Links Tent, Twitter Style

Not so long ago, I finally found my way onto Twitter, and discovered many of the people who write the blogs I follow, along with a whole bunch of other great information. I’ve been tweeting and retweeting some of the best info I’ve come across. Here’s the best of the best:

Great Resource:
The Bookshelf Muse blog: writing tools and musings about reading, writing and other randomness. There are two great thesauruses (thesaurusi?) in the right-hand column: an emotion thesaurus that lists over 60 emotions and and corresponding actions, and a setting thesaurus that will help you anchor your scenes using all of your senses.

Editing and Story Writing Information:

• If you’re not following Elizabeth S. Craig on Twitter, you should be. She posts great links to great content every day. I found many of these links through her tweets. 
• 6 Common Dialogue Mistakes to Avoid, written by Lynette Labelle at Chatterbox Chitchat.
• The Problem—and Reality—of Adding –LY, from The Muffin, brought to you by WOW—Women on Writing.com 
• Lessons From the Slushpile: Good vs Great from the Inkhaven blog.
• Janice Hardy, author of the MG fantasy, The Shifter, has a great post on her The Other Side of the Story blog about Edits vs. Revisions: One on One Death Match.
• The Blood-Red Pencil blog has lots of “sharp and pointed observations about writing,” including this post about Combining Characters.
• Ingrid Sundberg, self-professed writing conference junkie, shares what she learns on her blog Ingrid’s Notes. Here’s a great example 10 Tests to Prove Your Manuscript is Ready for Submission.
• This post, Are Filter Words Weakening Your Fiction? is a great reason to add the Write It Sideways blog to your blog roll.

Quick Tip: Dialogue Tags

One thing that drives me crazy about children's books is how often they use the word "exclaimed." The other is that no one ever "says" anything. If they aren't exclaiming it, they're shouting it, or whispering it, whining it, declaring it, stating it, demanding it, groaning it or--my personal pet peeve--smiling it. (How the heck do you smile dialogue?)

The bigger problem is that we start off reading books like this, and sometimes those dialogue tags continue into our adult writing. Simple is better.

The point of dialogue tags (he said, she asked) is to make it clear who is speaking. It's not so we know how the character says something. That's what strong dialogue and actions are for. So use said and asked only, or nothing at all. Don't use a tag if you don't need one--slip in a beat (bit of action that will tell us about your character more than the dialogue tag will) instead. The dialogue should be able to stand up on its own, and if it can't, it's the dialogue and not the tag that needs editing.

When you go through your novel, give yourself $2 in quarters. Every time you come across a dialogue tag besides said or asked, or find a qualified said (said stiffly, said angrily) take away a quarter. Do you still have a few quarters left when you get to the end? If not, go back and beef up your dialogue and make sure that you can justify each of those fancy tags.