SimplyLife

by Rose Ciccarelli, Editor She wanders in and out of your thoughts. You can see her in intimate detail, down to the freckle on the base of her palm. You want to know her life story. You can’t keep your mind off her. You’re either in love … or preparing to write about a character. So, how to bring her from your mind to the page? Who is this person? Find out all you can by using questions to dig deep and jot down what you discover. You probably already have an image in mind, so physical details such as race and ethnicity, age, height, weight, and hair color should all be easy. Delve deeper. Does your character have any physical or mental defects? How about complexes? What about inherited attributes? You may have thought about occupation and education, but what‘s she like with family and friends? How about her place in the community? Does she do volunteer work? Is she affiliated with a religion or a political party? How does she go through life? Optimist or pessimist? Frust...

Guest Post by Rose Ciccarelli, Editor Dialogue is more than words. It can show the reader how your characters interact. In every scene, characters talk (or avoid talking) because they WANT something. They may use different strategies to get it, communicated by words and actions. If one strategy doesn't work, then a character will try something else. That scene construction leads to conflict and forward movement in your story. The simplest way to make dialogue realistic is to invest time listening to how people really talk. Tune in at a baseball game or concert. Eavesdrop on the booth behind you in a restaurant. Listen to children chatting at the bus stop. What you’ll notice is that people don’t give a summary of events because the person they’re talking to already knows the situation and remembers what’s happened to this point. Also (although there are exceptions) people seldom say exactly what they mean. How often have you heard a real person say something like: “I’m bei...

Has this happened to you? You’re reading a mass market paperback or a best seller on your e-reader, and you stumble over a typo.  How did that experience make you feel?  Me too.  As a writer, you want to transport your readers to another world, not yank them from it feeling irritated that no one cared enough to make this right.  Rose Ciccarelli Caring about your readers may be the single best reason to use an editor, but there are others as well. Cold readers are crucial to honing your work, and an editor is the ultimate cold reader , who not only possesses a set of keen eyes but also LOVES to read, and has probably read a lot. An editor sees what you don’t, the missing words, misspellings, and errors in punctuation and grammar. We all miss our own mistakes because our brains fill in the blanks. We see what we think we wrote, not what is actually on the page. At the most basic level, an editor is a proofreader, taking care of all the nuts and bo...