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“Show, Don’t Tell” is one of the oldest pieces of advice to new writers, but it can be kinda confusing without some show and tell examples.

What exactly is the difference between Showing and Telling? Is “Showing” always right? And is Telling always wrong?

As we’ll see, “Show, Don’t Tell” is good advice in certain circumstances. Not just good advice, in fact, but absolutely essential to any half-decent novel.

At the same time, virtually every novel ever written contains passages that are told, not shown . . . and that’s fine. You just have to understand which mode of writing to use where.

These things get confusing when spoken about in the abstract, so we’ll use plenty of showing vs. telling examples to show you exactly what’s what.

Sounds good? Then let’s motor.

What Is ‘Show, Don’t Tell’?

‘Show, don’t tell’ is a technique authors use to add drama to a novel. Rather than telling readers what’s happening, authors use this technique to show drama unfold on the page. ‘Telling’ is factual and avoids detail; while ‘showing,’ is detailed and places the human subject at the centre of the drama.

Show, Don’t Tell: What This Actually Means

‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass,’ Anton Chekhov once advised.

Here’s an example of what he means:

Telling:
The night was cold and moonlit. The sleigh moved fast through the forest.

Showing:
Ekaterina was shocked by the cold. She’d known winters before, but never this far north and never this deep. Burrowed under furs as she was, she still felt her eyelashes freeze. There were crystals of ice on her face where her own breath had frozen solid. It was a clear night, and they raced through the whispering pines, like a feather drawn over a sheet of silver. It seemed magical. Impossible. Temporary. Forbidden.

What do you notice?

You’ll instantly notice a number of things here.

How To Recognise The “telling” Mode

Any piece of prose written in the “telling” mode:

• Is factual.
• Is brief.
• Is an efficient way to communicate data.
• Prefers to avoid detail, and is happy to convey broad overarching messages. (“It was cold.”)
• Is not necessarily human-centred, and as a result...
• Does not, in general, stir the heart.

How To Recognise The “showing” Mode

Any piece of prose written in the “showing” mode:

• Is human-centred (usually, though sometimes only by implication).
• Is a slower, richer, more expansive way to communicate.
• Is not efficient – quite the reverse!
• Loves detail.
• Tends to place the human subject right at the centre of things, and as a consequence...
• Can often stir the heart.

An Example Of Showing Vs Telling From Literature

You want an example of showing story from literature? OK, try this:

Telling

The parties were dazzling and opulent. They spilled out of the house, into the  garden and even the beach. [That’s my version of how a “telling” version might go.”

Showing

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. … The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive … floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside … the lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher.

You want to guess which method Scott Fitzgerald used to describe the parties in The Great Gatsby? I’ll give you a clue: it wasn’t the first of those ways.

An Extended Example Of Telling Vs Showing

One more example – this one a little bit more extended. The example here comes from my own book, The Deepest Grave, which I’ve chosen just to make the point that these rules and disciplines apply to all of us. To Scott Fitzgerald. To me. To you.

So, here’s one more example, as before given in in two possible versions.

Telling

Bowen, Katie and FIona find a sheet of vellum in an old Welsh church.

Showing

Bowen lifts the 1953 fish-restaurant newspaper out of the wooden wall box.

‘I suppose that can go.’

He looks glumly at the mess behind the cupboard, knowing that it’ll be his job to clean it. Katie looks into the box, now missing its newspaper floor.

Glances once, then looks more sharply.

‘No, that’s not right,’ she says, and starts picking at the bottom with a fingernail.

I already looked under the newspaper and saw just the pale, bleached colour of old pine – pine that has never seen the sun – but that was me being dumb. Me not knowing how to see.

Katie picks at the bottom and it comes away.

A sheet of paper, blank on the upper side, but with writing in clear purplish-black ink on the lower. Latin text. A hard-to-read medieval hand.

I’ve given you quite an extended chunk of ‘showing’ here because quoting at length makes a few further points very clear.

As well as everything we’ve said so far, Showing:

• Is dramatic – it’s story told as drama. You could actually imagine the long-form version of the scene above as something played out on a stage or in a movie. Literally every time that you could imagine a piece of writing as a stage or movie play, you are reading something that is shown not told.
• Often involves dialogue. It’s no coincidence. Movies involve actors saying their lines – and again, literally every time you encounter proper dialogue in a book, you are reading a scene that is shown, not told. In the example above, the characters immediately started talking about what they had found, thus emphasising the dramatic quality of the moment.
• Plays out in real time. Take a look one more time at those two passages just above. The first – basically “three people find vellum” – isn’t real time at all. There’s no sense of elapsed time there at all. It’s told like a news report on CNN or the BBC. In the extended passage – the one from my actual book – you could imagine a clock on the wall, counting out the seconds as the scene  elapsed. If you had to make a guess at how long it took from Bowen fishing out the newspaper to Katie finding the vellum, you could actually make a reasonable guess.

These thoughts lead us to the next massive point you have to know about the whole showing / telling thing:

Namely, why people get so obsessed by it.

Show, Don’t Tell: Why It Matters

People get obsessed with showing vs telling. Here’s the reason why.

OK. Here’s a question for you:

Why do readers read books?

That’s a real question, and you should think about your answer.

If you think about it, you’ll probably give me some answer like:

Readers want to get involved in a story.

They want to experience emotion through the lives and adventures of fictional characters.

They want to get swept up in other people’s dramas.

And yes. Exactly.

And to immerse ourselves in the experiences of those characters, we need to feel them as the characters themselves feel them – which is real time, minute by minute.

That’s the whole deal right there.

If you want to get your readers emotionally engaged, you have to plunge them into the drama of the moment. It would be no good Jane Austen telling us that “D’Arcy proposed to Lizzy Bennet and Lizzy said no.”

The whole reason we read Pride & Prejudice is to be with Lizzy as she experiences that first (awful) proposal. To feel her emotions and reactions almost second by second as she goes through that scene.

Readers always experience the closest emotional contact with their character during scenes that are shown, rather than via facts that are simply reported.

As a matter of fact, I don’t particularly like the “Show, Don’t Tell” mantra for two reasons, the first of which is that Henry James phrased the whole thing better:

“Dramatise! Dramatise! Dramatise!”

That’s so easy and so clear. If you have a patch of writing that seems a little low energy – a little blank, a little dull – then just let those commandments echo in your head.

Those dramatic scenes are all, always, shown not told. Those scenes are what keep your readers reading your novel. Your novel should be formed almost completely of such scenes.

By this point, you’re probably thinking, “Ah, OK, I’ve got this. I see why this is so important. I gotta remember never to tell story, and always to show story.”

And that’s what some people think. And what some writing tutors teach.

And they’re all wrong. Stick with me, and I’ll tell you why.

“Show, Don’t Tell”: Why This Rule Is Sometimes Just Plain Wrong

So far in this post, we’ve looked at – and preferred – examples of writing that were shown rather than told.

We’ve said that showing is more dramatic and more engaging. It’s the way we plunge our readers into the drama of our story. It’s our basic method for getting them to experience the emotions of our characters.

And that’s all true. But right at the start of this post, I also said:

Telling

• Is factual.
• Is brief.
• Is an efficient way to communicate data.

And hold on – those things can be good as well as bad, right?

So, sure, if we have some crucial scene – D’Arcy proposing to Lizzy Bennet, or my gang of Bowen, Katie and Fiona finding some vellum in a church – then you have to show that scene, not merely report the action.

But let’s say, you have a line in your book that says:

“Years passed and during that time Yulia hardly ever thought of the incident again. It was gone. It belonged in some past life,to some past self. She was busy now with other things. Only then, one bright, clear day in March . . .”

That’s telling, right? It’s the narrator just reporting stuff, not showing it.

And according to the “Show, Don’t Tell” mantra, telling is bad.

But It Isn’t!

What is telling? Telling is the wrong way to deliver dramatic scenes (which should, of course, compose the vast bulk of your novel), but it can be great way to deliver information that is essential to your story, but of no great dramatic consequence.

So take that “years passed” passage above. How would you even go about showing all that? Would you really have Yulia waking up day after day, month after month, and year after year, NOT thinking about whatever that past incident was?

Sure, that would be showing not telling . . . but you’d be crazy to do it that way.

The truth here is pretty simple:

If you have essential factual information to deliver, and that information has no dramatic interest in its own right, then just tell it. Don’t try to show it, because you’ll slow your book right down – and probably kill it.

Showing is for drama (and your book should be mostly drama.)

Telling is for the efficient delivery of all the non-dramatic information your book requires.

The way I usually think about it is that my dramatic scenes are the stones in my wall, but for the wall to hold together, to be intact, it needs a little bit of mortar too. The mortar is the glue that holds all the good stuff together.

Yes, there’s a lot more stone than mortar in the wall.

Showing and telling: you always need both.

How To Use “Show Don’t Tell” in Your Writing

Seven steps to totally awesome greatness

We’ve talked a lot about general principles, but it would be kinda nice to implement them, right?

So here goes with the 7 Ninja Tips of Showing vs Telling Greatness. You are now officially just one short rocket-ride from success …

1. Use Dialogue

Dialogue always delivers a scene that shimmers with life and emotional movement. (Especially when you write dialogue right, of course!) What’s especially great about dialogue is that it makes the reader decode the speaker’s true meaning in exactly the same way that we have to decode it in real life.

So if a character says, “Yes, I’d absolutely love that,” they probably mean that they’d love it … but if it’s a macho guy being invited to get work experience in a make-up boutique, you would probably guess that he’s being sarcastic.

That’s a pretty clumsy example, of course, but the gaps between what a character says and what they really mean can feel really alive to the reader. (And a lot of fun for the writer, too.)

2. Punctuate Your Scene With Actions

Some scenes will punctuate themselves with action very naturally. If you are writing a high intensity scene, such as a battle scene for example, your scene will be naturally studded with big, dramatic activity. But almost all books will have plenty of less action-intense scenes. So, for example, you might have a big corporate meeting in some glossy boardroom. The events being discussed might have huge consequences for your characters and your story … but there’s no onrush of dramatic activity. No cities being set on fire. No Vikings with swords. No car chases. No nothing.

But you still have to include actions.

If you don’t the scene will start to float away from the characters and seem unreal, without anchor. How do you show your story in this instance? What you need to do is insert actions anyway. You actually need to engineer something to punctuate the scene.

So yes, getting up, turning pages, pouring coffee, looking out at the view – all those things count and help — somewhat.

But maybe the corporate mogul at the heart of the action could at some point get angry. Hurl a coffee cup at a wall. Start shredding a binder full of company documents. Those things wouldn’t count for much if you were writing an action-adventure book, but for the kind of scenes you’re talking about, they deliver exactly what you need.

Short message: all scenes need actions, and those actions need to be suited to your place, your characters, and the kind of story you’re writing. Vikings with swords for one kind of book, thrown coffee cups for another.

3. Exploit Your Physical Setting

Actions and dialogue help, because they help keep your characters alive on the page – and alive in the mind of the reader.

For much the same reason, great descriptions of place help as well. They anchor everything that’s happening in the scene. That anchoring means that the stuff you’re describing feels like real things happening to real place in a real location.

Now, I’m not for a moment suggesting that you need to write whole pages of purple prose talking about the wind in the palm trees, or whatever else. What I am saying is that you need a paragraph or so to locate the action relatively early in the scene … and then you need to keep nudging the reader to remind them where you are.

So let’s say your scene is taking place in a rainy New York garden. You’d have two or three sentences setting the scene. (Let’s say: iron railings, rain, noise of police sirens, a sad-looking willow tree, smells and steam coming from the back of a Chinese laundry opposite.) Then you start to let your scene unfurl and, as the characters move and talk and act, you drop in little sentences like, “rain dripped from the willow.” or “She paused to let the howl of a nearby siren pass down the street.”

You’re not interrupting the action. You’re just helping the reader actually visualise it.

4. Make Use Of Your Character’s Physicality

In the example just given, I suggested that you might write “rain dripped from the willow.” And, good, that’s perfectly fine.

But let’s bring your character right into that rainy garden, shall we? So you might have something like this:

“Rain dripped from the willow. Her hair was getting soaked but he couldn’t help noticing that she seemed barely aware of it. And this was Esmee. Esmee who was normally so conscious of the tiniest bit of discomfort or, as she put it, ‘outdoor horribleness.’

That’s effective writing, because you have the physical location and the character interacting – and interacting to a specific emotional / story purpose. In this case, that purpose is to emphasise that Esmee is so taken aback by the events of the scene (whatever those are), she’s stopped noticing stuff that would normally really bother her.

The short moral: use your characters’ body and physical sensations to make them physically present and alive in your scene.

5. Use Specific Words, Not Generic Ones

Another easy win here.

If you are trying to locate a scene in a place that feels real, you want to get specific rather than generic.

So “rain dripped from the tree” feels blandly universal. “Rain dripped from the willow” feels already more specific and immediate.

Sometimes, of course, you’ll want to get really specific. Something like this maybe: “rain dripped from the willow’s long, drooping tendrils. She noticed that the tree was balding, losing leaves, as though unhappy to be here. As though longing for escape.”

I don’t want to suggest you always need to be that specific – sometimes it’s fine for a willow to just be a willow – but in this case, some specific comments about a tree rebound back to hint something about what the character’s might be feeling.

Short moral: always prefer the specific to the generic. And sometimes, if it makes sense, you can get very specific.

6. Always Make Space For The Reaction Shot

You know how in the movies, you’ll always get the reaction shot? LIke this, I mean:

Beat 1: “I don’t want to marry you,” she said. “I never did.”

Beat 2: Close up of the guy’s face

And it’s kind of obvious why you have those rhythms. If you don’t have the reaction shot, you’ve lost a lot of the drama from the action of beat 1. You need both.

And it’s the same with novels. Sometimes, you’ll need a whole paragraph describing a reaction. Sometimes you’ll leave it to dialogue. Sometimes you’ll make do with hints, but leave plenty of scope for creative ambiguity. And any of those routes (depending on the situation, depending on your story) are fine. What’s not fine is to leave the action without a reaction.

Short moral: always include the reaction shot! Easy.

7. Don’t Be Rushed: Let Readers Feel The Beats

FInal ninja tip of all-out showing & telling awesomeness:

Don’t rush.

Yes, you want to write a compelling and dramatic scene. Yes, you may have your heart set on a whole long action sequence with plenty of gunplay and chase scenes and whatever else.

But let the reader enjoy it! Let them savour the moment!

Don’t say, “the car was out of control. The car careened downhill and struck Damon on the hip, smashing him to the floor.”

That’s OK, but where’s the time to savour anything? The lovely thing about this moment is that Damon notices the car is out of control and he’s right in the firing line.

