Dialogue

Embrace Noir Conventions To Improve Your Writing - A grizzled PI drinks with a femme fatale.
Writing
Fred Johnson

Embrace Noir Conventions To Improve Your Writing

Few genres have such a distinctive look and feel as noir fiction. A successor of ‘hard-boiled’ or ‘pulp’ fiction, you’ll know the conventions of noir even if you’ve never read The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep – seedy urban underbellies, trench-coat-clad PIs, cigarettes, femme fatales, whiskey, flickering streetlights casting white pools on Chicago streets, nihilistic

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Get To Know Your Characters Better With This Novel Device - A character with a speech bubble. Inside are a hat, a mustache, and a monocle.
Writing
Robert Wood

Get To Know Your Characters Better With This Novel Device

Writers have a lot of different ways of getting to know their characters. Character biographies, for example, allow you to figure out a character’s backstory, defining who they are and where they’ve come from. Hot-seating, a technique borrowed from actors, involves either imagining a character or pretending to be them, answering a series of questions

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7 Hitchcockian Secrets To Writing Amazing Suspense - An image reminiscent of the shower scene from Psycho.
Writing
Tony Lee Moral

7 Hitchcockian Secrets To Writing Amazing Suspense

Tony Lee Moral is the author of three books on Alfred Hitchcock: Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie; The Making of Hitchcock’s The Birds and Alfred Hitchcock’s Movie Making Masterclass. His new novel, a Hitchcockian suspense mystery, Ghost Maven, is published by Cactus Moon Publications. When plotting my new novel Ghost Maven, I could find no

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7 Ways You’re Treating Your Novel Like A Screenplay (And How To Stop) - An author writes, picturing a film set.
Writing
Hannah Collins

7 Ways You’re Treating Your Novel Like A Screenplay (And How To Stop)

It doesn’t take a genius to see the differences between a novel and a screenplay. They look different on the page, what with the screenplay’s centered text, block-capital names, and bracketed direction. Not only that, but screenplays tend to be far thinner on the page count, too. You can roll one up pretty easily and use

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