I’ll bet you’ve grown weary of writing coaches telling you how to fix your work-in-progress. Ready to break the monotony? Here are some guaranteed ways to ruin a perfectly good manuscript.

Tension is built up on a wave of emotion. Emotion fuels the tension and vice versa. Every story needs tension to some degree or other because as a rwiter you want to grab the emotions of your readers. Tension is one way to do just that.
So just what is tension? It is where your character [...]

…or maybe that should be ‘How To Shut Certain Characters Up, Particularly When You’re Trying To Sleep’.  Or what about ‘How To Stop Other Characters Barging Into Your Mind And Demanding A Job’.  Now that’d be worth reading, particularly with the multitude of characters that share my head space.  I did agree to let a [...]

Before we talk shop about the best way to tag dialogue, permit me to illustrate the wrong way. Let’s bring some nursery rhyme characters to life for this, since they aren’t around to get offended:
The lamb, always sure to be where Mary was, watched Mary shellac her hair in place.
“Mary, you’re a scream,” the lamb [...]