery shop to ask the shopkeeper.

The detectives inform her that her husband was killed by a large blunt object, almost certainly made of steel. They search for the weapon but find nothing. One of the detectives notices the meat still in the oven. She persuades them to eat the meal, all the while discussing the weapon and how it must still be here somewhere. Hearing this from the other room, she begins to giggle.

My Thoughts

I love this story. It is darkly funny, amusing that she manages to get the police officers to help her dispose of the evidence. Throughout the story, we get to see her thoughts as she deals with the events of the story. She goes into autopilot, after learning that her husband was planning to leave her while she was pregnant. After she kills him, she becomes very cold and calculating, planning everything just right to give herself an alibi.

When the police come and investigate, they are kind to her and she seems to be banking on them not suspecting a woman such as her to be capable of striking a killing blow. Her alibi checked out, so they think it unlikely to be her.

The ending is left vague, on purpose, to my mind. It ends with one of the officers stating ‘”Probably right under our very noses. What do you think, Jack?” And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle.’

So what happened next? Did they hear her? Did they realise she could have done it with the frozen leg of lamb? That she had talked them into disposing of the murder weapon for her? That’s for the reader to decide. Was she justified in what she did?

You could argue she was. She clearly loved him, and was very much blindsided by what he told her. We don’t find out why he was leaving her, whether he was having an affair or there was another reason. When she returns home from the shop, she becomes genuinely upset, her tears are real and that makes her innocence more believable to the police. Yet, by the end, she is laughing.

Conclusion

That about covers this short story. I’m not sure what it says about me as a person, but it demonstrates how effective well written short stories can be. I am far from the only person to be entertained by these darker stories either. Horror is a very popular genre in books, movies and video games. True crime is also incredibly popular. We shouldn’t completely shy away from these dark topics. What are your thoughts?

On Friday, we’ll be digging into a controversial topic about Roald Dahl’s work from earlier this year. In the meantime, I’ve got plenty of other content on the blog to keep you going, and you can find me on my social media channels as well. Don’t forget to subscribe to get an email when each new blog post goes live. Until next time!

stack of books on brown wooden table

Roald Dahl – A Childhood Favourite

August 21, 2023 / / 0 Comments
stack of books on brown wooden table

A Childhood Favourite

Roald Dahl, a childhood favourite. I’ve always been a big reader. As a child, I consumed so many books. Like many people my age, my first foray into the horror genre was the Goosebumps books by RL Stine. My particular favourite author was Roald Dahl. I’ve certainly read every children’s book he ever wrote, and a fair amount of his adult short stories too. My favourites were Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, its sequel, the Great Glass Elevator, The Witches and the BFG. I actually wore out my first copy of the BFG and needed a replacement.

I’m Not Alone

I know I’m not alone in loving these stories. They are immensely popular and a real institution in popular media. There have been movies made of most of these books, with varying degrees of success. Matilda has a successful movie, West End and Broadway musical, and a movie of the musical. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has had two brilliant, yet very different movies made. I liked the Tim Burton and Johnny Depp film, and I will die on this hill.

Roald Dahls books have a particular appeal, and I think now, as an adult, I can understand why. I don’t know if these books shaped my sense of humour and personality, or I liked them because they aligned with these aspects of myself. What I do know is that there is often some dark undertones in these books. They don’t paint adults as these perfect people who are always right and should be respected automatically because they are older.

There’s a dark humour in a lot of the stories. Bad things can happen, and it’s sometimes funny when a bad person has something horrible happen to them. Particularly the rewrites of classic nursery rhymes and fairy tales with vastly different endings.

Messages

There’s a common theme in all of his children’s books. People who are abusive, gluttonous, greedy or cruel get what they deserve at the hands of the good child protagonist, often helped by a ‘good’ adult. The antagonists are usually adults, although children who start to show these dislikeable qualities are often punished for this in some way. Let’s look at an example.

Matilda

Let’s look at Matilda. Matilda is immediately shown as different from her family. Her father is a dishonest salesman who cheats people to make money. Her mother is spoiled and enjoys a lavish lifestyle. They show clear favouritism to their son, Michael, because he’s like them. They don’t have time for books or learning. Matilda loves reading and she has to do it in secret. Her family treat her like an outcast. They don’t even let her go to school until she insists on it.

