10 Tips to Make Your Writing Shine

My tips:

Tip 1: It’s All About the Characters – No matter your genre – high-stakes suspense, contemporary romance, historical fiction, fantasy – what makes people keep reading isn’t the action or the plot, but the characters. Yes, you need a plot. You need action. You need dialogue. You need settings. But those are just devices to help you take readers into the minds of your characters. An author’s first priority should be to create complex people, put them in situations that test their mettle, and offer readers insights into what makes them tick. By all means entertain with a fast-paced, action-filled story. But at the end of the day, people are what matter. Aim to make readers care about your characters, and they’ll always come back for more.

My tips:

Tip 4: Limit Dialogue Tags – Avoid “he said/she said” whenever possible. Dialogue tags add nothing to a story, unless several characters are speaking and tags are the only way to identify them and keep the action moving at a fast clip. Otherwise, use the space you’d otherwise devote to tags as an opportunity to give readers insights into characters. “‘No way am I getting anywhere close to Heather Callahan,’ Jake declared hotly.” How to improve that? “‘No way am I getting anywhere close to Heather Callahan.’ Jake shoved the leftover chili in the microwave and slammed the door, stroking the yellow Lab at his side when the dog flinched.” That tells readers much more about Jake than the first “he said” version . (And it gets rid of an adverb, too!)

My tips:

Tip 6: Write What You Can Research – I’ve often heard writing coaches advise “Write what you know.” I say, write what interests you, as long as you can research or imagine it. (That’s me at the shooting range, by the way, deep in suspense research mode!). Writing only what you know is limiting. That said, don’t skimp on research; readers will spot mistakes, and your credibility will be compromised. Your goal should be to get e-mails like the one that showed up in my in-box after my first suspense novel, Against All Odds, came out. That book focused on the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, and I received an e-mail from a former HRT commander. He’d heard about the book from a colleague, read it, and wrote to commend me on my research, saying I’d gotten it right, down the very radio call signals they used during missions.

My tips:

Tip 9: Cut Ruthlessly – Cutting is one of the hardest thing for many writers to do. But if a sentence, a scene or a whole chapter doesn’t advance the plot or offer new insights into a character, cut it – no matter how much you love the words you’ve written. Author Elmore Leonard once said he leaves out the parts readers skip, and that’s sound advice. Everything in a scene must serve a purpose. For example, in my Vanished, the heroine is in the hero’s garage. Several details are included that sound random but are very deliberate. She sets her soda on a shelf beside a half-empty bag of bird seed – and the reader learns that the tough detective she’s working with feeds birds. Later, she leans a folding chair against the wall, next to a dusty basketball – and the reader learns the hero has lost interest in things he once enjoyed.