Sandra Gerth - author of the Writers' Guide Series

5 Writing Lessons from The Walking Dead

The eighth season of The Walking Dead, one of the most successful television series of all time, starts tonight. I haven’t started watching The Walking Dead when it first began airing. A TV show about zombies stumbling around, craving brains, didn’t seem that original or that entertaining to me. But …

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10 tips to prepare for NaNoWriMo

It’s the first of October today, which means that we have just one more month until NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) begins. What is NaNoWriMo? For those of you who haven’t heard of it before: NaNoWriMo is an international writing event that challenges you to write 50,000 words of fiction …

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Is third-person limited POV limiting?

Third-person limited is probably the most common point of view in contemporary genre fiction, yet as an editor, I have often worked with authors who struggle with this POV. What is third-person limited POV? In third-person limited POV, the story—or a part of it—is told from only one character’s perspective. …

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Point of view in fiction

What is point of view? Point of view is the answer to the question “Who is telling us the story?” (or at least this scene). Are we watching everything from the outside, and a storyteller/author is telling the story? (= omniscient POV)? Or are we experiencing things through the senses …

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6 tips for using dialogue tags

Dialogue is one of the most important parts of writing a novel or a short story, so every writer has to know how to use dialogue tags. What are dialogue tags? Dialogue tags are things like “Tina said” that tell us which character is speaking. How to use dialogue tags …

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How to use action beats in your writing

Have you ever stumbled over too many “he said” and “she said” in your story? One of the followers of my blog apparently encountered that problem, so he’s trying to cut down the number of dialogue tags by replacing it with character actions. But what’s the correct way to do …

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The golden rule of writing: Show, don’t tell

“Show, don’t tell” is probably the advice writers hear most often from editors and writing mentors. But many writers struggle to understand what it really means. “Telling” means you give readers your interpretations and conclusions, while “showing” means you provide readers with enough details and behaviors to let them draw …

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How to punctuate dialogue tags and action beats correctly

One little thing that drives many editors crazy is incorrect punctuation of dialogue and action beats. Let’s start with a definition: A dialogue tag is a speaker verb such as “Tina said.” It tells your readers which character is speaking. An action beat is something a character does. Example: “I …

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