At school, Matilda shows that she is exceptionally gifted and bright. She learns of the headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, the main antagonist of the story. Miss Trunchbull is the worst kind of teacher, she hates children and is mentally and physically abusive towards them. Extreme punishments for the most minor infractions to her extremely strict school rules.

Contrast her with Miss Honey, Matilda’s teacher. She’s the good adult, who takes Matilda under her wing and allows her to thrive. Yet, she lives in fear of Miss Trunchbull, her aunt, who raised her. Matilda discovers her telekinetic abilities, and uses them to great effect to get revenge on Miss Trunchbull, scaring her off and allowing Miss Honey to reclaim her family home and live a happier life. Matilda convinces Miss Honey to adopt her so she can leave her family and stay, going on to live a good life.

Interpretation

So what can we learn from this? Not all adults are good people. Plenty of them are cruel and horrible. We should learn to accept people for who they are, and encourage their talents and abilities, not force them to suppress them. Everyone has a fear or weakness. You should stay with people who care about you and want to help you, and walk away from those who mistreat you.

Children are often told to listen and obey, do what they’re told without question and have respect for their elders, no matter what. Roald Dahl is showing us a different side, that we shouldn’t have to remain stuck in the status quo, and accept these things without question. It’s a powerful message, dressed up in a fantastical story about a girl with special abilities.

It certainly had a big impact on me, I saw a lot of myself in Matilda as a child. I loved reading and learning, and was made to feel like an outcast because of it. I endured years of bullying at school, because I had a teacher who singled me out as being smarter than everyone else in my class. This experience has had a lasting impact on me, but these books were a huge comfort. Now, as an adult, I am trying to find myself again and learning to be proud of who I am and my abilities.

Conclusion

I’ll leave you with this thought for now. I’d like to dig a little deeper into this and look at more of Roald Dahl’s work, including my favourite adult short story of his, A Lamb to the Slaughter. I also plan to address the recent controversy surrounding his work and give my perspective on it. The revisions made for ‘sensitivity’ by the publisher, and why I think the majority of changes are utterly ridiculous and performative. So be prepared for that later this week. To learn more, check out the Wikipedia page here. To read up on this years controversy regarding the revisions made to these classic books, check here.

Feel free to weigh in on this, I’m interested to see how others have interpreted these stories and what other people think of it. Comments are open. To read more, you can subscribe via email below, and as always, my social media channels are there if you want more. See you next time!

Punctuating and Formatting Dialogue

August 18, 2023 / / 0 Comments

How To Format Dialogue

You’ll remember that before we talked about breaking the rules of grammar within dialogue. That’s totally okay to do but when it comes to how we format and punctuate the dialogue itself within the text, there are important rules that must be followed. This is essential for making sure your dialogue is easy to read and follow. You don’t want your readers getting confused on who is saying what. So here’s the rules and tips for formatting and punctuating your dialogue.

Paragraphing

When writing dialogue, it is essential that the dialogue starts in a new paragraph. Even if it is just one or two words. After that, each new speaker gets a new paragraph. This applies whether you have two speakers or ten. So for a conversation between three characters, let’s call them Dave, Steve and Karen, you would format it like this.

Dave

Steve

Karen

Steve

Karen

Dave

This way it is clear that a different person is speaking for each line of dialogue. This also means you can reduce the use of dialogue tags a bit.

If a character is saying a lot at once, a longer monologue, you may choose to break it up into paragraphs. In this case, you should open each paragraph with quotation marks but only the end of the dialogue on the last paragraph should have closing quotation marks. This makes it clear that the preceding paragraphs are part of the same dialogue.

Quotation Marks

Direct dialogue must be enclosed in quotation marks. The general convention is to use double quotation marks – ” – these ones. Although in UK English it is also correct to use single quotation marks – ‘ – for direct dialogue. Either method is correct, but whichever one you use, make sure you’re consistent with it throughout the text.

For quotes within dialogue, these should be enclosed in quotation marks that are different from the ones you use for dialogue. So if your dialogue is contained within double quotation marks, you should use single quotation marks for quotes within dialogue, and vice versa.

“He literally said, ‘That’s not what’s going on.’ That’s what he said to me.”

or

‘He literally said, “That’s not what’s going on.” That’s what he said to me.’