What does he think? What does he do? What does he feel?

I don’t know, because this author hasn’t told us. It’s slower, yes, but it’s actually more exciting to tease out that moment in more detail:

The car was clearly out of control. Damon could just about see a driver but there was something about the curve of his shoulders, the loll of his head, which suggested the driver had lost consciousness, or worse. The fall of the hill put Damon right in the firing line. He remembered thinking, “I’m going to be hit. I need to move aside.” He probably took the very first part of that action too. Some sideways move. Some break for shelter. But …”

And so on. You can see that by slowing the action down you’ve actually ramped the excitement up. Pretty good, huh? And fun to write, every single damn time.

That’s it from me. Have fun with the showing & telling. Do it right, and your scenes will come alive, and you’ll enjoy writing them too.

Happy writing!

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Starting out simple and layering up

Good novels start with decent plots. So start with a simple sketch outline, then make it progressively more detailed. We show you exactly how to do it. 

The simplest way to write a terrible book is to start out having no idea what your story is, or where it’s going to lead. The easiest way to avoid that outcome is to prepare a simple outline of your plot before you even write the first sentence. 

The downside of this approach: you actually have to do some thinking before you can start writing. 

The upside: you won’t end up writing a terrible book. Which is a plus point, no? 

7 Steps To Writing A Plot Outline For Your Novel:

1. Understand the purpose of your outline.
2. Start with a barebones outline.
3. Add a midpoint.
4. Have a firm sense of purpose.
5. Integrate your characters.
6. Complete your outline.
7. Work in circles.

Understand The Purpose Of Your Outline

At its simplest, a plot outline can be defined as a very simple, barebones summary of your story. It could be as short as a single page outline. Or it might run to as many as ten or twenty pages. 

Either way, it’s important to realise that you’re not telling the story, you’re summarising it. So if your outline feels flat and unengaging, that’s fine. Your story itself can’t be either of those things, but your outline just needs to be functional, clear – and brief. The outline is for you, and for you only. It’s not for a reader either now or in the future. 

The approach we’re going to recommend in this post is to start really simple, then start to build as you get more insight into detail. Here goes. 

Start With A Barebones Outline

It’s commonly said that there are only seven plots in the world. We’re not totally sure about that, in fact, but it’s certainly true that pretty much every novel will adopt the same rough shape. That shape, at its simplest, is as follows:

1. Status quo: This is the situation at the start of the book. So, for example, if we were dealing with a Lee Child / Jack Reacher novel, the status quo might be “Jack Reacher is travelling through rural Montana, wanting to heal after a particularly bruising recent adventure.” At this point, nothing has happened. The situation is stable.
2. Inciting incident: The inciting incident is whatever happens to disturb that status quo. It could be an apparently small thing, or an obviously big one. So in Twilight, for example, the inciting incident is simply that Bella Swan’s attention is caught by an attractive – but odd – boy at school. In our Reacher story, it could be that an unseen sniper kills the bus driver dead and seems intent on killing everyone else on the bus too. Either way, the important issue is that the status quo has been disrupted. The reader already feels that a story has been set in motion.
3. Developments: This is the big middle chunk of your book. This is the part that probably occupies you from (say) 15,000 words into your book right up to 10 or 15,000 words before the end. It’s the scariest part of your outline, whether you’re a new novelist, or a seasoned scriptwriter, or anything in between. We’ll talk more about this element of your plot later in the post, but for now just bear in mind that your character will encounter obstacles, victories and reversals – but the victories won’t be permanent and the reversals won’t be lethal. Everything is still in play … but the stakes will gradually rise.
4. Climax: We said that the stakes gradually rise and, by the end of the book, the stakes feel like life and death. In a romance story, your protagonist will feel that she has to get this guy, because he is going to be her forever one. In a thriller, it’s not just that your protagonist’s life is in danger, it’s that some vast other risks are in play as well (a bomb in New York, a high school massacre, or whatever.) It’s not too much to say that the success of your book really stands and falls by how profound and engaging this climax moment feels.
5. Resolution: Then your story needs to resolve. It could be a triumphant resolution: Jack Reacher wrestles the bad guy on the lip of a gigantic dam and ends up hurling him over the edge to his destruction. Or it could be a bitter failure: The guy your romantic protagonist really, really wanted rejects her, or dies, or otherwise becomes unavailable. Or you could have some bittersweet ending. So in The Fault In Our Stars, the two romantic protagonists are truly in love (yay!), but their sickness takes its inevitable and tragic course. 

I strongly recommend that, for the first draft of your plot outline, you simply use those five headings. Quite likely, you have a pretty clear idea in your head of the first two of those stages, and a fairly clear idea of the last two as well. So just write down whatever you know under those headings. If you don’t have a clear idea, just leave a blank or a write question to yourself. (For example: “Jack Reacher has to find a way to escape the prison. But how?”) 

Most likely, the area where you’ll struggle most is the Developments section – but don’t worry. Just write what you know. We’re about to move to the next stage. Before that though, let me offer one more heading, which is kind of optional … and kind of doesn’t fit into a post on plot outline … except that it really, really does as well. So especially if you are writing a book with an interesting or complicated character, I suggest you make notes on:

1. Main character(s). A paragraph or two of notes on each of the main characters in your novel will help inform the work you do on plot – and vice versa. Your plotting insights will also enrich your main character. And because you want to think of character as fluid rather than static, you should also consider making some short notes on …
2. Character arc or character development. You want to sketch – in broad, simple terms only – how your main character changes or develops through the course of the book. More help on that here.

Got that? Good. OK:

Onwards.

Add A Midpoint

We just said that the developments section is the one you’re going to struggle with the most – and that’s fine. That’s just part of the joy of writing. But we can make your job a bit easier. 

The single hardest thing about that developments part of your book is that it feels very long and unstructured. So the simplest way to navigate it is to give yourself a solid anchor in the middle. 

That anchor is typically a piece of major drama in a particular scene (read more about how to perfect that dramatic scene, here). Sometimes it’ll look as though the protagonist has ‘won’. Sometimes it’ll look like he/she has ‘lost’. But either way, because we’re not yet at the true climax of the book the defeat or victory will be a false or temporary one. 

The actual type of drama involved will depend on your book. In a crime thriller (like the ones I write, for example) there will typically be an episode of action/adventure that also does something to change the complexion of the case being investigated. So I’ve had my protagonist get involved in hostage situations. I’ve had her be abducted. I’ve had her investigate a major unexplored cave system. And so on. They’re the sort of extended, memorable sequences that should echo long after the reader has finished the book. 

A romantic story needs the same kind of major twists. So it could be that your happy couple go away on what should be the holiday of their dreams, only for things to go terribly wrong. Or an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend comes along to mess things up. Or something else. 

If you can determine what your midpoint is, you’ll find your whole plot feels more manageable. Imagine your plot as a bridge. In the first ‘barebones’ version of your plot outline, we just had a major support at the Initiating Incident point and then again at the Climax/Resolution one. The rest of your plot was just a long stretch over the void. 

By introducing a midpoint, you give yourself another major support element. So it’s like you only have to manage the span from the Initiating Incident to the Midpoint , then from the Midpoint to the Climax. By breaking that developments section into two, you’ll find it much, much easier to navigate. 

Have A Firm Sense Of Purpose

It probably goes without saying, but we’re going to say it anyway … 

No plot will cohere or feel compelling unless your protagonist has a really clear sense of purpose. That purpose can morph a little through the book, but it can’t change its essential nature. 

So a Jack Reacher novel, for example, might start with Reacher trying to protect the bus passengers from the sniper … but as the narrative evolves, he might end battling a plot to – I don’t know – swamp Great Falls in drugs, or plant a bomb under the state Capitol, or whatever it is. But there has to be a solid continuity in what drives him throughout the book. He can’t start off chasing bad guys in Montana, then zoom off somewhere else and start some totally different story. 

The way to be sure that your outline is staying on track is to define, upfront, what your character’s motivation is. You may also want to explicitly state who their antagonist is and what the obstacles in the way of their success are. (That approach works better for some books than others, so if it doesn’t quite make sense to you, you can just ignore it. Who’s the antagonist in Twilight, for example? There isn’t really a great answer to that question.) 

Integrate Your Characters

So far, we’ve spoken of a plot outline as something almost mechanical – like a piece of clockwork you just have to wind up and set in motion. 

But of course your plot is propelled by its characters and the best stories aren’t character-led or plot-led, but led equally and powerfully by both. You can read more about plotting here.

To take an example, think of John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. The twisty, double-crossing plot needed a suspicious and experienced spy at its heart. And if that sounds cold, then the spy, Alec Leamas, also had a desperate desire to find love, to be able to trust again after his years of secret service. That character – cynical, but with that hopeless dab of longing – turned an efficient spy story into a twentieth century masterpiece. 

The best way to bring your characters and plot into perfect synchrony is to develop them both together. So you probably want to work on your character worksheets (more here) at the same time as you’re developing your story outline. 

So you might fill out your developments section with a new idea you had for a scene there. That might trigger an insight into your character, so you’d go and add something to your character worksheet. Then back again. 

You’ll find you don’t even need to work too hard on the integration. If you develop your story and your characters alongside each other, each element will bleed into and influence the next. The process will happen automatically and in a beautifully seamless way. 

Complete Your Outline

How far you take your outline is very much up to you. Some writers like to plan very intensively. Some like to use the Snowflake method. I know writers who will write a detailed 30 page synopsis of their novel before they proceed. I know others (like me!) who do the absolute bare minimum. Who just trust their instincts to be able to create on the run, if you like. 

So I’m not going to tell you how far you need to take your outline. What I will say is that if you want a detailed plot outline template to follow, then you may well want to use Blake Snyder’s famous beat sheet from his ‘Save the Cat’ book. That book was written for screenwriters and doesn’t have universal applicability to novelists, but a lot of people find it helpful all the same. So if you are Mr/Ms/Mx Detailed and you want a roadmap, then here it is: 

1. Opening image. This is like a touchstone for where your protagonist is at the very opening of the book. 
2. Theme stated. All decent books (or films) should have some underlying theme or debate. You want some statement of that theme – possibly playful; you don’t have to be too heavy – in the opening couple of chapters of the book. 
3. Set-up. This corresponds roughly to our Status Quo section 
4. Catalyst. This corresponds roughly to our Initiating Incident section. 
5. Debate. Is the hero going to rise to the challenge posed by the Initiating Incident? Quite often there’s a refusal or reluctance, before something tips the hero into changing their mind. 
6. Break into two. That’s the moment that launches the story from the opening set-up into the excitement of the Developments section. It’s where your character decides to accept the adventure being offered and launches off into the guts of your story itself. 
7. B story. A really good tip this. Very often, there’ll be some secondary story to accompany your main one. So if you are writing a broadly action-themed novel, the secondary story might be a romantic one. Introducing that that secondary tale right after the opening section is done and dusted feels just about right in terms of timing. 
8. Fun and Games. This is Snyder-speak for the opening round of action, where your premise really starts to make itself felt. So if you were writing (let’s say) an ‘action’ film set in an old folks home, this is where you’d really start to have fun with the premise. Yes, things are at stake here, but this is still the lower stakes portion of the book. Things seem to matter, but they’re not that consequential compared with what follows. 
9. Midpoint. As discussed above. The quivering dagger at the dead centre of your book. 
10. Bad guys close in. After the midpoint, things feel more consequential. Yes, your character may notch up some ‘wins’, but the mood, broadly, will be one of increasing seriousness as you move towards the climax of your story. 
11. All is Lost. It looks like everything is lost. Bond is captured and the villain is going to detonate his bomb. Or Lizzy’s Bennett’s silly sister has gone and destroyed her hopes of happiness with Darcy. 
12. Dark Night of the Soul. This is the interior / emotional counterpart of the ‘all is lost’ moment. It’s how the character reflects to themselves after the disaster that’s just happened. 
13. Break into three. This is the moment where the character bursts out of their despair. Where they come up with one last desperate stratagem, or some last effort of will. 
14. Finale. This is the climax and resolution elements we’ve already spoken of. 
15. Closing image. This is the image that shows where we are now – and is often a mirror image, in some way, of where we were. 

As I say, there’ll be elements of that template that may seem very helpful, and others that may not especially speak to you. So grab what you want. Discard what you don’t. 

And when you come to thinking about adding in more details, read this article on chapter lengths – it’s really helpful!

Work In Circles

In most things we do, we want to work in a logical, disciplined way. Start at the beginning. Follow a plan. Complete the task. Done. 

Outlining a novel is not like that. It’s the opposite. 

I’ve already mentioned that you’ll probably be developing plot as you develop character. So you’ll dive from one thing to another and back again. 

Good. That’s not indiscipline at work. That’s creativity. 

But also –  

You’ll make mistakes. You’ll screw up. You’ll have ideas, you’ll write them down – then you’ll figure out they’re bad and you’ll delete them again. 

Good. That’s not incompetence at work, it’s creativity. 

A cyclical, repetitive, trial-and-error type process is exactly what you’re after. That also means you’re not going to be able to sit down and develop a decent plot in a weekend. That’s not how it works (or almost never anyway.) 

So give yourself time. Forgive yourself errors. And have fun. 

Happy plotting. Happy outlining. And happy writing … 

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How To Write Prose- The Best Way

When you send your work off to an agent, the agent’s first look will be fast, smart and brutal.

They’ll ask, “Do I even like the concept for this book?” And they’ll ask, “Can this person write? Does this feel like the prose style of a serious, professional author?”

If the answer to either of those questions is in the negative, you’re on the path to rejection, no matter how hard you’ve worked on all the rest of your manuscript.

Well, we’re not going to address the issue of ideas in this post (though you could check out our comments in our article on writing an elevator pitch, if you’re worried, or see what we have to say about checking and developing your ideas.)

We’re going to deal with the second of the things that an agent (or their assistant) has uppermost in their mind when they consider your submission.

Quite simply, they’re thinking:

Can this person write?

Agents see hundreds of manuscripts and you’ll need yours to say, from that very first page and paragraph, “Yes, this is good prose. You are in the hands of a confident, capable writer. You will not be wasting your time with what follows.”

What are you aiming for? You are aiming for prose that is:

• Clear
• Economical
• Precise

If you can check those three boxes, you’re doing fine. John Grisham isn’t some kind of prose writing superstar. Nor is Suzanne Collins. Nor is Stephen King. Their genius all lies elsewhere.

9 Ways To Perfect Your Prose Style:

1. Avoid clichés.
2. Be accurate.
3. Keep it short.
4. Trust your reader.
5. Cull your adjectives.
6. Mix your rhythms.
7. Ditch the modifiers, let the verbs do the work.
8. Use unexpected words to shock readers into understanding.
9. Ask for help.

