Young and inexperienced Grey might be, but he was not unobservant. Neither was he a poor judge of men.
To my surprise, it was Lord John. But a Lord John I had never seen before. He was not so much disheveled as shattered, everything in order save his face. “What?” I said, deeply alarmed. “What’s happened?
He put a hand flat on the counter, as though to steady himself. “I have – bad news.” “I can see that,” I said, a little tartly. “Sit down, for God’s sake, before you fall down.” He shook his head like a horse shaking off flies and looked at me. His face was ghastly, shocked and white, and the rims of his eyes showed red.
But as spring blooms, the birds grow drunk with love and the bushes riot with their songs. Far, far into the night, darkness mutes but does not silence them, and small melodious conversations break out at all hours, invisible and strangely intimate in the dead of night, as though one overheard the lovemaking of strangers in the room next door.
James Fraser,” he said. His eyes were fixed on William with a burning intensity, as though to absorb every vestige of a sight he would not see again. “Ye kent me once as Alex MacKenzie. At Helwater.
I had turned the earth in my garden the day before, planting the winter seeds to sleep and swell, to dream their buried birth. Now is the time when we reenter the womb of the world, dreaming the dreams of snow and silence.
Stop it! It’s too big! Take it out!
No matter how much one knows that something dreadful is going to happen in the future, one somehow never thinks it will be today.
I suppose so.” An oath was an oath, though I rather wondered if Hippocrates ever ran into this sort of situation himself. Possibly he did; the ancient Greeks were a violent lot, too. The.
The humming noise disturbed him. It wasn’t in his ears but in his body – under his skin, in his bones. It made the long bones of his arms and legs thrum like plucked strings, and itched in his blood, making him want constantly to scratch. Fiona couldn’t hear it; he’d asked, to be sure she was safe before letting her help him. He.
I knew an old lady in the Highlands once, who said the lines in your hand don’t predict your life; they reflect it.
He lounged in the corner like a crouching cat, watching me through eyes narrowed against the sun.
If ever you find yourself in the midst of paradox, you can be sure you stand on the edge of truth.
Did ye not mean to go to Confession yourself?” Jamie asked, stopping near the church’s main door. There was a priest in the confessional; two or three people stood a discreet distance away from the carved wooden stall, out of earshot, waiting. “It’ll bide,” Ian said, with a shrug. “If ye’re goin’ to hell, I might as well go, too. God knows, ye’ll never manage alone.” Jamie.
You want to anchor the scene with physical details, but by and large it’s better to use sensual details rather than overtly sexual ones.
You don’t need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you’ve written, you should be able to point to any given element – be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point – and say why it’s there.
If you can’t look a line of dialogue in the face and say exactly why it’s there – take it out or change it.
Don’t go overboard in avoiding “said.” Basically, “said” is the default for dialogue, and a good thing, too; it’s an invisible word that doesn’t draw attention to itself.
As a rule of thumb, four consecutive lines of dialogue is about as much as you want to have without a tag.
Don’t let characters talk pointlessly – they only talk if there’s something to say.