Commas

When introducing dialogue, you should use a comma before the opening quotation marks. If you are ending the sentence containing the dialogue with a dialogue tag, the comma goes at the end of the dialogue before the closing quotation marks.

Steve said, “It wasn’t me.”

“It wasn’t me,” Steve said.

Remember that dialogue tags are part of the sentence. If the word after the closing quotation mark is not a proper noun, it does not need to be capitalised. Even if you end the dialogue with a question mark or exclamation mark. If you are not adding a dialogue tag at the end after the closing quotation mark, then the dialogue should end with a full stop (period) not a comma. Unless it is a question or requires an exclamation mark. You can see this in the above examples.

Interruptions and Trailing Off

During natural conversations, people will trail off or interrupt each other. That’s normal, especially during conversations that are emotionally charged. How can you show this in written dialogue, especially when you need a new line for a new person speaking? Two pieces of punctuation can help with this.

For interruptions, the best thing is a dash. Not just any dash, the em-dash. The em-dash is called this because it is the longest dash, the width of a capital M. They’re not easy to find on most keyboards, because they should be used sparingly.

They look like this: —

The keyboard shortcut is ctrl + alt + dash key. There may be different ones on different software programs.

“So, then I—“

“Hey! You better come quick!”

For trailing off, where the speaker stops speaking because they’ve realised something or lost their train of thought, you need the ellipsis. The infamous triple dots…

Depending on the style guide you use, there may or may not be spaces between the dots. The Chicago Manual of Style uses spaces between the dots . . .

Ellipses should be used only where necessary. It’s not uncommon for them to be overused. That gets tedious to read very quickly, and if they’re used too much, they lose their impact very quickly.

Conclusion

So that’s how to format and punctuate your dialogue. I hope you find it helpful. Go forth and write your dialogue effectively! Thank you for reading. Next week I’m going to start with some writing analysis posts, taking a look at some of the themes and subjects covered by pop-culture and examining how the writing explores these themes. Starting with one of my favourite TV shows of all time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the spin-off, Angel. I’m also planning to challenge myself a bit with writing some short stories and flash fiction to get the creative juices going as I work on my novel.

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Essentials of Writing Dialogue

August 16, 2023 / / 0 Comments

When you’re writing fiction, dialogue is an essential part of it. It is also an area that a lot of writers will struggle with. Often the dialogue is written too correctly, or there’s just simply too much of it. Writers can be prone to excessive adjectives, trying to avoid using ‘said’ too much and overcompensating. Dialogue is a common place for punctuation mistakes as well. So, without further ado, here is the essentials of writing dialogue.

Breaking the rules of grammar

Obviously you want to show you know the rules of grammar. Mistakes make you look unprofessional. However, when it comes to writing dialogue, it’s okay to break the rules of grammar. In fact, I encourage it. Why? Because people don’t talk with perfect grammar. At least, most people don’t. People speak in sentence fragments, use contractions, use slang and may hesitate or repeat themselves. Take these two examples.

“Hey, what’s that?”

“I dunno. Found it over there.”

Versus

“Excuse me. What is that you have there?”

“I do not know. I found it over there.”

See the difference? Some people might speak very formally, but the second version sounds a lot less natural and most people aren’t going to speak like that. Someone who does speak with perfect grammar and formality, is usually someone who is highly educated, extremely arrogant or not used to talking to people. If in doubt, read or listen to it out loud, and if it doesn’t sound ‘normal’, it needs changing.

Dialogue Should Serve a Purpose

Is there such a thing as too much dialogue? Yes, absolutely. If there is nothing but dialogue, a lot of the story becomes lost. You need action, you need description and depending on the POV you need internal dialogue as well. Dialogue should have a purpose in the story, whether it is exposition, character or relationship development, plot development or showing emotions and reactions to what happens in the plotline.

A lot of editors will cut back dialogue if it does not serve a purpose to the story. Even if in the real world, you would have small talk and introductions and things, if it’s not helping move the story along, some of it probably isn’t necessary. Even if you’re writing a phone conversation, you can gloss over the “Hi, how are you, how are the kids,” kind of stuff if it’s not important. You can use indirect dialogue to summarise or even just leave it out and get to the point of the conversation. If there isn’t a point, then that dialogue is probably unnecessary and you could cover it by simply saying something like: X spent twenty minutes on the phone to their sister.