If you can write clear, economical and precise prose – and it isn’t hard to do – you’re basically forcing the agent to read on. To judge your novel on its merits. To give your story a chance.

Here’s what you need to do.

Not sure what prose writing is? It’s basically the opposite of poetry. Any novel is written in prose. So is the text in any newspaper. So is the letter you write to your bank or your doctor or your secret lover. When novelists talk about prose style, they really just mean the way you write. Does your writing sound good or bad? Does it do the job you want it to do? Or does the way you express things always let you down? Wikipedia has more on what prose is, if you want to know that.

Kill Clichés

Cliché is the enemy of every author. And you recognise it when you see it, right? We’re talking about things like this:

• His eyes were blue enough to swim in.
• She felt a sharp pain, as though cut by a knife.
• The breeze whispered softly through gently waving trees.

It’s like watching a movie we’ve all seen before. It’s language that’s stale, old, past its sell-by date.

But cliche creeps in all over the place. The flame-haired passionate redhead? She’s an old, overused stereotype.

The midnight hostage exchange in a deserted warehouse? Seen it, read it.

The rose-covered cottage with a smiling old lady and lots of home-made cakes. Yep, nothing new there.

The simple fact is that wherever you grab for pre-made stereotypes – scenes, people and settings that we’ve seen a million times before – you bore your reader that tiny bit. You distance them from the text, when what you want is to hug them close.

So, look for cliches everywhere.

Then kill them.

Need more help? We have a brilliant video tutorial on Cliches – it’s part of our How To Write course and is available free to members of Jericho Writers. If you’re serious about writing, you probably want to consider joining us. You get tons of free learning materials, live online classes, an active and supportive community, and so much more besides. Learn more or join us.

Be Accurate

Let’s start with an example. Consider this sentence:

She lay in the early morning light listening to the roar of traffic softly rising like mist in the streets.

What do you think of that? Good? Bad? Half and half?

I hope you said that it’s an awful sentence, because it is. If I were an agent and I encountered this sentence on page 1 of a submission, I would read no further. Why? Because the writer isn’t in control of their language and that proves to me that they aren’t yet ready to go pro.

So let’s see what’s wrong.

“She lay in the early morning light” – that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that.

“listening to the roar of traffic” – yep, OK. (Although why is there a roar of traffic in the early morning? Unless there’s a very specific setting which answers that question, I worry that we’re not really dealing with early morning here, in which case why say so?)

“softly rising like mist in the streets” – OK, that’s where this sentence collapses completely. If traffic roars, it can’t softly rise. You could have a murmur of traffic doing something softly. Or a roar of traffic doing something loudly or violently. But roar + soft just doesn’t work. The two ideas are fighting each other.

And that’s not all of it. Mist doesn’t rise, it just hangs. It’s a stationary image, not a moving one. So that’s another fail.

And why say ‘In the streets‘? Obviously cars are in streets (so why bother to remind us?) And if you want to talk about a slow-rising mist, then isn’t that more naturally a rural metaphor? In which case the word streets again introduces an awkwardness.

In short, the writer of that sentence failed the Accuracy test, because they weren’t sure enough what they wanted to say and ended up just serving up a mess.

Oh, and if you think I’m being picky here, then I admit it:

YES! I’m picky.

So should you be. Prose style matters – and it’s good that it matters!

Books are made out of sentences and sentences are made out of words. If you're not very picky indeed about your word choices and sentence constructions, you will never be (or deserve to be) a real professional author. So be picky. It’s the first ingredient of success.

Keep It Short

When you write, treat your manuscript as though you had to pay 10p a word for the privilege of writing. Look at this paragraph, for example:

He walked slowly away, trying not to make any kind of sound. His feelings were in a turmoil, roiling and boiling, a tumult of emotion. He couldn’t help reiterating to himself again and again that he had done the right thing; that he had done everything he could. He insisted to himself that she, too, would surely see this one day.

Ugh. Let’s try that again. Here’s the same example, tightened up.

He crept away, his feelings in turmoil. He had done the right thing, he told himself. One day, she would see this, too.

Almost a third of the length. And everything about it is better. It doesn’t just say it faster, it says it better. In the first version, all that verbiage just got in the way.

And again: you just can’t be too picky here.

Let’s say you had a sentence in your book that was 12 words long, when it could say the same thing in just 9-10 words. Would you make the change? Or would you just think, nah, who cares?

I certainly hope that you said you’d make the change, because look at it like this. What if you write a 120,000 word book that could be reduced to 90 or 100,000 words without losing any material content? That book would be 20-30,000 words overweight . . . and would be way too baggy for any top-end literary agent to get involved with. But you will only cut that 20-30,000 word surplus by finding the 2-3 unnecessary words in that 12 word sentence and cutting them out. That’s what that part of the editing process is all about. There are no shortcuts.

In short: good writers work at their writing. Getting your prose style right is all about acute attention to detail.

If a bad sentence bothers you, you just need to keep going until you get it right.

You have to care about your sentences –
because your entire novel is made of them!

If you’re not open to cutting your work in service of your novel, making it the best you can, we’re in trouble.

Trust Your Reader

Another amateurish trait is that of not trusting the reader. We get many clients who write something rather like the following:

He rolled in agony. Fire shot through every limb. He felt like screaming out in pain. His entire face was distorted with the grotesque effort of not shouting out.

That uses many very forceful words (agony, fire, screaming, distorted, grotesque). You don’t need that many words to do the job. It’s as though the writer of this snippet doesn’t trust the reader to get the point, so he/she keeps making the same point again and again like some classic pub bore. Readers will ‘get it’, as long as you write in clear, forceful, non-repetitive language.

Here’s another example.

What do you think of the following little dialogue / micro-scene?

“Yes?” I nudged.

“Yes, only . . .” she hesitated, then stopped completely. Waved her hands at me to signal she was done, or that I should look away. Some gesture like that.

“So, yes, we should invite him?”

“Of course. Fine. Whatever you want. It’s not like I care.”

We don’t know what’s going on here of course – presumably, if we read this in a book, we’d have more background to make sense of it all. But it’s pretty clear, isn’t it, that the woman here has some set of quite strong, deep emotions about the guy they might or might not invite to something – and she’s not that keen to talk about what she feels.#

And you got all that, without the writer having to spell anything out at all. The writer just dropped stuff on the page and let you figure it out.

So now take a look at this way of doing things:

“Yes?” I nudged her, anxious to know what she would think.

“Yes, only . . .” she hesitated, then stopped completely. She waved her hands at me to signal something. I guess she was quite conflicted about me inviting him. Maybe she was a little bit angry, plus a little embarrassed. Her body language was more than consistent with these two emotions, so I decided that I should try to clarify the situation in order to identify her opinions more precisely.

“So, yes, we should invite him?” I said, hoping that this time I would get a more detailed answer.

“Of course. Fine. Whatever you want. It’s not like I care.”

But although she said she didn’t care, it was evident to me that she did. As a matter of fact, when she spoke the words “whatever you want”, it struck me that maybe she was being passive-aggressive, that although she said “whatever you want”, maybe what she actually means was, “No, I’d prefer not to see him.”

That’s terrible, right?

And it’s terrible, partly, because this version of the dialogue massively breaks the “keep it tight” rule. But it’s also terrible because it just lectures the reader in this horrible heavy-handed way on stuff that the reader can perfectly well figure out for themselves.

It’s even worse than that, actually, because in the first example, all the nuances of the situation were left open to the reader to figure out. In the second example, all that clunky explanation just crushes the nuances underfoot.

The moral of this story?

Trust your reader. They’re smart like that.

(And get more dialogue help, if you want it.)

Cull Those Adjectives

To stick with this theme, and especially when it comes to descriptive writing, double adjectives are almost always a no-no. The second adjective almost always weakens the first.

You want an example? OK, so take a look at this:

He leaned over the black iron railings, the coarse grey cloth of his sleeve catching on the sharp, treacherous spike.

Deleting any superfluous adjective improves this description straightaway:

He leaned over the iron railings, the coarse cloth of his sleeve catching on the sharp spike.

That’s better, right?

But I hope you notice that we can go one step better again. Every sentence needs nouns and verbs, while adjectives are definitely optional. And in many cases, a sentence just doesn’t need any adjectives at all.

So in fact, the best way to write that sentence would be simply:

As he leaned over the railings, his sleeve caught on the spike.

Good writers use adjectives sparingly. And if you're in doubt, write the sentence without the adjectives and see if it works better. If it’s actually missing something then reinsert the adjective. Your prose will instantly tighten and feel more alive, more taut.

Want more help on descriptive writing? Then get it here and here.

Mix Your Rhythms

Short sentences are strong. So use them. But too many? All short sentences? They’ll irritate the reader. You’ll annoy them. A lot.

Aren’t you annoyed already? I bet you are.

Equally, if you work with only longer sentences, you risk losing the reader, who’ll miss that bit of grit, of sharpness, that shorter sentences bring.

The same thing applies across the board.

• Description is great, but too much of it? Every small thing described? You’ll lose the reader.
• Abstract nouns are great – but big blocks of them? You’ll lose the reader.
• Emotional language is great. It’s a big part of why we read. But constant examination of every small emotion? Yep, you know what I’m going to say: you’ll lose the reader.

The secret, always, is variety – and flexing your language according to the mood and moment of your story.

So if your hero gets brutally dumped by his long time partner? Then look in detail at his emotions!

But if you’re in the middle of a tense action scene? Now’s probably not the time for all that.

Of course, it sounds obvious if you put it like that, but it’s not always so obvious as you write your text. One great trick, used by plenty of pro authors,is to read your work aloud. If it starts to grate with you, or if the rhythms seem awkward to say, then stop and rewrite!

It’ll be worth your time, guaranteed!

Work Those Nouns, Work Those Verbs!

Look at these examples, and figure out what’s wrong with them:

• He said loudly, raising his voice so she could hear it across the field.
• She jumped high in the air.
• He said as quietly as he could.

In most cases, of course, you’ll do better to simply cut out the adverbs (the things that describe the action – like loudly, high, and quietly). English is rich in vocabulary so in most cases, there are neater ways to say what you’re after. For example:

• He called to her (adding, across the field if you want).
• She leaped.
• He whispered.

I’m not saying those replacements are always better – you have to use your judgement given the particular place you are in your story. But as a rule of thumb? Ditch the modifiers and let the verbs do the work.

There’s a similar trick to see whether your nouns (words for objects) are working hard enough for you. Compare these two examples:

• He passed her some food, on an old white plate.
• He gave her lamb tagine. Big scoops of it, mounded on a plate of old porcelain, with a faded floral rim.

The first sentence is very bland, partly because all of the components words are very bland. If you listed all the commonest words in the English language, them pass, food, old, white, and plate would surely be amongst their number.

The second sentence has some much less common words, lamb, tagine, scoops, mounded, porcelain, faded, floral, rim. Because those words are less common, they feel tangier to the reader. They burn brighter in the reader’s imagination.

Again, I’m not saying you can use this trick all the time – your judgement has to come first; sometimes simple is good – but it’s worth bearing in mind. If you read over your prose and find it a little bland or lacking in energy, then giving (especially) your nouns and verbs a big more zing will make a huge difference.

Do you find this helpful? We have some brilliant video tutorials on prose writing – they’re part of our How To Write course and the whole thing available free to members of Jericho Writers. If you’re serious about writing, you probably want to consider joining us. You get tons of free learning materials, live online classes, an active and supportive community, and so much more besides. Learn more or join us. We’d love it if you did!

Add Some Little Flashes Of Genius

You’ll occasionally find a phrase that perfectly captures something: an unexpected word use that shocks a reader into understanding. Here are some dazzling examples of what we mean:

“A quick succession of busy nothings.”

“One moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

“I shall be dumped where the weed decays, and the rest is rust and stardust.”

These are snippets from writers of genius – Jane Austen, Graham Greene, and Vladimir Nabokov. Never try forcing this on your every paragraph or page (they didn’t). Only a scatter of diamonds here and there has effect, so go for it, if you can.

And if that seems a bit daunting to begin with, then start small.

The main trick in writing well is simple:
You just have to care enough.

We mean that pretty literally.

Let’s say, there’s something you want to convey. Something, let’s say, about those moments of transition in childhood, when new possibilities suddenly open up.

You’re talking about a semi-magical moment, so it would be great if you could find a description that had a little magic to it. But how to do it?

The answer is, you write something and see how you feel about it. Maybe this, for example:

It was one of those moments in childhood, that suddenly seemed rich in possibility.

That’s OK, right, but not exactly magical. So just let your imagination find what you are trying to say? What is it that for you conveys that idea of ‘rich in possibility’?

As soon as you ask that question, you might start finding some answers. For example:

It was one of those moments in childhood, where the future suddenly bloomed, like a field full of poppies.

A moment in childhood, where a window swung open, letting in the sunshine, letting in the future.

Or of course, you might end up with something like Greene’s own version:

“One moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

Bear in mind, he probably didn’t write that sentence cleanly at the first time of asking. He probably wrote something, felt it wasn’t quite right, then fiddled with the sentence until he was happy.

That’s how writers write. Dissatisfaction + more work = the route to better writing!

Get Writing Help

I hope you know by now that Jericho Writers is a club for writers just like you.

We have a ton of helpful advice to offer. There are free courses. Free films. Free webinars where you can ask agents and authors real questions about your work. There’s a community full of writers like you exchanging questions and comments on each other’s work.

And once you take out your (low cost, cancel-any-time) membership, everything within the club is absolutely free to members. It’s like you get access to the world’s best resource bank for writers, and pay just a fraction of what it would cost to buy those things outright.

Does that sound good? We really hope so. We built the club for writers like you, and we’ve already helped 100s of writers to achieve their dreams of publication.

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The Art And Craft Of Beautiful Manuscript Presentation

Manuscript presentation makes a big difference to the way literary agents receive your work. Yes, sure, agents are looking for wonderful writing above all, so in that sense the way you format your manuscript is secondary . . . but getting an agent is hard, so you may as well make sure that first impression is a good one.

And of course remember this: literary agents aren’t mostly looking to accept a manuscript. They’re looking for early warning signs that say this author hasn’t taken enough care to be worth reading further. So the lousy presentation of your book’s cover page can screw up your chances of success before your book has really given itself a chance.

Sounds scary?

It doesn’t need to be. Follow the tips below and you’ll be fine.

What Is A Manuscript?

There’s a difference between a manuscript and a book, and it’s much the same as the difference between a writer and an author. A writer is anyone at all who writes. An author is a writer whose work has been published.

The same thing is basically true of manuscripts / books, so a reasonable definition of the word ‘manuscript’ would be:

A manuscript is the text of your novel (or work of nonfiction),
before that text has been turned into the finished book.

