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- About editing (29)
- Book marketing (5)
- Fiction (17)
- Grammar and the English language (13)
- Manuscript formatting (3)
- Miscellaneous musings (14)
- Newspaper article (1)
- Punctuation (4)
- Self-publishing (14)
Author Archives: Arlene Prunkl
Truth and lies in fiction—how to write an unreliable narrator
By Arlene Prunkl, freelance editor I’m excited about this blog post. While most of my articles are on common topics that you can find information about all around the Internet, the subject of unreliable narrators doesn’t get a lot of ink. And that’s probably because relatively few fiction writers know about the literary device of unreliable Read the full article…
Posted in About editing, Book marketing, Fiction, Miscellaneous musings
15 Comments
Dialogue in fiction: Part V – Writing your characters’ thoughts
By Arlene Prunkl, freelance editor Overview In my final article on how to write effective dialogue for fiction, we’ll move from dialogue—a conversation between two or more people—to monologue—a conversation a character has in his or her mind; unspoken thoughts that are conveyed to the reader using several methods. This is variously referred to as Read the full article…
Posted in About editing, Fiction, Manuscript formatting, Self-publishing
41 Comments
Dialogue in fiction: Part IV – The nuts and bolts, cont’d.
By Arlene Prunkl, freelance editor Contents: 1. Conciseness 2. Contractions 3. Punctuation 4. Information dumping in dialogue: “As you know, Bob…” 5. Info-dumping monologues This is the fourth article in my series on how to write effective dialogue in fiction. In the first, I wrote about foreign accents and dialects. The second covered the essentials: realism Read the full article…
Posted in About editing, Fiction, Punctuation, Self-publishing
9 Comments
Dialogue in fiction: Part III – The nuts and bolts
By Arlene Prunkl, freelance editor Contents: 1. Balance of dialogue to narrative 2. Opening pages 3. Dialogue tags 4. Action tags 5. Tom Swifty adverbs 6. More dialogue tips This is the third article in my series on how to write effective dialogue in fiction. In the first article, I covered foreign accents and dialects Read the full article…
Posted in About editing, Fiction, Self-publishing
9 Comments
Dialogue in fiction: Part II – The essentials
By Arlene Prunkl, freelance editor Contents: 1. Realism through artifice 2. Dialogue’s primary purpose 3. The three other purposes of dialogue 4. Distinction between characters A few months ago, I got a little ahead of myself by writing a post on how to write authentic foreign accents and dialects in your fiction dialogue. Today, I’m going back Read the full article…
Dialogue in fiction: Part I – How to write authentic dialects and foreign accents
By Arlene Prunkl, freelance editor This is the first in a series of blog posts on techniques for writing realistic dialogue in fiction. Of the many things to master when writing dialogue in fiction, creating authentic dialects and natural-sounding foreign accents for your characters is possibly the most challenging. If you don’t get the accent Read the full article…