Indirect Dialogue

Nice segue into indirect dialogue and when it should be used. You want to avoid repetition. If a major event happened, then one of your characters is telling someone else about it, you don’t need to write out every word they say. Your reader will get bored reading a blow by blow account when they just read a blow by blow account.

Instead, summarise using indirect dialogue. “X explained what had just happened the night before.” Then, you can get into how the character receiving the explanation responds to the news instead, which will be more interesting. It also helps you avoid writing out excessive small talk.

Dialogue Tags

He said, she said, they said. A lot of writers feel they have to avoid using ‘said’ as much as possible. It comes from trying to sound original and trying to avoid repetition, but the problem is they then start digging deep into a thesaurus looking for alternatives.

This may not sound like a problem, but if the dialogue tags are extremely colourful and varied, it reduces the impact of the content of the dialogue. It distracts the reader from what’s actually being said. A lot of the time, what you can do is use ‘said’ and use description of body language and action to show people’s emotions, or even just the words the character uses. Having the odd interesting tag can put more emphasis on important pieces of dialogue and improve the impact.

Don’t forget that if there are only two people involved in the conversation, not every line of dialogue even needs a tag. As long as you remember to put each person’s lines in a new paragraph, after a couple of lines, you can drop the tags altogether, only adding them when needed to clarify who is speaking or for emphasis. For an example, here’s an excerpt from my current WIP novel demonstrating this.

Shaine nodded, shivering a bit. “It’s gotten quite cold in here,” she said.

“Mm. We can’t start a fire, the smoke could be suffocating in such a small space,” Alonso said.

“No, we can’t. Maybe… I can’t believe I’m saying this, but maybe we should put our bedrolls together. For warmth.”

“Oh? That would work,” Alonso said.

“To sleep.”

“Yes, I know what you meant, Shaine. I’ll be a perfect gentleman, I promise.”

Shaine smiled warmly. “I know. I trust you, Alonso. I’m so glad I’m not doing this alone,” she said.

1st draft Buried secrets excerpt – by emma stewart

Conclusion

So, that’s the essentials of writing dialogue. I hope you found it helpful. It was fun getting to share a little excerpt from my first draft as well. The further I get in writing it, the more excited I am to be able to share it with the world. I’ll leave things off here and on Friday we’ll pick it up again and talk about how to format and punctuate dialogue properly.

If you want to read more, there’s plenty of previous blog posts that you might find interesting. I’ve added a directory page to separate the posts by type and I will be reworking the categories and tags to make it easier to navigate and find what you’re interested in. Remember, you can find me on Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok as well. If you want to get updated every time a new post goes live, you can subscribe below. Until next time!

Seven Writing Myths Discussed

August 14, 2023 / / 0 Comments

There’s always someone telling you how you should write, that you must follow these steps and this routine to succeed as a writer. Then you find other people who tell you that these rules are utter nonsense. It can be difficult to know who to believe. As with any creative pursuit, writing has lots of myths and accepted truths that might not be quite so set in stone. So let’s discuss seven writing myths.

1. Write What You Know

This is a common one. The idea that you should only write about what you know about. The problem is, it’s difficult to interpret what this actually means. Most people assume it means you can only write about your own lived experience. So there is something to this, but at the same time, depending on your genre, writing only what you have experienced can limit you significantly.

A big part of writing, especially fiction, involves using imagination and creativity. If you want to write something that isn’t just an autobiography or a fictionalised version of your life, you need to think outside your own life experiences. You can use your own experiences and knowledge to embellish your writing and make it feel more real. But, if you want to include something you have no real world experience of, does this mean you can’t write about it?

Well, it depends. If you plan to include something you don’t know much about, the key to making it authentic is research. Learn all you can about the topic. Learn from people who have lived that experience. Be prepared to accept feedback and change things accordingly. For example, it can be difficult for someone who has never experienced depression, to write it authentically in a character. Not impossible, but you might find you have to really face up to your own misconceptions about what it’s like to experience depression. The same can apply to disabilities, gender identities, different sexual orientations and to race and ethnicity of real world people. Caution is advised, and thorough research will help you write this in a sensitive manner.

