8 Reasons Why Good Books Are Rejected

Your novel is brilliant. You know it is.

So why aren't any agents picking it up?

This is not a post about delusions of the quality of one's writing. It's about why you send your book out to 10 agents and another 10, and then 10 more, and you still haven't gotten a nibble.

It takes sending a book out to more agents than you would imagine before you find the right one. And that's what it's about: finding the right person, the one who will be as committed to your book as you are.

You're not represented ...yet. Persevere. Image "rejected" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by ☻☺

5 Ways Your Dialogue Tags Suck: Dialogue Diatribe #2

Dialogue tags shouldn't be difficult. Trust me. As an editor who reads the work of new writers, dialogue tags can get really screwed up and entirely disrupt the flow of a story.

Don't take this lightly.

In my last post on dialogue, I explained the mechanics of dialogue. Today I want to talk about the tags themselves.

Make your tags invisible. Image "Memorias de un hombre invisible" 
(CC BY-NC 2.0) by 'J' Jose Maria Perez Nuñez

The thing with dialogue tags is that when people begin writing fiction, they often begin to see that they are writing he said and she said and it feels like a lot of repetition. As writers, we're taught to avoid using the same words too often, so we want to fix this problem. Unfortunately, in attempting to fix dialogue tags, many writers wind up with bad ones.