Fiction Craft Blog

The standard advice for handling dialect in commercial fiction is to stick to fairly standard forms. Popular advice says that: 1) You can include more dialect in dialogue as it's not expected to be standard or "correct" 2) You can use a basic pattern to infer a strong dialect, but don't try and reproduce the dialect yourself unless you are very comfortable with it and use it. ( More on that here. ) 3) You can go "all in" and write a novel completely in nonstandard forms, but

Many science-fiction and fantasy writers overuse italics and capitalisation in their work. In this short blog post, I’ll cover basic style guidelines and explain why this happens. Key points: Science-fiction and fantasy authors often overuse capitalisation and italics as they want to mark out new elements of their world as different. It's a kind of mental scaffolding in the writing process. However, in the final version, this is often unnecessary and can break reader immersio