2. Reading Makes you a Better Writer

To a degree, this is true. If you’ve never been a big reader, writing can be difficult. Reading lets you explore new ideas and worlds, learning different styles and writing techniques and understanding the genres you’re interested in. However, writing is a skill and it can only be truly improved by practice.

Reading a lot won’t make you a better writer if you are not practicing the writing side of things. Analysis of what you read can help you identify techniques and skills that you can use as a writer, but you’ll only learn how to use them if you practice. Some people will say you should avoid reading too much, or you’ll end up copying other authors and stealing their style. This is also debatable. If you are writing for yourself, you will establish your own style, while perhaps taking influence from writers you like.

3. Write Every Day

A lot of writing advice is centered around this idea that you should write every single day no matter what. I disagree with this to some degree. I do believe having a good regular writing routine is a great idea, but like anything else, breaks are important. Just like going to the gym every single day and doing a full 2 hour workout is probably going to become counterproductive, writing is the same way. Forcing it too much will lead you to burn out.

It also depends on your life. A lot of writers, especially those just starting out, are probably doing it around a full time job, family life, studies or any other commitments. It makes much more sense to set aside time in your schedule you can dedicate to writing. If it’s one evening a week, great! If you can fit in an hour or two every day and that works for you, great! It needs to be sustainable

4. Writer’s Block

There’s a lot of opinions here. People will say ‘Writer’s block isn’t real, it’s just laziness’. Others will be keen to give you a list of different things you can do to overcome writer’s block. Basically it is a situation which many writers and creatives face, where they are struggling to produce any work. They can’t come up with ideas, you can’t write anything you’re happy with or you have no motivation.

It can be so difficult, when nothing seems to be working and you have no motivation or interest in your work. Personally, I do believe writer’s block is very real, I have experienced it myself. I find the key is figuring out why you’ve hit this stumbling block in your writing. Are you getting a bit burnt-out? Do you need to take a break? Are you just struggling to figure out what comes next?

Knowing what has caused it may help you find a way to overcome it. If you need a break, take a break. You could try looking at another project. Go and do something else and leave it for a few days. Maybe watch a new TV show or read a new book. You might just get an idea when you least expect it. If you are struggling with the next plot point, take some time to review what you’ve written so far. You don’t need to go ahead and do a full edit, but re-reading it might help you pick up on the plot threads again and figure out what you want to do next.

5. Your Idea Should Be Perfect Before You Start

To me, this is flat out wrong. If you wait until you have a perfect idea and a perfect plan, you’ll never get started. Perfection can come later, that’s what reviewing and editing is for. You have the idea, you’ve written a rough plan from the initial idea and after that, you should start writing. Things might change as you write, you might come up with new ideas and plot points as you go. That’s okay. This is why you write drafts and go back and edit later.

Very few pieces of media are published in their initial form. Movies and TV are edited extensively, a huge amount of footage filmed is removed. Music is the same, and writing is the same too. Some people advise against editing as you go, and recommend finishing the entire first draft before you go back and edit. Others prefer to edit a bit as they work. Either way, don’t be afraid to write everything that comes to mind.

6. You Must Write in a Certain Order

Some people will insist you should write your book from start to finish in that order. Even going so far as to insist you follow an established story structure format. Others will advocate for writing the ending first before filling in the rest. Is this really okay? I think it depends on you and how your brain works. As a rule, I tend to write from start to finish, but there have been times where I’ve had an idea for a specific scene that takes place later in the story than where I’m at.

I think if your inspiration is leading you to a later part of the book, it’s okay to write it and figure out exactly where it fits in later. My current WIP came about from an old writing experiment I did years ago where I basically tried to write a description of a journey. I read over it, and an idea came to me, and before I knew it, I had four chapters written. And it went from there.

7. Planning Stifles Creativity

The old ‘pantser’ vs ‘plotter’ debate. Pantsers are people who fly be the seat of their pants, i.e they get in their flow and write without having a plan in place. Plotters are the opposite, preferring to have an outline in place before they start writing. And plenty of writers fall somewhere in between. People who are pantsers will often claim that having a plan stifles their creativity and slows them down. Plotters will often argue that having a plan reduces the risk of writer’s block.

