"Don’t let characters talk pointlessly—they only talk if there’s something to say."
- Diana Gabaldon
"Dialogue doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Dialogue is contradictory, in that it can either speed up or slow down a passage."
"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, ..."
"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."
"Jamie’s viewpoint is expressed almost entirely in metaphor: If she was broken, she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a shattered bottle. He’s using physical language, ..."
"For a different woman, a different relationship, a different situation, gentleness might have been the proper, the only approach—but not for this woman, in these circumstances. The only thing that wil..."
"One of the general patterns of good (i.e., striking and memorable) writing is the effect of repetition. If you use a certain element—a plot device, an image, a noticeable phrase—once, readers may or m..."
"Almost everybody understands that you have to have something at stake for a story to be good."