Give a Holiday Gift to Writers Who Help Other Writers

Here's how:

Nominate a few helpful Web sites, blogs, and newsletters for a Writer's Digest 101 Best Websites nod. I would love it if you'd include mine among them but there are many other great ones out there, too.

One of my favorites is Tony Eldridge's Marketing Tips For Authors. ( Letting you know about it is sort of my holiday gift to you. It offers a mix of practical marketing advice for authors on a shoestring budget from an experienced internet marketer and author. It offers how-to posts, guest posts from authors (maybe one of your articles?), book reviews, and a weekly link carnival. It also offers a free video subscription where authors can receive how-to video tips on some of the more technical aspects of marketing their books on the net. I don't know anyone else out there who does the latter.

Here are Writer's Digest suggested categories for nominations, just to help you get your thinking cap on:

Agent Blogs
Writing Communities
Publishing Resources
Jobs and Markets
Creativity and Challenges
Genres/Niches
General Resources
Fun for Writers

Send comments and nominations for next year’s list to writersdigest@fwmedia.com with “101 Websites” in the subject line (deadline is Jan. 1, 2010). Learn more at http://writersdigest.com/article/101-websites-2009 .

Here are some possible sites/blogs to nominate from the assortment I offer authors and, if you haven't utilized them to benefit your own writing career, consider them a resource for 2010:

Blogs for Writers:
This one, http://www.SharingWithWriters.blogspot.com ,
http://www.TheFrugalEditor.blogspot.com
The Resources for Writer pages at my Web site

And please let me know if you nominate any of them so I can thank you and mention your title in my newsletter. It's part of the marketing fun, part of the way to keep our marketing efforts rolling along. (-:


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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and two how to books for writers, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't and The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success. Her FRUGAL book for retailers is A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. She is also the author of the Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal". Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor blog.

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Seven Easy Ways to Keep Dialogue Sharp

This blog post is a bit of a celebration. Apparently this month Sharing with Writers blog was named to Writers Digest 101 Best Resources or something similar. I am being vague because I haven't seen; I've only heard about it from friends who are happy to pass on good news. So, I got to thinking that people might want to know something of the kind of fare they will find on my other blog, The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor at www.thefrugaleditor.blogspot.com. You'll find articles there, questions and answers and lots of discussions on the differences between rules and style choices.

Seven Easy Ways to Keep Dialogue Sharp

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Author of The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success

1. Keep it simple. "He said" and "She said" will usually do. Your reader is trained to accept this repetition.

2. Forget you ever heard of strong verbs. Skip the "He yelped" and the "She sighed." They slow your dialogue down. If you feel need them, look at the words—the actual dialogue— your character used when he was yelping. Maybe it doesn't reflect the way someone would sound if he yelped. Maybe if you strengthen the dialogue, you can ditch the overblown tag.

3. When you can, reveal who is saying something by the voice or tone of the dialogue. That way you may be able to skip tags occasionally, especially when you have only two people speaking to one another. Your dialogue will ring truer, too.

4. Avoid having characters use other characters' names. In real life, we don't use people's names in our speech much. We tend to reserve using names for when we're angry or disapproving or we just met in a room full of people and we're practicing out social skills. Having a character direct her speech to one character or another by using her name is a lazy writer's way of directing dialogue and it will annoy the reader. When a reader is annoyed, she will not be immersed in the story you are trying to tell.

5. Avoid putting internal dialogue in italics. Trust your reader. She will know who is thinking the words from the point of view of the narrative.

6. Be cautious about using dialogue to tell something that should be shown. It doesn't help much to transfer telling from the narrator to the dialogue. It just makes the character who is speaking sound long winded. Putting quotation marks around exposition won't draw the reader into the scene or involve him more than if you'd left it part of the narrative.

7. And magic number seven is, don't break up dialogue sequences with long or overly frequent blocks of narrative. One of dialogue's greatest advantages is that it moves a story along. If a writer inserts too much stage direction, it will lose the forward motion and any tension it is building.

For more on writing dialogue check out Tom Chiarella's Writing Dialogue (Writers' Digest) and for more on editing in general—from editing query letters to turning unattractive adverbs into metaphoric gold—find The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success (Red Engine Press) on Amazon.
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Carolyn Howard-Johnson is an instructor for the UCLA Extension Writer's Program. The first book in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books, The Frugal Book Promoter, won USA Book News' Best Professional Book Award and Book Publicists of Southern California's Irwin Award. The second, The Frugal Editor, is also a USA Book News winner as well as a Reader Views Litary Award winner and the campaign for that book was named Best Marketing by the New Generation Indie Awards committee. It includes many editing tips on dialogue, the use of quotation marks and more. Learn more at www.howtodoitfrugally.com . This article is available for republishing on the Articles4Writers,Editors page.