So who is right? Again, it depends. I do think it’s a good idea to have an idea of the overall plotline of your work before you start writing, at least having the ending in mind. You’re probably noticing a theme here, that these ‘rules’ are not as hard and fast as some people like to insist they are. There is something to most of them, but everyone works differently and I think these rules can be interpreted and applied to your work the way that works best for you. Or as they often say in Pirates of the Caribbean: “They’re more like guidelines, anyway.”

So that’s a view on some of these common writing myths. I’d love to hear any thoughts or experiences of what we’ve discussed today, so feel free to chat about it in the comments. For more, stay tuned. We’ll be staying in this vein for the rest of the week. I post every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe below to get an email whenever a new blog post is live.

For more on writing advice, I have other posts including cliches and editing as you go. For more on writer’s block, this blog post on Reedsy has a lot of good information.

Understanding Verbs Part 3

August 11, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Part 3 Of Understanding Verbs

In the first part we discussed verbs, what they are and the different kinds of verbs you might come across. In part 2 we covered the different tenses and forms of verbs., In this part we are going to cover the use of verbs within the sentence. Subject-verb agreement is essential for clear writing. If the verb and subject are not in agreement, the sentence can sound awkward and the meaning could be confused. We’ll also touch on split infinitives and implied subjects.

Subject-Verb Agreement

What does this actually mean? Essentially, the form of the verb used must match the subject of the sentence. Remember, the subject is what is doing the action of the verb. So a singular subject requires a singular verb, and a plural subject requires a plural verb.

“The dog is in the kennel.”

So above, the subject ‘the dog’ is singular, so we use the singular form of the verb ‘is’. If we said: “The dogs are in the kennels.” There is more than one dog so we need to use the plural form ‘are’. “The dogs is in the kennels.” would be incorrect, and it sounds awkward when you read it aloud.

That brings me to a good way to tell whether your subject and verb are in agreement. Reading aloud is a great way to check your writing makes sense and is correct. It’s easier to tell if you have the correct words and word order, by hearing it out loud. You can read it out loud, record yourself reading it out loud or even use software to read it aloud for you.

Exceptions and Rules

As with all good English rules, there are exceptions. Using the first person pronoun ‘I’ means you need to use the plural form of the verb. If the verb is following up a main verb, in some cases you use the basic form of the verb. “He helped the old lady cross the road.” ‘Helped’ is the main verb so the secondary verb ‘cross’ is used in its main form.

There are a few additional rules for certain circumstances. Detailed explanations and examples can be found here. The Blue Book of Grammar is a great resource for English grammar, with good explanations and there are quizzes too, so you can test your knowledge. A lot of people might say that this is intuitive, and it is to a native English speaker, however, mistakes are common and if you know the rules, then you’ll be able to apply them properly in all situations. Especially if you plan to be a proofreader or editor.

Rules for Subject-Verb Agreement

In a sentence with the word ‘of’ the subject will typically be before the phrase ‘of…’ and thus it is this part that must agree with the verb. Take the following pair of sentences for example:

“A bunch of colourful flowers bring cheer to any room in the house.”

“A bunch of colourful flowers brings cheer to any rom in the house.”

Can you work out which one is correct? Try reading them out loud, and try to identify what part of the sentence is the subject, and what the relevant verb is.

Did you think the second sentence is correct? You’d be right! The subject is the ‘bunch’. the flowers are a secondary noun, and the verb is ‘brings’.

If you have two singular subjects connected by ‘either/or’ or ‘neither/nor’ requires a singular verb. If you have a singular and a plural subject in a sentence like this, the verb agrees with the noun or pronoun nearest to it. Caution is advised, as some sentences can end up awkward, even if they are grammatically correct. In this case, rewording the sentence might be the way to go.

If you have two or more singular subjects connected by the word ‘and’, you will usually use a plural verb. Be careful, some nouns connected by ‘and’ become compound nouns and should be treated singularly, such as ‘breaking and entering’. It is often considered to be incorrect to place a personal pronoun first in a list of pronouns/nouns but grammatically, it is not. It is more a convention of politeness.

Phrases separating the subject and verb such as ‘besides, along with, as well as, not’ are not part of the subject and should be ignored, so the verb matches the subject. The same applies to anything in parentheses (brackets).