In the old days, when the industry still worked with paper, the manuscript was literally the stuff you printed off on your home printer. When I sent my first manuscript out to literary agents, the damn thing ran to more than 180,000 words and it was enormous. Over 600 pages of printed paper, as I recall.

These days, your manuscript may well never be printed off at all, anywhere.

Quite likely, you will work away at your manuscript on a laptop. You’ll send it to an agent by email. Any editorial work will be conducted by email and an e-copy of your manuscript. When the thing is ready to go out to publishers, it’ll go as a computer file, only.

It’s referred to as a manuscript though: it’ll only become an actual book once it’s been typeset and bound (and becomes an actual hard copy, dead-tree book), or once it’s been formatted and packaged up as an ebook. (As a matter of fact, I think some of the kudos that still attaches to trad publishing as opposed to self-publishing has to do with the way it marks out that transition.)

Format Your Manuscript Professionally:

1. Use double or 1.5 line spacing
2. Use a standard font
3. Make sure to use font size 12
4. Use standard margins
5. Chapter breaks should be marked by page breaks
6. Insert page numbers
7. Indent paragraphs
8. Don’t overuse the ellipsis… Or, exclamation marks!
9. Title pages should also include your name, contact info, and wordcount

Manuscript Basics

So your manuscript is basically just a computer file that lives (for now) on your home computer only, but may in time come to sit on the e-reader of your literary agent and (you hope) a whole bunch of editors too.

While the manuscript remains on your laptop and nowhere else, then you can format it just as you please. There are no rules at all. No one will see. No one will care.

I know one (really good) literary author who has poor eyesight and weirdly bad spelling. So he types in a huge font size – Arial, size 16, often all bold – and just ignores the spelling errors.

If he sent out his work out like that, it would make a terrible first impression on anyone reading it. But he doesn’t. That’s just the way he works.

So manuscript formatting rules only apply when you’re ready to go out to agents . . . and even then, you need to realise that there are no rules, exactly. There’s no standard manuscript format. No required novel template that you have to follow, or else . . .

So the only real rule of manuscript presentation is a simple, ordinary one:

Your manuscript should look like a clean, professional document.

If you obey that one single rule, you’ll be just fine. That said, there’s a follow-up quasi-rule, which can be expressed as:

You probably want to set out your manuscript in a way that is most helpful to a literary agent.

Those guys read a lot of new manuscript submissions, so if you make their life harder, you are – even if just in a small way – acting against your own best interests.

Ways you can make an agent’s life easier include:

Helpful choice of filenames

Maybe the file on your computer is called novel.doc, because you hadn’t settled on a title when you started to write. That’s fine – plenty of my novels have started out that way too. But remember that an agent may be looking at your submission alongside 50 others. So don’t call your documents novel.doc / synopsis.doc / query.doc – you’ll confuse the agent almost instantly. Best practice would be to name your file something like The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald, first three chapters.doc. [Except I think that title might already have been taken . . .]

Clean, clear title page

I'll give more detail on that in a second

No unnecessary additional text

Your manuscript is just a working document, that has – prior to publication or the offer of a book deal – no special status in life. So don’t write dedications in here. Or Author’s Notes. Or long acknowledgements. If there”s a really compelling reason why you need to do these things, then OK. But in most cases, all that stuff can wait.

Easy readability for the main text itself

More on that shortly as well!

Oh yes, and I should probably also say that in the screenwriting trade, there are fierce and important rules about formatting. They matter because of an equation like this: length of screenplay = run time = production costs. That equation does not apply if you're writing a novel or nonfiction book, and the result is that the publishing industry requirements about format are much looser. And quite right too!

How To Format Book Title Pages

Applies both to novels and non-fiction books.

Your title page should contain:

• The book’s title in a large font
• A subtitle, if the book has one. Most novels won’t.
• A quick genre specifier, if you want it. “A crime thriller”, for example. I’ve added “A novel” to the page below, only because this page was prepared for the American market where “a novel” is quite often used as a kind of subtitle.
• Your name
• The book’s rough word count, rounded to the nearest 1,000 or 5,000 words
• Your contact info (Email, phone, address) in the bottom right hand corner, or otherwise somewhat secondary

It doesn’t need anything else. It doesn’t need and shouldn’t have a copyright notice. (See an example of the title page for one of my novels.)

Oh, and NO ARTWORK. Unless you are a professional illustrator, say, you just want to keep the front cover bare of anything except text. Remember that the publisher, not you, will decide what the final book looks like, so sticking your own imagery on the book will, in most cases, look a awkwardly amateurish.

Epigraphs, dedications, acknowledgements and all that kind of stuff can be left for when your book makes it into print. At this stage, you really don’t need that kind of thing. If you really must put in an epigraph, you can certainly do so on the second page or (probably italicised) on the cover itself.

Your cover page would ideally not have any page number on it but, as you can see from the image, I didn’t bother eliminating the number from my title page. It’s no big deal.

Manuscript Text Formatting Guidelines

Follow this broad template, and you’ll have a happy literary agent . . .

The following guidelines will mean that you deliver the kind of manuscript that any literary agent will instantly consider professional and easy to navigate. If you want to deviate from any of these exact strictures, you probably can.

The golden rule is to deliver something that looks like any normal, professional document AND one that is laid out like a book, not a business letter. (ie: indented paragraphs not line breaks in between.) And even that rule about indenting the paragraphs is often not followed by first time writers.

But are literary agents going to turn down great work just because they don’t love the paragraph formatting? Of course not. So don’t worry too much.

OK, enough preamble. For a nice looking manuscript, you want to present it in something like the following way:

• Make sure to use double or 1.5 line spacing.
• Use a nice ordinary font. (Times New Roman, Garamond, or Georgia are all good choices. Arial is quite common, but maybe better avoided as sans serif text is just harder to read at length.)
• Ensure that you use a font size no smaller than 12, and no larger than 14.
• Use standard margins. Your existing defaults are probably fine, but check.
• Chapter breaks should be marked by page breaks, so each new chapter starts on a clean sheet.
• You can mark each new chapter with a number, if you care to. Or anything at all, really, just so long as it’s clear what’s going on. (If you’re worried about how long your chapters are, or how many pages are in a novel, then read this and put your mind at ease).
• Don’t forget to insert page numbers (though, truth be told, all that matters less now that everything happens in e-form. It’s still a nice touch.)
• Indent paragraphs (using the tab key or the paragraph formatting menu – don’t rely on the space bar). Do not leave a double space between paragraphs except as a section break.
• Oh, and don’t overuse the ellipsis (“…”) or the exclamation mark. Professional authors use those things very sparingly.

This page shows my own choices: a nice looking chapter header (but mine is a lot fancier than you need.) Modest paragraph indentation, I like 0.3″. A personal, but not wacky font. (I usually use Garamond, though I’m not quite sure what I used in this example!) Line spacing that’s clear, but not too spacey. (I generally use 1.5 line spacing, though you can go as low as 1.25 if you really want.) Plus a nice neat page number, of course.

It would be good practice to include your name and the title of the book in a header or footer, though I haven’t done so in this image.

Oh, and did you notice that the very first paragraph in that page was not indented? That’s technically correct and looks quite classy . . . but don’t worry if you haven’t done it. At that level, no one will care. (And that’s one big thing to remember about manuscript presentation. You need your work to look clean, professional and literate. If you check those boxes, then you’re fine. Really, truly, nothing else matters – except the quality of your actual book, which needs to be amazing.)

Manuscript Format: Dialogue Presentation

This isn’t a full guide to dialogue format, so do check more complete sources if you need, but for a quick refresher:

• Dialogue counts as new paragraphs, so it should be indented.
• When speech by one character is interrupted by a descriptive line, and then the speech continues, this all counts as one paragraph. Begin the next paragraph with the next speaker.
• Use single quotation marks for dialogue. When dialogue is followed by ‘said X’ or ‘chortled Y’ you should not capitalise either the s of said or the c of chortled. This is true even if the dialogue ends with an exclamation mark or a question mark.
• If the speaker quotes someone else within dialogue, you show that inner quotation with double inverted commas. Like this, for example: ‘No,’ said Hugh patiently. ‘What Sophie actually said was, “Go to hell, you bloody idiot!” Words to that effect anyway.’
• For more help on writing dialogue in the first place, then nip over here.

Again, though, that rule about quotations within dialogue is hardly ever going to matter . . . and no one at all will care if you get it wrong. It’s your novel or non-fiction which matters!

Dialogue Format: An Example

   ‘This manuscript is nicely presented,’ said the agent.
   ‘Indeed it is,’ said the publisher. She paused briefly, to strike off a few zeros from an author’s royalty statement. ‘It is well presented. And intelligent. And beautifully written.’
   ‘But Oprah won’t like it.’
   ‘No, indeed. Nor the Chief Buyer at Walmart.’
   ‘So we’ll reject it!’ they chorused, laughing wildly.
   Their limousine swept on through the rainy streets, leaving a faint aroma of cigar smoke and Chanel no. 5 lingering on the mild springtime air.

Use the example above for guidance – or, if in doubt, open any paperback book. The way it’s laid out is the way yours should be.

Manuscript Presentation: Punctuation Basics

Your presented manuscript needs flawless punctuation. A few last tips.

• There is one general rule for punctuation. It is there to help avoid ambiguity.
• Commas are tricky, but often missed out before names. Get into the habit of putting them in and you will avoid absurdities like the ones noted by Lynn Truss in Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
• Hyphens are an endangered species, and only the writer can save them. Again, it is vital to avoid ambiguities and absurdities – for instance, the white toothed whale. Is it the whale or the teeth that are white?
• It is a good rule to avoid lists of adjectives but, when you have them, check to see if any should be hyphenated. You can have a dining room, but a table there becomes a dining-room table.
• Semi-colons are also endangered, yet can bring a deal of subtlety to a writer’s style. A semi-colon links two related sentences; the second often elaborates or adds context to the first. A semi-colon is stronger than a comma, but not as strong as a full-stop.
• Colons are used where one sentence introduces another. The rule is simple: use the colon when one sentence introduces the next.

The three mistakes that our editorial team sees most commonly are these:

1. Not Enough Use Of Commas

Commas are like a tiny pause within a sentence and they can divide sentences into little blocks of meaning. They can make (especially) long sentences much easier to parse and comprehend. And commas are free. Use them!

2. Use Of Commas Instead Of Fullstops/Periods

Yes, we like commas, but commas aren’t there to divide one sentence from another, if you use commas where you mean to use fullstops (periods), you will end up with sentences that never seem to end, writing of this sort will drive your editor mad, punctuation-related homicides are rising sharply as a result. (*)

3. Misuse Of Apostrophes

The mistake which will have most agents screaming has to do with apostrophes. These are simple, so get them right. (‘It’s’ means ‘it is’, It’s raining, for example. ‘Its’ means the thing belonging to it, The mouse gnawed its cheese, for example – and ‘its’ is correct. No apostrophes are added to other possessive pronouns like his or hers, either.) If you’re unsure, look these things up.

* – Oh and if you wanted to know how that sentence ought to look, it’s like this:

Yes, we like commas, but commas aren’t there to divide one sentence from another. If you use commas where you mean to use fullstops (periods), you will end up with sentences that never seem to end. Writing of this sort will drive your editor mad. Punctuation-related homicides are rising sharply as a result.

If you wanted a semi-colon instead of a period after “mad”, that would be very elegant and your editor would probably want to give you a kiss. Instead of shooting you. Which has gotta be a win, right?

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do You Prepare A Manuscript For Submission?

There are many things to consider when preparing your manuscript for submission as manuscripts have to be formatted quite specifically. The first and most essential thing is to ensure that your manuscript has been thoroughly edited and is as well-written as possible. Manuscripts tend to be written in Times New Roman font in a size 12 and are double spaced with no separation between paragraphs (though each paragraph other than the very first should be indented). The most important thing is that the text itself, and the formatting, are clear and readable, and you have provided all the necessary information somewhere within the manuscript.

What Is The Proper Format For A Manuscript?

A well-formatted manuscript will feature A4 pages, should have a font size of 12, be written in a legible font (such as Times New Roman), have regular margins, indented paragraphs, and be double spaced. Manuscripts also include a title page, a header, and page numbers and each line of dialogue should be indented and should start on its own line.

How Many Pages Should A Manuscript Be?

The number of pages in, and the general length of, a manuscript varies considerably in terms of genre, topic, readership, and many other important factors. Most manuscripts tend to be around 70,000-120,000 words long, which equates to around 250-450 pages. But children's books are generally far shorter (especially ones written for infants!) while certain books, such as fantasy and historical fiction, are much longer than that.

Get Help

Writing a book is hard. Getting an agent is hard. Getting published – well, that’s still harder.

And getting well published? Actually making a career out of this thing? That’s never been even remotely easy, and (if you’re talking about traditional publication) may be harder than it’s been for decades.

So get help. Don’t start spending crazy money, but get help.

If you're eager to polish your manuscript, but aren't sure where to start, get help from an experienced professional editor with our Manuscript Assessment Service.

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A short journey to the sewer

We’re always on the side of the book. We’re always on the side of the writer.

With books, we want them to be as good as they can be – written well, edited well, pressing clients to be as wonderful as they can – and if you have the guts and determination to pick up a pen and write a book, we’re on your side.

And that’s why we are firmly, emphatically, viscerally opposed to vanity publishing in all its forms. This is a story, yes, about Austin Macauley, but it is also a story about a whole raft of other vanity presses too. Snakes, worms and weasels, every one.

Why such strong language?

Because vanity publishers take vast sums of money from authors to publish their books. This is in contrast to how to best practice in both traditional publishing (where publishers pay you), and modern ebook-led self-publishing where it costs nothing to upload your book to retailers like Amazon, and where per book royalties are excellent. So if you want to know more about what to avoid – and about Austin Macauley Publishers specifically – then read on. A more complete guide to (proper, legitimate, profitable) publishing can be found here. We also have a range of writing courses, which include plenty of material on publishing, literary agents, and self-publishing etc - as well as just the joy of creative writing itself. We urge you to explore all this.

What Is Vanity Publishing?

Vanity publishing is where authors pay for their book to be ‘published’ and where ownership of the book passes to the publisher as part of the contract.

Vanity publishers never call themselves by that name. They’ll say they offer ‘partnership publishing’ or ‘hybrid publishing’ or say they offer a ‘contributory contract’ or anything else of that sort. But if any publisher:

1. Asks you for money
2. Ends up owning the rights to your book

you should regard them as a vanity publisher.

That’s if you’re polite, and inclined to be generous.

Quite frankly, we prefer to think of them as thieves and fraudsters.

