A lot of writers—myself included—have characters with similar names. For one novel, I found about seven names that all started with the letter j. While we get these names right because we know the characters well, readers, who are learning them, might mix them up. Changing character names is hard though. We spend a lot … More CWM: #17 — Characters with similar names
Sometimes, sentences start to stack up. When that happens, they can feel as if they’re too similar to each other. In those spots, it’s good to check how those sentences differ. Because if you’re not careful, they can all sound the same and feel bland. See what I mean? I’ve caught sentences like this back-to-back … More CWM: #15 — No sentence variation
I’ve done one of these on commas before. I had talked about using commas to continuously add information to a sentence. But I haven’t talked about when to use a comma and when not to. Commas are complicated. What tends to get overlooked with them though is independent clauses and dependent clauses. An independent clause … More CWM: #14 — Misusing commas
Dialogue tags can be tricky. But they’re easy to understand after knowing the difference between them and action beats. Dialogue tags show who’s speaking and how they’re speaking. These can include but are not limited to: Dialogue tags are formatted with a comma before the ending quotation, and a period goes after the tag. For … More CWM: #13 — Dialogue tags vs. action beats
I’ve had a few authors use commas to add detail after detail onto a sentence. But they don’t realize how jam-packed the sentence becomes. Here are two fictional examples: Laurence came through the door, looking for answers, looking for something to turn his path around, and looking for that foolish cat who messed up from … More CWM: #10 — Adding too many details with commas
Lately, I’ve seen a few writers overuse character names. They would use a name almost every chance they could. Here’s a fictional example: John walked over to Laurencia with the biggest smile on his face. He turned with his back away from Laurencia, careful not to let Laurencia see the paper behind his back. John … More CWM: #9 — Overusing character names
I’m sure we’ve all come across a character in a book who we didn’t feel anything toward much. We weren’t worried about the character’s well-being. Which doesn’t help us want to continue reading. It can take many drafts to get into a character’s head and develop them on the page. Some characters are harder to write than … More CWM: #7 — Not developing characters
Besides the gray with an a vs. grey with an e battle, there’s one common spelling error I’ve often noticed while editing: hyphenated words. Sometimes we believe a word needs a hyphen when it doesn’t. Or we forget the hyphen when we actually need one. It could also depend on how we use the word … More CWM: #5 — Misusing hyphens
We type a word. It’s spelled correctly. Microsoft Word isn’t flagging it either. It sounds right too! But I love that Disney fairy tail doesn’t quite look right. It can get more complicated than that. There are long lists of words we think we know, but we don’t. Or we have a brain fart. We … More CWM: #4 — Common misused words
In some cases, repeating words helps. “Please, Elie,” I begged. “You have to do this. You know how much it means to me. Please.” Notice how please repeats? It doesn’t overdo the dialogue since they’re separated out. It feels smooth. On the other hand, I’ve seen writers use the word please about five times in one … More CWM: #3 — Repeating words for emphasis
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