Prepositions and Amounts

Sentences that begin with ‘there’ or ‘here’, the true subject is after the verb so the verb should match the subject. “There are the keys,” or “There is the key.” Singular verbs should also be used for distances, time periods or sums of money, when considered a single unit. “Ten years is too long.” But if you are talking about money like hundreds of dollar bills, then it becomes plural.

Finally for portions of something, phrases like ‘some of, a lot of, the majority of’, the opposite of the first rule applies. The verb should agree with the noun after the word ‘of’. “Most of the cake is gone.” vs “Most of the cakes are gone.” With collective nouns, it can be subject to the writer’s intent but the phrasing of the noun might need to be changed to make it easier or clearer.

Finally, if the phrases is expressing a wish or something that is contrary to fact, ‘was’ is replaced with ‘were’. “If your father were here, he would stop you.” Normally, ‘were’ is a plural verb but in this case it’s expressing a wish that is not factually true. This is called the subjunctive mood, a hypothetical or wishful thought, or a request. “I wish you were here.” In this case you pair a singular subject with a plural verb. Make sense? Hopefully I’ve made it a bit clearer. English rules are full of odd exceptions.

Split Infinitives

Infinitive verbs are verbs that are used with the word ‘to’ before them and are not the main verb of the sentence. “He is going to pay.” ‘Going’ is the main verb and ‘to pay’ is the infinitive. A split infinitive is where a word is inserted between ‘to’ and the verb, often an adverb. “He is going to grudgingly pay.”

It is a held belief that you should never use a split infinitive, however, technically speaking it is not wrong. However, they can be awkward and clumsy, so they are usually not necessary and most experienced writers won’t use them unless it is necessary. You might find that there are other ways to word the sentence that read less awkwardly.

Implied Subjects

There are certain situations where the subject is not included in the sentence and is considered implied. This is usually when the sentence is a request or a command of some kind. “Stop right there!” or “Please bring me fresh towels.” Both of these have the implied subject of ‘you’ so it is not considered necessary to state the pronoun. It is assumed that the subject is ‘you’ and the context is enough.

This is not as common in English, but is much more common in other languages, such as Japanese. In Japanese, for example, pronouns are dropped and implied all the time. While pronouns for ‘you’ and ‘i/me’ do exist in the language, it is generally assumed from the context that the listener knows who the subject is so it is not stated unless needed for clarity. Indeed, it is often considered quite rude to say ‘you’ in Japanese. It also means that it is not uncommon for a single verb to be a complete sentence. If you said “Eating.” in English, it would sound quite weird, without saying “I’m eating.”

Conclusion

That concludes our foray into understanding verbs and tenses. I hope this has been helpful and interesting. If you missed part 1 and 2 you can find them here and here.

I’d love to hear any thoughts or questions. In the mean time, happy writing! Don’t forget to subscribe for updates on new blog posts three times a weekend come find me son social media for more updates. Next week we’re going to look at some myths about writing and some ‘rules’ that you should break.

Understanding Verbs Part 2: The Irregular, Helper and Reflexive Verbs

August 9, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Part 2 of Understanding Verbs

Welcome back to understanding verbs. This is part two, where we will be covering irregular verbs, reflexive verbs, linking verbs and helping verbs. There are a lot of different kinds of verbs. So hopefully I can make this more straightforward to understand. Last time, we covered what verbs are, how to understand conjugation and tenses and how regular verbs work. Regular verbs follow a regular pattern, hence the name! Irregular verbs, as you can probably tell, do not.

Understanding Irregular Verbs

How many irregular verbs are there in English? Quite a lot! There’s around 200 of them. If you remember in the last part, we compared this to Japanese, a language I’m studying for fun, and found that in Japanese, there are only two irregular verbs. So, I’m not going to cover every single one here, but we’ll look at a few of the most common ones you’ll come across.

With regular verbs, we saw that there’s a consistent pattern in how we conjugate these verbs for different tenses. With irregular verbs, there’s no pattern and the word can change drastically when we conjugate it for different tenses. This is where there can be difficulty in knowing which word we should be using.

So let’s look at a couple of examples:

To know:

The past tense of to know is ‘knew’, the past progressive tense is ‘was/were known’, the past perfect tense is ‘had known’ and the past progressive perfect tense is ‘had been knowing’. The present tense is ‘know’. The present progressive is: ‘I am knowing’, ‘he/she/it is knowing’ or ‘you/we/they are knowing’. Present perfect tense is ‘has/have known’.

