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.
If I’m goin’ to lie on my face wi’ my buttocks bared, I want the lass under me, not behind me wi’ a hatpin!
Dialogue doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Dialogue is contradictory, in that it can either speed up or slow down a passage.
Then ye live with it, laddie,” he said softly. “That’s all.
Pointing out the emotion in a scene is like laughing at your own jokes.
If there’s true emotional content in a situation between characters, all you do is reveal it.
Watch a good movie sometime without reference to what’s happening but only with attention to how it was photographed; you’ll see the change of focus – zoom in, pan out, close-up on face, fade to black, open from above – easily. You want to do that in what you write; it’s one of the things that keep people’s eyes on the page, though they’re almost never conscious of it.
Knowing him, I thought his main feeling would have been gratification that the wing of Persian antiquities next door had escaped.
Just as an effective advertisement or page layout includes a lot of white space, a powerful scene requires immense restraint. Show things as simply as possible.