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

Is a comma before ‘as’ ever mandatory? Takeaway: A comma before as hints at a break, which suggests as is being used in the sense of because . A comma before as to mean because is not mandatory but can be helpful for clarity Some editors argue that the comma before as changes the meaning to because , despite the lack of editorial consensus on this issue The different meanings of as The style guides are quiet on this one. Here’s my attempt, as not even the Chicago Manual