Donna Hechler Porter

Bunnies hop. Feet hop on hot pavement. Toddlers can hop and hop and hop . . . Dr. Seuss likes to “Hop on Pop.” But readers should not be forced to hop between characters while reading a book. This is called head hopping, and it is one of the first mistakes emerging authors will make. And nothing, I mean NOTHING, screams “amateur” like head hopping.

This week for Toolbox Tuesday we are going to switch from prose to content, specifically characters. After all, characters are an integral part of any novel. I have stuck with some rather sloppy reads as far as prose and structure, especially from newbie authors, simply because the characters popped from the page and I CARED about what was happening to them. I previously discussed how to use the four temperaments in creating characters here . . .

When I finished my first novel, Keeping Secrets, it came in at a whopping 180,000 words. Of course, that was way way way too long. It was time for a crash course in editing and revising. One of the first things I realized while in the throes of trying to cut down words was that I was being redundant. Redundancy, for those needing a formal definition, means “not or no longer needed or useful; superfluous” or “word or data able to be omitted without loss of meaning or functio

Tags. New authors love them. Seasoned authors hate them. And no, I am not speaking of shopping. For those of you who do not know, tags are the words at the end of dialogue. They usually take the form of the words said, asked, or answered, but other words can be used as well. One of the mistakes new authors often make, and seasoned authors fight against, is the overuse of them.