Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style

How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.551

Dialogue is the most pictorial component of ordinary prose.* Even veteran writers have to work on the mechanics of dialogue. A good conversation on the page can look like a tennis match. One swings. The other swings back. No speaker attributions. Just the ball of dialogue going back and forth.

Written language is one of the visual arts. Visual devices that we call punctuation direct the reader when to pause, or stop. They alert you to what’s more important (and less). Quotation marks let you know someone is speaking, paragraphing that a new thought-cluster is occurring, and a line skipped after a paragraph that there’s a change coming in

Language is a kind of music. Silence at play with sound. Cadence, beats, accents, and tone.

Shapes of text are like clothing: they’re what content wears.

Appearance counts. On the page as on the body.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, creating an “innocent” main character—one ignorant of the lay of the land or the problem to be solved—can be a wonderfully natural way to lead your reader into a story.

Whether rigging or not, one’s self and the myriad aspects of oneself show up in one’s characters. The more you are able to encompass and give voice to those aspects, the larger you grow, and the better fiction writer you will be. You’ll meet yourself on the river, as it were.

True action combines realization—when a character is “impressed”—and acting on it in a way that makes a difference to the character’s life or others.