43 Quotes About Diana-gabaldon

Watch a good movie sometime without reference to what’s happening but only with attention to how it was photographed; you’ll see the change of focus—zoom in, pan out, close-up on face, fade to black, open from above—easily. You want to do that in what you write; it’s one of the things that keep people’s eyes on the page, though they’re almost never conscious of it.

You want to anchor the scene with physical details, but by and large it’s better to use sensual details rather than overtly sexual ones.

You don’t need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you’ve written, you should be able to point to any given element—be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point—and say why it’s there.

As a rule of thumb, four consecutive lines of dialogue is about as much as you want to have without a tag.

Don’t let characters talk pointlessly—they only talk if there’s something to say.

Dialogue doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Dialogue is contradictory, in that it can either speed up or slow down a passage.

Pointing out the emotion in a scene is like laughing at your own jokes.

If there’s true emotional content in a situation between characters, all you do is reveal it.

Just as an effective advertisement or page layout includes a lot of white space, a powerful scene requires immense restraint. Show things as simply as possible.