Sneak Peek at Near + Far's Cover Art

We talked last week about story shapes and arcs as well as what gets set up in the beginning of a story. This week we talked about characters and dialogue, and how the first shapes the story. One of the points made was that a character is not something you stick in a slot of a story – the character shapes the entire story. For example, the story of someone encountering a werewolf is very different if your protagonist is a little old lady who hates dogs because they’re messy than if that protagonist is an emo-teen determined to become a werewolf in order to get revenge on someone that wronged them.

The main character usually changes in some way over the course of the story, but that change must feel organic and natural. You can set up a big change of mind with foreshadowing and having them change on some smaller matter, showing that such change is possible, so it doesn’t throw the reader out of the story when it occurs.

We discussed approaches to learning more about your characters. I recommended the book Writing The Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, which talks about writing characters who are a different sex, race, or class background than yourself. I also recommended people-watching and reading pop psychology (or even more sciencey stuff, which will provide all sorts of story ideas.

One of the quickest ways to turn an editor off is with improperly punctuated dialogue, so learn the rules and use them. We went over things like speech tags, how to punctuate internal dialogue, why you don’t need to come up with a bunch of synonyms for “said,” and how to make voices distinctive. I suggested that people watch the wonderful adaptation of Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat” – here is the original text, and here is the film made from it.

If you really want to focus on dialogue, read good plays, which are pure dialogue. If you want to write in a particular historical voice, one of the best ways is to read deeply in that period so you absorb it. Doing so may make you aware how much what we read and watch creeps into our writing – that’s one very good reason to read some high quality stuff now and again.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

Writers get told they must blog, but not a lot of advice about it. I’ve talked about this more than once, most notably in Do Writers Need to Blog? No. and How to Blog Without Really Trying But Still Managing Not to Be Half-Assed About It. But another thing to consider beyond the content you’re producing is whether or not your readers are finding it.

If you have a blog, take a moment and type your name into a search engine. If your blog doesn’t appear on the first page of results, you have a problem. The further down the page it is, the harder it is for a reader to find it. Type ‘Cat Rambo’ in and you should see this blog on the top of the list, along with other links that go to me rather than that taxi driver with a cat named Rambo who drives around with his cat in the backseat or the Cat Rambo featured in an article about underwater pumpkin carving.

So — if you’re not on that first page –how do you remedy that? Here’s five ways to make your blog more effective by making it more discoverable when people come looking for you.

Check your front page. Does it include the name you write under? Not just your first name, not a cute pseudonym. And not contained in an image rather than text. If not, please add it.

Make titles meaningful. A title should give a reader a reason to read, often to answer a question that the title has raised. For example: what are the five quick ways I could make my blog more discoverable? rather than “Check this out” or “Here’s something startling.”

Use images. Visual content makes a post more engaging and it provides something when people are sharing it on social media. Visual content gets shared more often than text-only. And a post lacking an image may not be pinnable on Pinterest, which is a valid social media site for authors.

Look at your site on your phone. Google Analytics tells me over half my traffic is readers using their phone to read it; it would be foolish for me not to make it as readable as possible for them. What’s not appearing? What looks weird? Menus that look great on a computer screen and are easy to select and click with a mouse are often much more difficult to navigate on a phone’s smaller touch screen.

Use what’s available. Tags and categories are both tools that search engines incorporate when creating rankings and they make things more discoverable for your readers. The Related Posts plug-in that I use on this blog depends on tags in order to find and display similar content that may intrigue readers of a particular post.

Bonus tip: Link to other posts. Internal links can help your reader find relevant content without leading them away from your site, and they also favorably influence search engines. You might even create pages that consolidate information, like this page of Resources for F&SF Writers. Look at this page — I can count five different ways I’ve done this. Can you find them all?