So you can see from this that the word can change a lot depending on the tense you are using. The verb ‘to find’ can change to ‘found’ or ‘finding’ depending on the tense. The verb ‘to think’ can become ‘thinks’, ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’. It’s not intuitive, and unfortunately there’s not really a shortcut to remember these, you just have to learn them. For more, see the Blue Book of Grammar here.

You might have noticed something else, in the above example for ‘to know’ and that is the various forms of the verb ‘to be’ used in the verb phrases. That leads us into the next section nicely, helping verbs.

Helping Verbs

We’ve used helping verbs in a lot of the examples already, as one of the things they help with is expressing the tense of a verb. They are used to form the progressive, perfect and progressive perfect tenses, and the verb ‘to be’ is the most commonly used one. So can you list the 8 forms of the verb ‘to be’? See below for the answers.

Click here to see them.

be, is, are, am, was, were, being, been

Did you get them all? Do you know when to use each form? Let’s do a conjugation table to show you them, then we’ll discuss the uses of it in more detail. Remember that ‘being’ is the present participle and ‘been’ is the past participle.

PersonPastPresentFuture
Iwasamwill be
He/She/Itwasiswill be
Youwerearewill be
Wewerearewill be
You (pl)werearewill be
Theywerearewill be
Basic conjugation table for ‘to be’
Main verb vs Helping verb

‘To be’ is a verb that can be used on its own such as “It is there.” It is also used alongside other verbs to help indicate tense. “I am going to the party.” In this example, the main verb is ‘going’ and ‘am’ is there to help the main verb ‘to go’. “She was leaving work.” In this one, ‘was’ is helping the main verb ‘to leave’ and indicates that this is past tense. “She is leaving work.” Present tense. Does that make sense? These helping verbs also have an impact when we look at using the passive voice, which was covered in a previous blog post here.

Linking Verbs

Guess what? ‘To be’ is also a linking verb! There’s a reason it’s the most commonly used verb in the English language. It’s so versatile! So, what do we mean by linking verb. Essentially, it’s a verb that links a noun to an adjective. “The ball is blue.” The noun is the ball, blue is the adjective, and the linking verb ‘is’ is basically telling us that the adjective is describing the state of the noun’s existence. You can use a form of ‘be’ to link a noun to adjectives, adverbs and adverbial phrases.

There are a few other common linking verbs, such as ‘become’, ‘seem’, ‘feel’, ‘taste’. Note that most of them indicate something to do with our senses, which makes sense given you are linking adjectives.

Reflexive Verbs

Reflexive verbs are verbs used when the subject and object of a sentence are the same thing. Similar to when we talked about reflexive pronouns, reflexive verbs work in a similar way and are always used with reflexive pronouns. “The cat grooms itself.”

The use of reflexive pronouns and reflexive verbs is often used for emphasis and can come with certain connotations. Take a look at these three sentences, which all say the same thing in essence, and see if you feel differently about them.

  • I cleaned the house.
  • I cleaned the house myself.
  • I cleaned the house all by myself.

The basic meaning of all of them is the same. The subject ‘I’ performed a verb ‘to clean’ on the object ‘the house’. The addition of a reflexive pronoun does imply more feeling. It’s stating that the subject performed this alone, and depending on how you read it, it could indicate the person’s feelings on the matter. You could get a sense of pride, that they completed the task on their own, or you could read it in a bitter tone.

The third sentence can have the same, but with a bit more emphasis on the fact that they did the task alone, and perhaps are unhappy that they were left to do this without help. Or extremely proud that they achieved it on their own for the first time. The context will give an indication of which kind of tone is implied, but you can see how using reflexive verbs and pronouns can change the meaning of a sentence and change the feeling, or ‘mood’ of what you write.

Conclusion

So we’ve covered quite a bit today, although there is plenty more to read on this subject. On Friday, part 3 will cover subject-verb agreement, split infinitives and implied subjects. If you missed the first part, you can read it here. If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to comment. I’ve got a few interesting things in the works and I will soon be sharing updates on my novel, where I’ve been doing a lot of world building.

Follow me on social media for more content and subscribe to the blog below to get an email whenever a new post goes live! See you next time!

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