To be clear: they are not breaking the law. But whether some narrow legal test of fraud is or is not met misses the ethical heart of the issue. The fact is that these publishers are offering writers a contract which they basically know will not meet the legitimate dreams and aspirations of those writers.

What Vanity Publishing Looks Like

We’ve spoken to one writer who was offered a ‘contributory contract’ from one vanity publisher (not Austin Macauley), requesting from her a staggering £7,000 to publish her poems.

This lady was dying of cancer, and she wanted to earn a little something for the son she’d leave behind. Thankfully, she called us first, and asked for our advice.

What we told her was this:

• There is not meaningfully any market for poetry, and certainly not of the (sincere, but quite home-spun) verses she’d written.
• She would never see that £7,000 again
• Sales would be modest in the extreme. Aside from any sales she made to friends and family, her sales would quite likely be zero, nothing, nix, nada.
• She almost certainly would get a nicely produced book to hold in her hands
• She would not find that book being sold in bookshops
• Yes, the book would be available on Amazon, but so are 5,000,000 other titles. Uploading a book to Amazon is easy. Selling it once it’s there – that’s hard.
• She would not, meaningfully, get any marketing support from the publisher once the book had actually been produced.
• In effect, she’d be paying £7,000 to have her book printed & the rights owned by somebody else. You could easily spend no more than £1,000 for a book of that length, print as many copies as you wanted, work with lovely, truthful, well-intentioned people, and still retain all the rights to the book.

Naturally, she did not use that publisher to ‘publish’ her work. Instead, she went to a reputable local printer and, for a modest sum, got the thing printed up for local distribution. She told me that she wanted everyone who came to her funeral to get a copy.

And look, there’s something good here and something awful.

The good thing is that a dying woman made a book that she wanted to create. That spoke her thoughts to those she cared about.

There is nothing at all of vanity in that impulse. In that sense, the term ‘vanity publishing’ is a total misnomer. I’ve seen a lot of people snared by vanity publishers, and in not one single case was vanity the issue. On the contrary, it’s naivete, hope, and nothing else.

So that’s the good thing. A dying woman wrote and distributed some verses.

And here’s the bad thing: someone wanted to steal £7,000 from her. Sick, dying, and not at all wealthy.

Did I say bad?

I meant awful.

The thing about vanity publishers is they don’t really publish at all. They get books designed & printed. You can do that too, just google “typesetting”, “cover design” and “book printers” and you’ll have everything you need.

Or use an ethical outfit like Matador, or Lulu, or CreateSpace, or IngramSpark, or Completely Novel, and you’ll get a fair service at a fair price. (What each of those outfits offers is different, so you can’t just compare prices – it’s more complex than that.)

So if you just want to pay something to produce 10 books (or 100, or 1,000), you need to work with a company like one of those guys. Or source your own design / copyediting / cover design, etc. It’s not hard, and it can be very rewarding.

What Are The Alternatives To Vanity Publishing?

A word about traditional publishing and modern self-publishing

[This section talks about the alternatives very swiftly. If you need more help, go to our main publishing advice page that gives you a load more detail in a very helpful format.]

Traditional Publishing

Or you can publish in the traditional way with a regular publisher.

The advantages of that route:

• you get paid, upfront plus (potentially) royalties as well
• you get a real publisher working hard to market your book
• you will be sold in bookstores and have the pride of having done a hard thing well.

There’s also one obvious disadvantage:

• It’s very hard to get accepted by a traditional publisher – the rate of success is probably 1 in 1000 submissions (or even worse)

If your work IS of that quality, you probably need a literary agent. Details on how to do that can be found here. We answer further common questions about literary agents here. We also offer free lists of agents in the US and the UK.

Self-publishing

If you don’t want to go that route – too hard? too slow? you don’t want to lose control of your book? – then modern self-publishing is also an excellent answer.

Modern self-publishing involves selling your book via Amazon and/or the other e-tailers such as Apple.

You will make a majority of your sales – perhaps over 90% of them – via ebooks, but it’s perfectly possible to create and sell print-books as well. They’ll be of good quality and will be available to readers all over the world.

The advantages of self-publishing include:

• Royalties are superb: Amazon pays 70% royalties on ebook sales, whereas traditional publishers will pay just 17.5% (or less, if you inlcude the amount you’ll owe your agent.)
• It’s easy
• It’s fast
• You reach readers right across the globe

The disadvantages include:

• you have to handle the various bits and pieces yourself: cover design, ebook formatting. Most people will just outsource those tasks, but you still need to find the right people for the job.
• Because of those tasks, you are likely to pay something to get our book published – but $1500 / £1000 would be a perfectly reasonable  budget for most.
• You have to market your book. Amazon is a platform; it’s not going to market on your behalf unless you have some prove sales potential already.
• There is still a difference in kudos between self-publishing and the traditional sort. That doesn’t really make sense to us. (Who do you admire more: someone who sold $100,000 worth of self-published books on Amazon? Or someone who got a £1000 book deal from some remote bit of Penguin Random House?) But still: it matters to some people.

If you want to find out more about how to self-publish your work, you can find out with our (characteristically comprehensive) guide here. Info on book descriptions here. Info on categories and keywords here. Advice on getting your book covers here.

It’s also true that writing really well is a skill that can be learned – and then learned some more. If you’ve struggled with literary agents in the past, it may well be that your actual book isn’t as strong as it could be. For that reason, we’ve got useful advice on how to write a book right here.

Learning About Writing And Publishing

Also – this does’t quite fit on this page in a way – but: it’s possible you don’t yet know enough about the whole writing/publishing industry to yet make a decision on how to proceed. And if you think, yes, maybe that applies to me, what then?

Well, there’s a LOT you can do. If you feeling like flashing the cash (a very little bit), I’d urge you to become a member of Jericho Writers. You’ll get access to the world’s best resources on writing, publishing and self-publishing. Info here. You should also, certainly, join our Jericho Townhouse writing community, that just gives you an exceptional way to meet other writers, and exchange questions help and community. View our forums, our blogs, our groups.

Austin Macauley – A Close-up Look At One Vanity Publisher

Hold your nose, folks. We’re heading down . . .

This post grew (as you may have guessed) out of an encounter with Austin Macauley, a vanity publisher. Or rather: multiple encounters, all of them negative.

We heard about authors feeling cheated.

We heard about authors being threatened with legal action if they spoke out about their experience.

We heard about authors going to court against the firm.

We heard about a prominent blogger – a person of integrity and intelligence – being threatened with legal action for speaking out about these things.

So we thought we’d look into Austin Macauley reviews . . . and we did not love what we saw.

If you're asking yourself 'is Austin Macauley publishers reputable?', we have the answer. No.

In this updated post, we take another look at Austin Macauley – but please remember that ALL vanity publishers operate in much the same way. What we say about this firm could, mutatis mutandis, be said about all its snakelike brethren. Indeed, we DO say it about all those firms.

Oh, and to be crystal clear: we do not believe that Austin Macauley is engaged in illegal activity. In our opinion, what they do is totally unethical and close to cheating, but some bad things are within the law; vanity publishing very much included. (Alas.)

Okie-doke. So-

If you Google “Austin Macauley”, as I just did, you may find this:

Screengrab taken 17.5.2020

And – huh?

A publisher who advertises?

Go and Google Penguin Random House. Or HarperCollins. Or Simon & Schuster. Those guys don’t advertise.

Why not? Because their business model works like this:

Find great books. Publish them well. Make money.

No part of that relies on advertising to authors and luring them in. (So how do they get those great books? They pay for them. And authors and literary agents bring them all their best stuff.)

But the Austin Macauley model works like this:

Find authors willing to part with cash. Part them from their cash. Deliver some kind of book. That’s it.

The book doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to actually sell. AM doesn’t even actually have to try to do all the things that real publishers do to make sales. Of course not! They’ve already made money. From you!

Bu I get ahead of myself.

Here’s what they say on their website home page (text copied 24 April 2018)

We pride ourselves on our hybrid publishing model, a progressively more popular means by which both new and previously published authors can establish themselves in the increasingly competitive world of books.

This is horseshit.

Here’s that same bit of text with my explanations in brackets:

We pride ourselves on our hybrid publishing model [we take money from authors which no reputable publisher does. Deep in our snakelike hearts, we know that this is a horrible way to make a living, but we may as well make a virtue of it and pretend it’s normal.]
a progressively more popular means [Rubbish. Traditional publishing is great. Self-publishing is great and has zoomed up in the world. Vanity publishing is used only by those who don’t know any better. It’s “popular” largely with those people who don’t know better and who are taken in by flashily effective advertising.]

by which both new and previously published authors can establish themselves in the increasingly competitive world of books [Double-rubbish. You want to know if Austin Macauley establishes writers in the the world of books? OK. So do this. Go to the biggest bookstore near you. See if you can find any Austin Macauley books. Browse the shelves. Ask a checkout clerk. Seek specific titles by name. You will find almost none, and most likely none at all. And if I’m wrong, I’ll give you a dollar and a kiss for every one you find.]

Indeed, let’s take the partnership / hyrbid / vanity agreements that Austin Macauley and its peers offers. We’d want to ask:

• What is the median cost to the author of these partnership agreements?
• Partnership implies some joint sharing of risks and rewards, so do these firms contribute a sum broadly equivalent to that contributed by your authors?
• What are the median sales of partnership titles? Note that ordinary averages (means) can be distorted by one or two high-selling titles, so a median figure would be helpful. This is a crucial question, and you should not part with a single penny before getting an answer.
• What, loosely, is the median financial outcome for partnership authors? Do they recover their contributions via royalties? Do they generally make a profit, and how much? And if they make a loss, what is the average magnitude of that loss?

I hope it’s obvious why these questions are important.

Austin Macauley Publishers operates within the law insofar as it prints books, makes those books available on Amazon, available for order by bookshops (not the same as saying that these books are likely to be stocked in bookshops). It makes modest efforts to secure publicity for its books and authors.

All that does not amount to a good deal. It amounts to a right royal stinker of a deal.

Avoid Austin Macauley. Avoid its peers. And may they, one day, all bite the dust!

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The romance genre is one of the best selling book genres in the world, and that includes erotica novels full of unforgettable sex scenes.

So how do you get over the awkwardness of writing sizzling action, and learn to write sex scenes that your readers can't get enough of?

In this article I'm going to be talking about erotic fiction; from how to start your first draft and engage your reader's imagination, to ensuring you are writing high quality erotica that will have your target audience wanting more!

So, like any good romance, let us start at the very beginning....

What's The Difference Between Romance Novels And Erotica?

The simplest way to look at the two is this:

Romance novels have the sex scenes revolve around the plot.

Erotic fiction has the plot revolve around the sex scenes!

So before you start writing erotica, ask yourself whether your story is about the characters and an exciting plot (that just so happens to have the odd steamy scene) - or whether the hot action is what your readers want, and you simply have to thread each sex scene together with a plausible storyline.

Which leads us on to structuring your story - because, like any genre, your romance needs to have a plot!

Structure Your Story

Now I’m not going to go into a ton of detail about how to write a great book - because every successful author of erotica will have a different story to tell. All I will say is that you do need to respect your basic story structure.

Writing erotica novels is no different to writing any other kind of fiction!

The teasing quality of a suspense-driven story (Will the heroine succeed or not? Does he or doesn't he like her?) should match up perfectly with the will-they/won’t-they quality of the romantic/erotic dance. Without that suspense, that build up, you have no momentum driving the story forward.

That said, when it comes to writing erotic fiction, your story can be relatively simple – and relatively short. A 50,000 word story wouldn’t work so well as a crime-thriller, but it’s plenty long enough for erotica.

Hit The Beats

And I'm not talking BDSM here!

'Hitting the beats,' in the most basic of storytelling ways, simply means making sure your book has a story arc. this may sound formulaic, but if you have too much of any of these segments, some or missing, or they are in the wrong order then your readers will notice as the pacing will feel 'off' and it won't keep readers hooked.

Make sure your romance or erotic story includes all of this:

Set The Scene (Act 1)

Where does the book take place? Is it on a tropical island? Or in a 19th century mansion? Two very different stories.

Introduce The Characters

From the onset we need to know who the characters are - is the MC a love-starved vampire or a controlling millionaire (or both)? Readers need to see what the main character's life was like before the...

Inciting Incident

What happens in the book that's a point of no return? This is the part when the book gets going.

The Middle (Entering Act 2)

Some writers struggle with this part as it's generally the least exciting part of the book. It's where the character grows and learns things, it's their journey or discovery. What will happen between your two characters? Add lots of twists and surprises.

False Peak/False Defeat

The book isn't over yet. There's either worse things to come or hope on the horizon. Keep the readers on their toes.

Things Can't Get Any Worse

Your hero/heroine thinks that all is lost, then they work out the solution

The Hero Overcomes (Enter Act 3)

Show the MC overcoming their internal or external struggles and finally getting what they set out to get at the beginning of the story

Happily Ever After

Because you are writing erotica/romance, it's important that you have your two main love interests get together at the end. And if they don't, well, at least hint that they might in future books. Always end on a high note!

Let's take a look at what makes amazing writing and what the best erotica writers consider when building their worlds.

Think Character

Even if your story is simple, your characters shouldn’t be. The power of sexual tension (and release) is multiplied tenfold on the page if there is some conflict and resolution between the characters.

That doesn’t have to mean the two main characters are always shouting at each other (though that could work). It means you must have some kind of push-pull dynamic that will have to be resolved somehow … and often via them taking all their clothes off.

It also means that your characters have to develop through the course of your story. The sex they have on first meeting won’t feel the same as the sex they have at the end of your book.

But sex is just sex, right? Wrong.

Writing Sex To Reflect Plot

Most people, when thinking about adding sex scenes in their erotic novel, focus on the body parts. What goes where, who does what, what they are wearing etc. But it's so much more than that.

Sex doesn't belong in any book without a purpose. Much like in any other genre, a sex scene is no different to an action scene. Every fight isn't the same, every car chase is different.

The sex your protagonists have at the beginning of the book should not be the same as the sex scenes at the end of the book. They have been on a journey, they know one another better, their relationship has helped heal old wounds or accomplish what they set out to do.

How they interact with one another has to move the plot forward and show character growth in such a way that you've moved beyond the sexiness to something a lot deeper.

But you need to do this subtly. How?

Show...don't tell!

Show Don’t Tell

When writing erotic stories, showing and not telling is vital.

People read erotica to be part of the sex, to feel the same emotions the characters are feeling.

That means you can’t merely report that character X had great sex with character Y. You have to let the scene unfold, action-by-action, on the page. Keep plenty of dialogue there too, make it part of the plot. Remember that interesting character interplay = interesting sex.

