The expert magician seeks to deceive the mind, rather than the eye..

To create tension, dialogue needs to be stretched out. That is, characters should not be immediately responsive..

The biggest difference between a writer and a would-be writer is their attitude toward rewriting. . . . Unwillingness to revise usually signals an am….

Our instinct as human beings is to provide answers, to ease tension. As writers our job is the opposite, to create tension and not dispel it immediat….

A reader's emotions can be sparked with few words. That's the power of dialogue..

I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a ….

Most of the time, tough, combative, adversarial dialogue is much more exciting than physical action..

Readers take in dialogue one thought at a time. A frequent mistake of beginners is to combine thoughts, which may be suitable for other forms of writ….

A lawyer's job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people's closets..

Dialogue is a lean language in which every word counts..

Readers, transformed by film and TV, are used to seeing stories. The reading experience . . . is increasingly visual..

In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories.

A writer writes what other people only think..

Dialogue, contrary to popular view, is not a recording of actual speech; it is a semblance of speech, an invented language of exchanges that build in….