You can have relatable, complex characters and a compelling plot, but if your dialogue feels forced or clunky, your readers won’t make it far enough to care.
The truth is: nothing ruins a manuscript faster than bad dialogue.
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Writing a novel can feel like staring into the void. When you’re sitting in front of a blank page, anything could happen, and that feeling is both freeing… and terrifying. This is where a good story structure comes in.
The query letter has one job–to get the agent (or the publisher, if you’re going that route) to read the pages you sent.
This means it doesn’t necessarily have to be brilliant, it just has to work. How to write a query letter that works?
There are eight parts of a query letter:
You build a character by separating them from the mass of humanity. Making them an individual, rather than a face in the crowd, is the main challenge of writers.
A mannerism is one of the best ways to make a character memorable. Just a single unusual or curious affectation can make them stick in the reader’s mind.
How well do you know your characters?
You’ve probably asked yourself some form of this question before. Most successful writers spend time delving into the characters who populate their pages.
Countless resources exist (such as Bookfox’s “4 Character Questionnaire Tests—Can You Pass Them?”) to help you create characters rich in backstory, motivation, and personality—just like real people.
What you’re about to read is unlike anything else on Writer’s Block.
The vast majority of other articles are written by freelancers who pick a few ideas off the top of their heads and slap them into a blog post. Most of them are recycling the same old familiar ideas – take a walk, take a vacation, read a book. Even worse, they’re trying to solve a fundamental problem by surface-level fixes.
It’s stupid and their ideas don’t work.
Here are my 40 favorite books about writing, the books I’d swear by and beg you to read.
These books help me feel like I’m not alone. They help me work through problems I didn’t even know I had. And they give me enormous amounts of courage to keep pressing on.
After reading more than a hundred books on writing, I’ve narrowed it down to my top 40.
Look, this is basically a list of 100 Things Every Writer Should Do Before They Die. How many have you already done?
Some of them are pretty ambitious — reading 100 books in a single year is difficult, no doubt. While others like “write fan fiction” or “go to a reading” have a much lower bar.
In every author’s life there comes a moment when they must slaughter one of their creations.
Yep, you’ve got to kill one of your characters.
I know, I know, you love them, you’ve created them, and yet for the sake of the story and for the sake of the reader, they need to bite a bullet, drink that poison, or succumb to cancer.
How should you write a sentence?
Well, most guides will start off with 10,000 ways NOT to write a sentence.
You know, the finger-wagging schoolmarm that lectures you about avoiding fragments and comma splices and run-ons.