Put yourself in their shoes (or lingerie) and imagine what they are experiencing. Engage all five senses. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? What can they smell, hear, taste, see?

Make sure that what the setting and props reflect the story. If the scene is set in a 19th century mansion then is he ripping off her silk ballgown? Do the candles in the chandeliers flicker? Is she feeling off her gloves finger by fingers?

Alternatively, if they're on a dessert island, do they have sand in their mouth and hair? Can they hear tropical birds and the crash of waves? Is the warm breeze caressing their naked backs?

How To Write A Great Sex Scene

We've established the importance of character, story structure, and showing not telling when writing your erotica novel as a whole - but how do you write your individual sex scenes?

Here is my simple guide in ten easy steps (this advice refers specifically to erotica, the genre my Unbreakable trilogy, starting with The Silver Chain, is written for. Although it can be applied to sex scene writing in general):

Create A Picture Of The Characters, Imagine The Flow

If you can, put yourself in the scene. If you find that too difficult, then superimpose famous heart-throbs, or a secret crush, on to your characters.

Imagine these characters making love in front of you on a screen, and describe what you see and feel. Put yourself in the picture. If it's not exciting you...then it won't excite your readers!

Make Your Readers Care

Because if they don't, they'll soon get bored.

Your protagonists may come from different worlds, or there may be a difference in age or in the balance of power between them, but they are drawn to each other like a couple of magnets.

And once we know how this dynamic works, we will know how and why they like one another, and your readers will be attracted to them, too.

Remember that in erotica, upon first meeting, these characters have one aim - to have sex with each other. And the aim of most readers is to watch that attraction unfold, grow and reach an unforgettable climax (in every sense of the word).

Voyeuristic, yes, but true!

Choose Your Location

So next, place them in a sexy environment for this first time.

Depending on their age, situation, energy, athleticism and/or pure machismo, the back of a clapped out Ford Cortina or the bins behind the Plaza cinema might be just the place for a quick, rough first time, and that will certainly do it for some readers.

Any good erotic writer is more than capable, like the old Martini adverts, of creating a sex scene any time, any place, anywhere!

But others usually pick up an erotic novel to get away from the dirty old mean streets of real life. They're after escapism!

So whisk your characters off to a place you’d like to be. A moonlit beach, or a sumptuous penthouse hotel room, or a soft rug in front of a roaring fire.

Imagine you are a film director setting the perfect scene. Make sure there's low lighting and great music or some other subtle sound track. Garish lighting and deadly silence are not always the sexist ambience, at least for the first time.

But as the story progresses you can really have fun with your characters - having them so hot for each other that after the first seduction they’ll do it anywhere. A lift, a restaurant, a riding stable, an art gallery.

And to keep us on our toes, you can also later on play with the dynamic, too. Have the meek heroine take the lead, for once. See how the hero responds to that.

Don’t Forget The Build-Up/Foreplay

Build up sensuously to the physical act with suggestive conversation which will either be blatant and in your face, or playful, teasing, even holding back.

Depending on whether you have just 50,000 words to play with and it's straight forward erotica, or whether you are writing a 90,000 word steamy romance, you can decide how long it takes them to get together.

They can have wild passionate sex in chapter one, then get to know one another...or they can spend four chapters stealing glances at one another. Either way, stick to your story beats in terms of pacing and keep the readers just as tense and excited as the two lovers!

Also, remember characters don’t stand woodenly about like actors in a bad am-dram before they get down to it. Have them eating, drinking, dancing, singing, involve us in that experience, then show us their clothes, how well they fit, are they too formal or tight, how good does it feel as they come off? Unbuttoning cut-off jeans can be just as sexy as unzipping a ball gown.

Make it tense, passionate, breathless, but …

Take It Slow

In real life the first time you have sex with someone new is often urgently desired but ends up fast and disastrous, but this is fantasy!

So although there can be some hesitation, shyness and teasing, ultimately everyone, reader included, needs to be on tenterhooks to get their hands on each other and get down to it.

Teasing the characters means teasing the reader, which is what they picked up the book for in the first place!

Structure Your Scene

Structure your scene like the sex act. That is, foreplay, action, climax, wind down.

Too obvious? You might think so, until you start writing the scene.

Think of the foreplay as the aforementioned setting. The removal of clothes, the first sensation of skin on skin starts the action rolling in the obvious direction.

If it helps, think of a movie scene. I know actors always say how pedestrian and workmanlike it is simulating sex in front of a crew of burly cameramen, a bank of arc lights and a demanding director, but imagine yourself as an extremely involved, generous, hands-on director with your characters.

Make sure the bed is soft, the studio is warm, and soon they’ll take off on their own towards the strong, satisfying, long-awaited penetration! As for the climax, well, no beating about the bush, is there? This is when the glorious pinnacle of where we all want to be is reached, and tread carefully here with the language (see below). Challenge yourself to find different ways of describing that rush of ecstasy. Avoid waterfalls, avalanches, orchestras!

What actions or words stimulate the eventual moment? Focus on emotion just as much as action here.

Keep A Tad Of Realism Alive

Slightly unrealistically erotic couples tend to come together every time but if you want to be more realistic, let one come before the other and show who is the generous one, who is thoughtful, who is selfish. Or are they both equally considerate, and if not, will they become so as the novel progresses?

Finally, the wind down is often the hardest. After the shivering and shuddering, do they fall asleep, or analyse, or do it all over again? I often have a knock at the door, or a phone call after the act, so that in the early days the couple are never at leisure totally to relax or take each other for granted until the next drama occurs.

Find The Right Balance Of Cinematic And Plausible

Make it dramatic, but human. Not impossibly athletic, but not mundane either.

The characters will already be attractive and/or beautiful, or arresting in some way to turn the reader on. The men have got to be strong and well hung and very experienced (unless the opposite of that caters for a specific audience).

The women are generally curvaceous, soft and wonderfully proportioned, and if not experienced, then primed and ready to learn. Again - if you write for a different audience then change your characters to fit the readers' ida of perfection.

If this is a romantic setting, lots of kissing and stroking, exploration. If this is more down the BDSM route, then the participants will get their kicks from spanking, binding, and pain. But there is always room for sensuousness and tenderness - and most importantly, whatever they do in the bedroom must be a natural part of the plot AND help the reader understand the characters better.

Don’t Get Coy With Your Language

Keep it simple, punchy, evocative, but not obscene or anatomical.

Don’t, like John Updike, veer away from simple words and use hideous ones like ‘yam’ to describe a penis. Don’t use euphemism or flowery words, either. ‘Cock’, ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’ are acceptable with some publishers, but not others, and certainly not in the new mainstream type of erotica.

There's a difference between well written erotica and graphic pornography!

You also have to use your powers of evocation very carefully to avoid sounding awkward or coy. So ‘manhood’ and ‘sex’ can be used, but sparingly. Read erotic romance books and other works of your chosen genre, or find a publisher’s house style, to find what works and what publishers/readers prefer.

Use The Rhythm Method

Next try to get into a rhythm similar to the rhythm of sex.

Slow, slow, quick, slow. Yes, that’s it. Like a dance. Why else to you think dancing was considered so daring in the old days? It was the nearest people could get to each other in public. And have you ever seen sex better choreographed than in the Argentine tango?

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you still have questions about writing erotica? Here are some FAQs...

How Do I Start Writing Erotica?

Start with your characters and setting, think about how they influence your plot, and what kind of relationship they may have. You may want to practice with fan fiction first or self publish before approaching a publisher.

How Do You Write An Intimate Scene?

Begin with all four senses and picture yourself in the scene. What are you feeling? Try to avoid brash or corny words, keep it simple, and focus more on the characters, the setting and the emotions than the step by step actions. No one reads erotica because they want a How To sex manual.

How Do You Write A Steamy Romance?

Steamy romance novels are different to erotica as the sex is part of the plot and moves the story forward. With romance novels the characters and plot are the most important part...then the sex. Whereas with erotica it's all about the sex and the plot matters less.

With steamy romance novels try and focus on the characters, what they want and how being with the one they love will achieve their goals. Don't add sex scenes for the sake of it, ensure there's a build up, lots of teasing, the pull and push suspenses, and then a big climax (as it were).

The Ultimate Guide To Writing Sex

And there you have it, everything you need to write a sizzling sex scene for your erotic fiction.

Just remember to connect with all your senses, write about whatever specific kink interests you, and have fun. The last part is the most important - because if you're not enjoying yourself your readers won't either!

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Speech gives life to stories. It breaks up long pages of action and description, it gives us an insight into a character, and it moves the action along. But how do you write effective dialogue that will add depth to your story and not take the reader away from the action?

In this article I will be guiding you through seven simple steps for keeping your fictional chat fresh, relevant and tight. As well as discussing dialogue tags and showing you dialogue examples.

Time to talk...

7 Easy Steps For Compelling Dialogue

Getting speech right is an art but, fortunately, there are a few easy rules to follow. Those rules will make writing dialogue easy – turning it from something static, heavy and un-lifelike into something that shines off the page.

Better still, dialogue should be fun to write, so don’t worry if we talk about ‘rules’. We’re not here to kill the fun. We’re here to increase it. So let’s look at some of these rules along with dialogue examples.

“Ready?” she asked.

“You bet. Let’s dive right in.”

How To Write Dialogue In 7 Simple Steps:

1. Keep it tight and avoid unnecessary words
2. Hitting beats and driving momentum
3. Keep it oblique, where characters never quite answer each other directly
4. Reveal character dynamics and emotion
5. Keep your dialogue tags simple
6. Get the punctuation right
7. Be careful with accents

Dialogue Rule 1: Keep It Tight

One of the biggest rules when writing with dialogue is: no spare parts. No unnecessary words. Nothing to excess.

That’s true in all writing, of course, but it has a particular acuteness (I don’t know why) when it comes to dialogue.

Dialogue Helps The Character And The Reader

Everything your character says has to have a meaning. It should either help paint a more vivid picture of the person talking (or the one they are talking to or about), or inform the other character (or the reader) of something important, or it should move the plot forward.

If it does none of those things then cut it out! Here's an example of excess chat:

"Good morning, Henry!"

"Good morning, Diana."

"How are you?" she asked.

"I'm well. How are you?"

"I'm fine, thank you." She looked up at the blue sky. "Lovely weather we're having."

Are you asleep yet? You should be. It's boring, right?

Sometimes you don't need two pages of dialogue. Sometimes a simple exchange can be part of the narrative. If you want your readers to know an interaction like this has taken place, then simply say - Henry passed Diana in the street and they exchanged pleasantries.

If you want the reader to know that Henry finds Diana insufferably then you can easily sum that up by writing - Henry passed Diana in the street and they exchanged pleasantries. As always she looked up at the sky before commenting on the weather, as if every day that week hadn't been gloriously sunny. It took ten minutes to get away, by which time his cheeks were aching from all the forced smiling.

No Soliloquies Allowed (Unless You're Shakespeare)

This rule also applies to big chunks of dialogue. Perhaps your character has a lot to say, but if you present it as one long speech it will feel to the modern reader like they've been transported back to Victorian England.

So don’t do it!

Keep it spare. Allow gaps in the communication (intersperse with action and leave plenty unsaid) and let the readers fill in the blanks. It’s like you’re not even giving the readers 100% of what they want. You’re giving them 80% and letting them figure out the rest.

Take this example of dialogue, for instance, from Ian Rankin’s fourteenth Rebus crime novel, A Question of Blood. The detective, John Rebus, is phoned up at night by his colleague:

… “Your friend, the one you were visiting that night you bumped into me …” She was on her mobile, sounded like she was outdoors.

“Andy?” he said. ‘Andy Callis?”

“Can you describe him?”

Rebus froze. “What’s happened?”

“Look, it might not be him …”

“Where are you?”

“Describe him for me … that way you’re not headed all the way out here for nothing.”

That’s great isn’t it? Immediate. Vivid. Edgy. Communicative.

But look at what isn’t said. Here’s the same passage again, but with my comments in square brackets alongside the text:

… “Your friend, the one you were visiting that night you bumped into me …” She was on her mobile, sounded like she was outdoors.

[Your friend: she doesn’t even give a name or give anything but the barest little hint of who she’s speaking about. And ‘on her mobile, sounded like she was outdoors’. That’s two sentences rammed together with a comma. It’s so clipped you’ve even lost the period and the second ‘she’.]

“Andy?” he said. ‘Andy Callis?”

[Notice that this is exactly the way we speak. He could just have said “Andy Callis”, but in fact we often take two bites at getting the full name, like this. That broken, repetitive quality mimics exactly the way we speak . . . or at least the way we think we speak!]

“Can you describe him?”

[Uh-oh. The way she jumps straight from getting the name to this request indicates that something bad has happened. A lesser writer would have this character say, ‘Look, something bad has happened and I’m worried. So can you describe him?’ This clipped, ultra-brief way of writing the dialogue achieves the same effect, but (a) shows the speaker’s urgency and anxiety – she’s just rushing straight to the thing on her mind, (b) uses the gap to indicate the same thing as would have been (less well) achieved by a wordier, more direct approach, and (c) by forcing the reader to fill in that gap, you’re actually making the reader engage with intensity. This is the reader as co-writer – and that means super-engaged.]

Rebus froze. “What’s happened?”

[Again: you can’t convey the same thing with fewer words. Again, the shimmering anxiety about what has still not been said has extra force precisely because of the clipped style.]

“Look, it might not be him …”

[A brilliantly oblique way of indicating, 'But I’m frigging terrified that it is.' Oblique is good. Clipped is good.]

“Where are you?”

[A non-sequitur, but totally consistent with the way people think and talk.]

“Describe him for me … that way you’re not headed all the way out here for nothing.”

[Just as he hasn’t responded to what she just said, now it’s her turn to ignore him. Again, it’s the absences that make this bit of dialogue live. Just imagine how flaccid this same bit would be if she had said, “Let’s not get into where I am right now. Look, it’s important that you describe him for me . . .”]

In short:

Gaps are good. They make the reader work, and a ton of emotion and inference swirls in the gaps.

Want to achieve the same effect? Copy Rankin. Keep it tight. And read this.

Dialogue Rule 2: Watch Those Beats

More often than not, great story moments hinge on character exchanges with dialogue at their heart.  Even very short dialogue can help drive a plot, showing more about your characters and what’s happening than longer descriptions can.

(How come? It’s the thing we just talked about: how very spare dialogue makes the reader work hard to figure out what’s going on, and there’s an intensity of energy released as a result.)

But right now, I want to focus on the way dialogue needs to create its own emotional beats. So that the action of the scene and the dialogue being spoken becomes the one same thing.

