Freelance scribbler exploring worlds real and imagined
Dialogue is a powerful tool. It gives your readers a chance to hear the characters speaking, efficiently revealing aspects of their personality and inter-personal relationships that are difficult to show in narrative.
Something you quickly learn if you read and write fiction, though: realistic dialogue isn’t easy to write, and even great writers sometimes get it wrong. If you’re looking for ways to enhance your dialogue, here are some tips that can help.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman 120 pages (Herland), 117 pages (With Her in Ourland) The Forerunner (1915-1916)
Read this if you like: Mark Twain, Gulliver’s Travels, utopias
tl;dr summary: Women do things better, and that includes building a civilization.
See Herland on Bookshop See With Her in Ourland on Bookshop
High fantasy has a long-standing tradition of borrowing from myth and religion, and anyone with even a surface knowledge of world mythology will see that right away reading Wheel of Time. I think I noticed some of this even when I read the books as a kid, but my current re-read coincides with a deep dive on world mythologies, making the familiar names and concepts stand out even more vividly than on my past reads through the series.
(Note: Thar be Wheel of Time book spoilers ahead—if you haven’t read the whole series and care about such things, probably best to stop reading now)
I’ve been reading novels in Spanish for about a year—successfully, at least. One of my main motivations to become fluent was so I could read Marquez in Spanish, and as a chronically impatient human, I made an aborted attempt at Cien años de solidad a few years ago, well before I had the skills to navigate it. I had to stop multiple times every sentence to look up words I didn’t know, making it impossible to just sink into the story; I set it aside after about a page.
Mythology and folklore can be an excellent source of storytelling inspiration. In the past, it could be tricky to track down info on myths outside what I’ll call the Big 4 (Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Norse). Even for these well-known pantheons, a lot of the available info was over-simplified, or filtered through the view of writers who misconstrued (or sometimes straight-up rewrote) the original story.
Today, scholars, folklorists, and mythologists from around the world can share their knowledge without going through an academic gatekeeper. The result is a wealth of information about mythologies, pantheons, rituals, and folk tales, both ancient and active. While the internet is still shockingly incomplete in some areas, there are tons of resources available for writers seeking inspiration from myths and folk stories. Here are some of the sites I’ve found most useful for my own research.
In the simplest terms, point of view can be defined as the perspective through which a story is being told. A story’s POV identifies three things:
Who is telling the story
The relationship between the narrator and main character
The distance between the characters and readers
Those things are all critical to how a story comes across to the reader, and shifting the POV—even if it’s just from one 3rd-person close narrator to a different one—can have a huge impact on how the reader interprets the story (and how much they enjoy reading it).
I love a good writing prompt. Or even a not so good writing prompt. Honestly, anything that gets my creative mind going and takes it into a new place is a winner in my book. And starting from something that’s inherently entertaining, like a board game, can be especially valuable, in my opinion. It shifts your mind out of work-brain and into fun-brain, taking away some of the pressure of producing words and helping to silent the inner critic so you can just enjoy the process.
Because that’s what writing should be, even if you’re writing about a serious topic, even if you’re a capital-A Author who does it for a living: joyful. If you’re not engaged by your own writing, no reader is going to be, either. When the writer takes joy in the creation process, that comes through on the page.
I’ve been doing a lot of research into ancient mythologies lately. One of the most interesting books I’ve come across in this is Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman. It looks at the Goddess religions that were widespread in the ancient world, the cultures that worshipped these female supreme deities, and when and how they were replaced by the patriarchal cultures that eventually evolved into the religions of the present day.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff to unpack in this book, and I highly recommend it for anyone who’s interested in ancient mythology, specifically as a way to gain insight into the culture that developed it. One of the details that’s stuck with me the most is Stone’s breakdown of the Adam and Eve story as a kind of pre-Christian propoganda against the Goddess.
I’m a sucker for a mailing list. Anytime I research new journals and presses to submit to, or go to a conference or bookfair, I end up subscribing to a plethora of new lists.
Of course, doing this, I’ve signed up for a bunch of newsletters that were…less than helpful. Inevitably, I’ll come to realize my inbox is getting inundated and embark on a purge. But there are newsletters I’m always excited to see pop up in my inbox, and a few I’ve come to anticipate, to the point I’ll go searching through my spam folder to double-check if I don’t see them.
Jennifer Wortman 167 pages Split/Lip Press (2019)
Read this if you like: Susan Minot, Kristen Roupenian, writing flash fiction
Tl;dr summary: Stories of people trying to find and show love and mostly failing, but in a funny, beautifully-written way.