Here’s how screenwriting guru Robert McKee puts it:

Dialogue is not [real-life] conversation. … Dialogue [in writing] … must have direction. Each exchange of dialogue must turn the beats of the scene … yet it must sound like talk.

This excerpt from Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs is a beautiful example of exactly that. It’s  short as heck, but just see what happens.

As before, I’ll give you the dialogue itself, then the same thing again with my notes on it:

“The significance of the chrysalis is change. Worm into butterfly, or moth. Billy thinks he wants to change. … You’re very close, Clarice, to the way you’re going to catch him, do you realize that?”

“No, Dr Lecter.”

“Good. Then you won’t mind telling me what happened to you after your father’s death.”

Starling looked at the scarred top of the school desk.

“I don’t imagine the answer’s in your papers, Clarice.”

Here Hannibal holds power, despite being behind bars. He establishes control, and Clarice can’t push back, even as he pushes her. We see her hesitancy, Hannibal’s power. (And in such few words! Can you even imagine trying to do as much as this without the power of dialogue to aid you? I seriously doubt if you could.)

But again, here’s what’s happening in detail

“The significance of the chrysalis is change. Worm into butterfly, or moth. Billy thinks he wants to change. … You’re very close, Clarice, to the way you’re going to catch him, do you realize that?”

[Beat 1: What a great line of dialogue! Invoking the chrysalis and moth here is magical language. it’s like Hannibal is the magician, the Prospero figure. Look too at the switch of tack in the middle of this snippet. First he’s talking about Billy wanting to change – then about Clarice’s ability to find him. Even that change of tack emphasises his power: he’s the one calling the shots here; she’s always running to keep up.]

“No, Dr Lecter.”

[Beat 2: Clarice sounds controlled, formal. That’s not so interesting yet . . . but it helps define her starting point in this conversation, so we can see the gap between this and where she ends up.]

“Good. Then you won’t mind telling me what happened to you after your father’s death.”

[Beat 3: Another whole jump in the dialogue. We weren’t expecting this, and we’re already feeling the electricity in the question. How will Clarice react? Will she stay formal and controlled?]

Starling looked at the scarred top of the school desk.

[Beat 4: Nope! She’s still controlled, just about, but we can see this question has daunted her. She can’t even answer it! Can’t even look at the person she’s talking to. Notice as well that we’re outside quotation marks here – she’s not talking, she’s just looking at something. Writing great dialogue is about those sections of silence too – the bits that happen beyond the quotation marks.]

“I don’t imagine the answer’s in your papers, Clarice.”

[Beat 5: And Lecter immediately calls attention to her reaction, thereby emphasising that he’s observed her and knows what it means.]

Overall, you can see that not one single element of this dialogue leaves the emotional balance unaltered. Every line of dialogue alters the emotional landscape in some way. That’s why it feels so intense & engaging.

Want to achieve the same effect? Just check your own dialogue, line by line. Do you feel that emotional movement there all the time? If not, just delete anything unnecessary until you feel the intensity and emotional movement increase.

Dialogue Rule 3: Keep It Oblique

One more point, which sits kind of parallel to the bits we’ve talked about already.

It’s this.

If you want to create some terrible dialogue, you’d probably come up with something like this (very similar to my previous bad dialogue example):

“Hey Judy.”

“Hey, Brett.”

“You OK?”

“Yeah, not bad. What do you say? Maybe play some tennis later?”

“Tennis? I’m not sure about that. I think it’s going to rain.”

Tell me honestly: were you not just about ready to scream there? If that dialogue had continued like that for much longer, you probably would have done.

And the reason is simple. It was direct, not oblique.

So direct dialogue is where person X says something or asks a question, and person Y answers in the most logical, direct way.

We hate that! As readers, we hate it.

Oblique dialogue is where people never quite answer each other in a straight way. Where a question doesn’t get a straightforward response. Where random connections are made. Where we never quite know where things are going.

As readers, we love that. It’s dialogue to die for.

And if you want to see oblique dialogue in action, here’s a snippet from Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network. (Because dialogue in screenwriting should follow the same rules as a novel. Some may argue that it should be even more snipped!)

So here goes. This is the young Mark Zuckerberg talking with a lawyer:

Lawyer: “Let me re-phrase this. You sent my clients sixteen emails. In the first fifteen, you didn’t raise any concerns.”

MZ: ‘Was that a question?’

L: “In the sixteenth email you raised concerns about the site’s functionality. Were you leading them on for 6 weeks?”

MZ: ‘No.’

L: “Then why didn’t you raise any of these concerns before?”

MZ: ‘It’s raining.’

L: “I’m sorry?”

MZ: ‘It just started raining.’

L: “Mr. Zuckerberg do I have your full attention?”

MZ: ‘No.’

L: “Do you think I deserve it?”

MZ: ‘What?’

L: “Do you think I deserve your full attention?”

I won’t discuss that in any detail, because the technique really leaps out at you. It’s particularly visible here, because the lawyer wants and expects to have a direct conversation. (I ask a question about X, you give me a reply that deals with X. I ask a question about Y, and …) Zuckerberg here is playing a totally different game, and it keeps throwing the lawyer off track – and entertaining the viewer/reader too.

Want to achieve the same effect? Just keep your dialogue not quite joined up. People should drop in random things, go off at tangents, talk in non-sequiturs, respond to an emotional implication not the thing that’s directly on the page – or anything. Just keep it broken. Keep it exciting!

This not only moves the story forward but also says a lot about the character speaking.

Dialogue Rule 4: Reveal Character Dynamics And Emotion

Most writers use dialogue to impart information - it's a great way of explaining things. But it's also a perfect (and subtler) tool to describe a character, highlighting their mannerisms and personality. It can also help the reader connect with the character...or hate them.

Let’s take a look here at Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower as another dialogue example.

Here we have two characters, when protagonist Charlie, a high school freshman, learns his long-time crush, Sam, may like him back, after all. Here’s how that dialogue goes:

“Okay, Charlie … I’ll make this easy. When that whole thing with Craig was over, what did you think?”

… “Well, I thought a lot of things. But mostly, I thought your being sad was much more important to me than Craig not being your boyfriend anymore. And if it meant that I would never get to think of you that way, as long as you were happy, it was okay.” …

… “I can’t feel that. It’s sweet and everything, but it’s like you’re not even there sometimes. It’s great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn’t need a shoulder? What if they need the arms or something like that? You can’t just sit there and put everybody’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can’t. You have to do things.”

“Like what?” …

“I don’t know. Like take their hands when the slow song comes up for a change. Or be the one who asks someone for a date.”

The words sound human.

Sam and Charlie are tentative, exploratory – and whilst words do the job of ‘turning’ a scene, both receiving new information, driving action on – we also see their dynamic.

And so we connect to them.

We see Charlie’s reactive nature, checking with Sam what she wants him to do. Sam throws out ideas, but it’s clear she wants him to be doing this thinking, not her, subverting Charlie’s idea of passive selflessness as love.

The dialogue shows us the characters, as clearly as anything else in the whole book. Shows us their differences, their tentativeness, their longing.

Want to achieve the same effect? Understand your characters as fully as you can. The more you can do this, the more naturally you’ll write dialogue that’s right for them. You can get tips on knowing your characters here.

Dialogue Rule 5: Keep Your Dialogue Tags Simple

A dialogue tag is the part that helps us know who is saying what - the he said/she said part of dialogue that helps the reader follow the conversation.

Keep it Simple

A lot of writers try to add colour to their writing by showering it with a lot of vigorous dialogue tags. Like this:

“Not so,” she spat.

“I say that it is,” he roared.

“I know a common blackbird when I see it,” she defended.

“Oh. You’re a professional ornithologist now?” he attacked, sarcastically.

That’s pretty feeble dialogue, no matter what. But the biggest part of the problem is simply that the dialogue tags (spat, roared, and so on) are so highly coloured, they take away interest from the dialogue itself – and it’s the words spoken by the characters that ought to capture the reader’s interest.

Almost always, therefore, you should confine yourself to the blandest of words:

He said

She answered

He replied

And so on. Truth is, in a two-handed dialogue where it’s obvious who’s speaking, you don’t even need the word said.

Get Creative

As an alternative, you can have action and body language demonstrate who is saying what and their emotions behind it. The scene description can say just as much as the dialogue.

Here's another example of the same exchange:

Joan clenched her jaw. “Not so!”

“I say that it is.”

His voice kept rising with every word he shouted, but Joan was not going to be deterred.

“I know a common blackbird when I see it.”

“Oh. You’re a professional ornithologist now?”

Not one dialogue tag nor adverb was used there, but we still know who said what and how it was delivered. And, if you're really smart and develop how your characters speak (pacing, words, syntax and speech pattern), a reader can know who is talking simply by how they're talking.

The simple rule: use dialogue tags as invisibly as you can. I’ve written about a million words of my Fiona Griffiths series, and I doubt if I’ve used words other than say / reply and other very simple tags more than a dozen or so times in the entire series.

Keep it simple!

Dialogue Rule 6: Get The Punctuation Right

Dialogue punctuation is so simple and important, and looks so bad if you get it wrong. Here are eight simple rules to know before your character starts to speak:

1. Each new line of dialogue (i.e: each new speaker) needs a new paragraph – even if the dialogue is very short.
2. Action sentences within dialogue get their own paragraphs too. The first paragraph of a chapter or section starts on the far left, and the next paragraph (whether it starts with dialogue or not) is indented.
3. The only exception to this rule is if the sentence interrupts an otherwise continuous piece of dialogue. for example: “Yes,” she said. She brushed away a fly that had landed on her cheek. “I do think hippos are the best animals.”
4. When you are ending a line of dialogue with he said / she said, the sentence beforehand ends with a comma not a full stop (or period), as in this for example: “Yes,” she said.
5. If the line of dialogue ends with a question mark or exclamation mark, you still don’t have a capital letter for he said / she said.  For example: “You like hippos?” he said.
6. If the he said / she said lives in the middle of one continuous sentence of dialogue, you need to deploy those commas like a comma-deploying ninja. Like this for example: “If you like hippos,” he said, “then you deserve to be sat on by one.”
7. And use quotation marks, dummy. You know to do that, without me telling you, right? (Yes, yes, some serious writers of literary fiction have written entire novels without one speech mark - but they are the exception to the rule.)
8. Use the exclamation point sparingly. Otherwise! Your! Book! Is! Going! To! Sound! Very! Hysterical!

Dialogue Rule 7: Accents And Verbal Mannerisms

Realistic dialogue is important, but writing dialogue is not the same as speaking. Remember that the reader's experience has to be smooth and enjoyable, so even if your character has an accent, speech impediment, or talks excessively...writing it exactly as it's spoken doesn't always work.

Accents

If you want to show that your character is from a certain part of the UK, it often helps to add a smattering of colloquial words or

In The Last Thing To Burn by Will Dean, the antagonist, Len, has an accent (Yorkshire or Lancashire, it's obvious but never stated). The protagonist is trapped inside this man's home, she has no idea where she is, but by describing the endless fields and hearing his subtle accent the reader knows exactly where in the UK she's trapped.

Len says things like:

'Going to go feed pigs' and 'There's a good lass.'

You can highlight location, a character's age, and their social standing simply by giving a nod to their accent.

On the flip-side, if they have a foreign accent, it can sometimes be too jarring to write dialogue exactly as it sounds.

'Amma gonna eata the pizza' is an awful way to write an Italian accent - it's verging on racist. Try to avoid that. Instead, simply mention they have an Italian accent and let the reader fill in the blanks.

Accents Written Well

But, of course, there's always an exception!

Irvine Welsh writes English in his native Scottish dialect and it's exemplary - but nothing something we would recommend for a novice writer.

Here's an excerpt from Trainspotting:

Third time lucky.  It wis like Sick Boy telt us: you’ve got tae know what it’s like tae try tae come off it before ye can actually dae it.  You can only learn through failure, and what ye learn is the importance ay preparation.  He could be right.  Anywey, this time ah’ve prepared. 

Perhaps, if you have a Scottish character in your novel you may want them to speak in a strong accent. But getting it wrong can ruin an entire novel, so unless you are very skilled and very confident, stick to the odd colloquialism or word and leave it there.

Verbal Mannerisms

Whether you realise it or not, we all have speech patterns. Some of us speak slowly, others pause, people also trail off mid-sentence. Some people also use verbal mannerisms, such as adding a word to a sentence that is unnecessary but becomes a personal tic (such as 'man', 'like' or 'innit'). Or repeat favourite words. These can be influenced by age, background, class, and the period in which the book is set.

Here's an example of two people talking. I won't mention their ages or backgrounds, but see if you can guess.

"Chill, Bro."

"Chill? I'm far from chilled, you scoundrel. That's my flower bed you've just dug up."

"I found something, though. It was sticking out the ground."

"Outrageous behaviour. So... You... One simply can't go around digging up people's gardens!"

"Yeah. And what?" They both stared down at the swollen white lumps pressing out of the soil like plump snowdrops."What is it, though?"

Harold swallowed. "Fingers."

A Few Last Dialogue Rules

If want some great examples of how to write in dialogue, read plays or screenplays for inspiration. Read Tennessee Williams or Henrik Ibsen. Anything by Elmore Leonard is great. Ditto Raymond Chandler or Donna Tartt.

Some last tips:

• Keep speeches short. If a speech runs for more than three sentences or so, it (usually) risks being too long. Break it up with some action or someone else talking.
• Ensure characters speak in their own voice. And make sure your characters don’t sound the same as each other. Remember mannerisms, speech patterns, and how age and background influences speech.
• Add intrigue. Add slang and banter. Lace character chats with foreshadowing. You needn’t be writing a thriller to do this.
• Get in late and out early. Don’t bother with small talk. Decide the point of each interaction, begin with it as late as possible, ending as soon as your point is made.
• Interruption is good. So are characters pursuing their own thought processes and not quite engaging with the other.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Are The 5 Typesetting Rules Of Writing Dialogue?

Part of the editing process is to ensure you format dialogue correctly. Formatting dialogue correctly means remembering 5 simple steps:

1. Only spoken words go within quotation marks.
2. Use a separate sentence for every new thing someone says or does.
3. Punctuation marks stay inside quotation marks and don't forget about closing quotation marks at the end of the sentence.
4. You can use single quotation marks or double quotation marks - but you must be consistent!
5. Beware of capital letters. Always at the start of a sentence and after the quotations mark.

How Can You Use Everyday Life To Perfect Your Dialogue?

Listening to people speak will really help you perfect good dialogue. Sit in a cafe and people watch. Watch their body language and how they express themselves. Their verbal mannerisms, tics, how they choose their words, the syntax, speech patterns and turns of phrase. Make notes (without being spotted) and look out for contrasting word choices and personas.

What Is A Bad Example Of Dialogue?

There are plenty to choose from above - but the worst things you can do include:

• Using too many words
• Writing an accent how it's heard (unless you are Irvine Welsh, which most people are not)
• Writing dialogue that's irrelevant or misleading
• Using too many dialogue tags (or none at all)
• Bad punctuation - remember dialogue formatting
• Avoid long speeches

How Do You Start Dialogue?

There are many ways to start dialogue. You can ease into it, by introducing the character to the scene. Or you can jump in median res, slap bang into the centre of the action. Much like life, sometimes we hear a person's voice before we see them - they pop up out of nowhere - and sometimes we call them or walk into a room where they are, and we have rehearsed what we plan to say.

See what works best for your scene, your characters, and the genre you are writing in (dialogue in a crime thriller will sound very different to dialogue in a young adult novel, for instance).

That's All I Have To Say About That

We really hope you have found this article interesting and that you have now found the confidence to tackle the dialogue in your novel.

What your characters say and how they say it can make the difference between a good book and one that everyone is talking about. So get eavesdropping, get practising, and read as many books and plays as you can to create better dialogue.

Practice makes perfect and don't forget to enjoy yourself!

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In a short story, where a whole world or emotional journey can be summoned up and dramatised in the space of a few pages, every line and word has to count – and that’s especially true of the way you begin. Here, for inspiration, are a range of starting strategies from some great exponents of the form…

1. The Telling Detail

“One Dollar And Eighty-seven Cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheek burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.”

From ‘The Gift of the Magi’, by O Henry

Sometimes known as the American Maupassant, O Henry’s stories are tightly plotted narratives of ordinary lives with lots of humour that usually end with a classic sting in the tale that, while surprising, flows with unerring logic from the story’s premise.

In this classic tale, we know the whole set-up within a few lines. It is Christmas and Della has no money to buy a present for her beloved husband James. In their whole house they possess only two things that they really value: his gold watch and her golden hair. In a formula that has been much copied since, we watch Della sell her golden locks to raise money to buy a fancy fob for James’s watch, while unbeknownst to her he has pawned his watch to buy her a set of ivory combs that she has long coveted for her (now departed) hair!

It is a tale that sounds tragic, but is actually heartening, because in the end the couple are confirmed in their real gift: the love they bear each other. (Plus, of course, Della’s hair will grow back!) But it all stems from a single telling detail: that opening cinematic detail of a tiny sum of money, piled up in pennies and scrimped from tense negotiations with tradespeople, that is all Della thinks she has to show James how much she loves him.

2. The Paradox

“In the beginning, Sanford Carter was ashamed of becoming an Army cook. This was not from snobbery, at least not from snobbery of the most direct sort. During the two and a half years Carter had been in the Army he had come to hate cooks more and more. They existed for him as a symbol of all that was corrupt, overbearing, stupid, and privileged in Army life…”

From ‘The Language of Men,’ by Normal Mailer

Published in 1953, ‘The Language of Men’ tells the story of an over-sensitive, frustrated serviceman who, after years of being passed up for promotion and never finding his niche in the army, ends up as a cook – the thing he hates most about the army. Immediately we are curious: What will happen to a man who becomes the thing he most despises?

Carter feels that he never manages to understand other men, to feel either equal to them or able to lead them. ‘Whenever responsibility had been handed to him, he had discharged it miserably, tensely, over conscientiously. He had always asked too many questions, he had worried the task too severely, he had conveyed his nervousness to the men he was supposed to lead.’

Even after starting to enjoy his work as a cook, the story builds to an incident where the men come to him and ask for a tin of oil for a fish fry-up they are organising – a party to which he is not invited. Carter stands his ground, and earns some grudging respect, but then undercuts it all again after the event with his ‘unmanliness’ – the true source of his self-disgust.

The whole drama of a man failing to fit in with and gain respect among other men is foreshadowed in the paradox that’s set in motion in the story’s opening lines.

3. The Historical Backdrop

“Paris was blockaded, starved, in its death agony. Sparrows were becoming scarcer and scarcer on the rooftops and the sewers were being depopulated. One ate whatever one could get.

As he was strolling sadly along the outer boulevard one bright January morning, his hands in his trousers pockets and his stomach empty, M. Morissot, watchmaker by trade but local militiaman for the time being, stopped short before a fellow militiaman whom he recognized as a friend. It was M Sauvage, a riverside acquaintance.”

From ‘Two Friends,’ by Guy de Maupassant

A protege of Flaubert and the author of the novel Bel-Ami, Maupassant wrote over 300 short stories, many of them – like this one – set during the Franco-Prussian war, and showing how innocent lives are swept up and crushed by futile, brutal conflict.

This story starts with a brief paragraph of context and another telling detail: the absence of sparrows. At this point in the conflict, the Prussian army has established a blockade around Paris and is seeking to starve out its citizens.

The two friends of the title were passionate fishermen in peacetime, and after a chance encounter they convince each other to go off and fish once again. As well as the hunger they feel, they are motivated by a hankering for a return to the innocent pleasures of their pre-war lives.

They slip out past the French lines, to an area where they think they will be safe, but after a brief interval of bliss the Prussians detect them, with tragic consequences…

The opening line describes the war situation in vivid, journalistic terms, after which we are plunged into the tale of these two innocents. In a few telling phrases, it provides context and general background for the very particular tragedy which is about to ensue.

4. The Anecdotal Approach

“Margot met Robert on a Wednesday night toward the end of her fall semester. She was working behind the concession stand at the artsy movie theatre downtown when he came in and bought a large popcorn and a box of Red Vines.

“That’s an… unusual choice,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually sold a box of Red Vines before.”

From ‘Cat Person,’ by Kristen Roupenian

‘Cat Person,’ reportedly the first short story ever to go viral, tells a simple tale of a doomed romantic encounter. Margot, a student, meets an older guy, Robert, and they begin a flirtation that turns into a date that turns into a rather unsatisfactory (for her) sexual encounter.

Robert starts off as rather funny and charming, but over time we see that he is needy, insensitive, possessive, and utterly unaware of what Margot is thinking or feeling. Margot regrets the whole thing but doesn’t know how to tell him; Robert, when he is let down, turns all-too-predictably toxic. In short order he goes from mooning after her to demanding who she’s slept with to calling her a ‘whore.’

This sequence of events struck a chord with many, many people because it is clearly so familiar. The story emphasises the banality of the whole progression by narrating events in a straightforwardly chronological, anecdotal style, right from the opening paragraph. This approach serves to underline the depressing banality of Robert’s misogyny while implicitly asking the question: Why should women have to accept this as normal?

5. In Media Res

“And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that -parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.”

From ‘The Garden Party,’ by Katherine Mansfield

Literally ‘in the middle of things’, an in media res beginning is where the story drops us into the middle of the action of the narrative, so that we are instantly caught up in events. In this case, we are plunged into the excited bustle of a well-to-do family preparing a sumptuous garden party, and the story does a fantastic job of building up the anticipation and painting a picture of the affluence of the hosts. There is a marquee to put up, a band on its way, an enormous delivery of fancy flowers, fifteen kinds of sandwich, and a retinue of servants to ensure everything is ready.

Beginning with ‘and’ adds to this effect, giving us to understand that garden-party fever has been going on already for days, and seeming to hark back to earlier worries about what the weather would be like on the day. But against all this blithely affluent gaiety comes the story’s turning point: news that a poor workingman living in a cottage nearby has died in a sudden accident.

Laura, a daughter of the house, wonders if it appropriate to continue with the party, especially as all the noise and music and bustle will carry to the grieving widow (who also has six children, we later discover). But just as happens to the reader with the introduction, she is swept along by the occasion, and only really reconsiders the incident at the end of a successful party, when her mother suggest she take a basket of sandwiches from the party down to the widow. Laura’s reaction to this difficult task is initially ambiguous, but ultimately it seems as if again she finds a way to paint the tragedy in complacently optimistic colours, choosing to find a serenity and beauty on the dead man’s face and so blind herself to the grim reality of the tragedy and the agony of the grieving wife.

6. The Refrain

“The thing about being the murdered extra is you set the plot in motion.

You were a girl good at walking past cameras, background girl, corner-of-the-frame girl. Never-held-a-script girl, went-where-the-director-said girl.

You’ll be found in an alley, it’s always an alley for girls like you, didn’t-quite-make-it girls, living-four-to-a-one-bedroom-apartment girls. You’ll be found in an alley, you’ll be mistaken for a broken mannequin at first, you’ll be given a nickname. Blue Violet, White Rose, something reminiscent of Elizabeth Short, that first girl like you, that most famous one. The kind of dead girl who never really dies.”

From ‘Being the Murdered Extra,’ by Cathy Ulrich

Cathy Ulrich’s extraordinary ‘Murdered Ladies’ flash fictions present a series of stories – there are 40 of them in her collection, Ghosts of You – which always begin with the same line: The thing about being the murdered extra/girlfriend/moll/classmate/witch/dancer [etc] is you set the plot in motion.

It’s a thought-provoking line, which grows in power with every repetition. On the face of it seems strange to see these women as setting the plot in motion, when they are all victims of male violence. But we start to see that what they set in motion is actually the story that the people who survive them will appropriate from their lost lives, and blithely relate in their absence.

Each woman may set her plot in motion, but in each case she is not alive to explain how everyone gets her wrong, or projects their own version of events to absolve themselves too easily. We see that this theft of each woman’s own story is another violence that is done to them, something the stories seek in some small way to redeem. As Ulrich says: ‘Every story is looking for the lost girl from the title […] I am looking for the lost in these stories. I don’t know if I will ever find them.’

7. Setting The Rules

“The north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a priest. Afterwards, both the man and the metal must be purified. These are the rules and the laws; they are well made. It is forbidden to cross the great river and look upon the place that was the Place of the Gods—this is most strictly forbidden. We do not even say its name though we know its name. It is there that spirits live, and demons—it is there that there are the ashes of the Great Burning. These things are forbidden—they have been forbidden since the beginning of time.”

From ‘By the Waters of Babylon,’ by Stephen Vincent Benét

In any story that seeks to build a world that is not ours, there is some work to be done in establishing the reality of that world – its customs, its landscape, its people, its rules. World-building stories can sometimes fall down when they indulge in too much of an expository info dump, as the accumulation of background detail can quickly dent narrative momentum.

What’s so clever about the start of this story is that the rules are themselves the engine of the plot. We pan cinematically across the edges of the story’s territory, and understand the legends and forbidden areas of this world. But the quest of the narrator – who is indeed the son of a priest – will take him east, into the forbidden Place of the Gods (about which, of course, we are already very curious). At the outset of the story we do not the time in which the story is set, what kind of being he is, or where he lives. But all these things will be revealed as the narrator’s journey through a post-apocalyptic, post-technological world takes him to places that gradually start to seem very familiar…

8. Beginning With The Inciting Incident

“The day my son Laurie started kindergarten he renounced corduroy overalls with bibs and began wearing blue jeans with a belt; I watched him go off the first morning with the older girl next door, seeing clearly that an era of my life was ended, my sweet-voiced nursery-school tot replaced by a longtrousered, swaggering character who forgot to stop at the corner and wave good-bye to me.”

From ‘Charles,’ by Shirley Jackson

Screenwriting guru Robert Mckee describes the inciting incident as a moment that ‘radically upsets the balance of forces in your protagonist’s life’. It’s the moment when our main character is plunged out of their normal routine and a challenge or quest appears which will shape their journey, and with it the rest of the story. It’s common to locate this point near the start of the story after some introductory ‘normality,’ so that we can understand how the main character’s life is to be disrupted.

But here the inciting incident is placed by mystery and horror writer Shirley Jackson – best known for The Haunting of Hill House – at the very start of the story. Everything that happens flows from Laurie starting kindergarten. Laurie gets cheekier and less innocent with each passing day, as he brings home increasingly hair-raising tales of an even naughtier boy called Charles. The whole story deals with the comic escalation of Charles’ behaviour, as reader and narrator alike become ever more curious to meet the errant child and speculate on what his parents are like.

I won’t spoil the ending, except to say that there is perhaps a clue in the mother’s lament in the opening paragraph about the end of an era of innocence…

9. The Thought Experiment

“MY LOVER IS experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I don’t know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. It’s been a month, and now he’s a sea turtle.”

From ‘The Rememberer,’ by Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender’s story begins by asking the reader to imagine something extraordinarily counterfactual: that her lover is regressing through millennia, going through the evolutionary process so fast – a million years a day, in reverse – that we can actually track his progress by the day. One day he is a baboon, another a salamander; eventually he is no longer even visible to the naked eye.

As with so many of Bendee’s stories the result is mournful, strange, poetic and profound. She takes a surreal thought like this and turns into a powerful meditation on memory, the difference between evolution and maturity, speciesism and loss. And it all begins with that challenging idea which confronts us in the very first sentence.

10. THE CONUNDRUM

“1-0. Who would expect the Embassy of Cambodia? Nobody. Nobody could have expected it, or be expecting it. It’s a surprise, to us all. The Embassy of Cambodia!

Next door to the embassy is a health center. On the other side, a row of private residences, most of them belonging to wealthy Arabs (or so we, the people of Willesden, contend). They have Corinthian pillars on either side of their front doors, and—it’s widely believed—swimming pools out back. The embassy, by contrast, is not very grand. It is only a four- or five-bedroom North London suburban villa, built at some point in the thirties, surrounded by a red brick wall, about eight feet high. And back and forth, cresting this wall horizontally, flies a shuttlecock. They are playing badminton in the Embassy of Cambodia. Pock, smash. Pock, smash.”

From ‘The Embassy of Cambodia,’ by Zadie Smith

This subtle and absorbing story from Zadie Smith opens with a mystery: an embassy, set in a leafy north London suburb rather than a grand central district of the city, and a wall, behind which a mysterious game of badminton is being played. The rest of the story picks at this mystery and uses the imagined score in the ongoing game-playing as a backdrop to the unfolding tale of Fatou, a domestic servant to the affluent Derawals, who has escaped servitude and dodged abuse in Africa only to face privations and hardships in London.

Each mini-chapter of the story is headed with a score from the badminton match – from 1-0 up to 21-0. This mechanism provides a rhythmic framework to the tale. We may never learn who actually holds the rackets, but we see that the back-and-forth motion behind the wall of an embassy – an institution with the power to grant deny or people access to whole a country – is a fitting counterpoint to the enforced travels of impoverished migrants, and to the desperate movements of Fatou’s hopes and fears in a world where she has little agency or resources, and only one friend.

Now you’ve seen how these authors have done it, it’s time to get stuck into actually putting pen to paper – or fingertips to keyboard – and start writing your short story. For more from Dan, check out his top 10 steps for writing short stories (with even more examples!).

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