A sign of true craftsmanship for a writer is when he selects the right words and arranges them in an evocative way. After all, the most interesting character facing a significant moral decision in a fast-paced plot and exotic setting will sound flat if the words used are wrong. The vocabulary choices and ways they are arranged to create a sense of style is known as diction.

Consider this excellent use of diction from Frederic Brown’s short story “Puppet Show”:

Horror came to Cherrybell mounted on a burro led by an ancient, dirty and gray-bearded desert rat of a prospector who later gave the name of Dade Grant. Horror’s name was Garvane. He was approximately nine feet tall but so thin, almost a stickman, that he could not have weighed over a hundred pounds. Old Dade’s burro carried him easily, despite the fact that his feet dragged in the sand on either side. Being dragged through the sand for, as it later turned out, well over five miles hadn’t caused the slightest wear on the shoes – more like buskins, they were – which constituted all that he wore except for a pair of what could have been swimming trunks, in robin’s-egg blue. But it wasn’t his dimensions that made him horrible to look upon, it was his skin. It looked red, raw. It looked as though he had been skinned alive and the skin replaced raw side out. His skull, his face were equally narrow or elongated; otherwise, in every visible way, he appeared human – or at least humanoid. Unless you count such little things as the fact that his hair was robin’s-egg blue to match his trunks, as were his eyes and his boots. Blood red and light blue.

Notice how certain words describing Garvane evoke a sense of revulsion and alienness about him: “It looked as though he had been skinned alive and the skin replaced raw side out”, his hair and trunks are a contrasting “robin’s–egg blue”, he’s a “stickman”. In fewer than 100 words, we have a good idea of what Garvane looks like, but even more than that we are moved at an a gut level and find him repulsive.

Mastering diction really is a matter of reading a lot of good authors and spending a lot of time writing. But if a beginner, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind to improve your diction right away:
• Don’t use big words for the sake of showing off – Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Often such words distract the reader and make him think the author is a show-off.
• Don’t always go for the simplest, shortest word (as so many writing books wrongly recommend) – Instead, opt for the right word, that is the word that best fits in definition, tone, characterization, etc. The English language is vocabulary rich, and the word you’re looking for probably is out there.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

“Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.” – Delmore Schwartz

“A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.” – Raymond Chandler

“Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don’t forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.” – Paula Danziger

“The glory of a good tale is that it’s limitless and fluid…” – Stephen King

“In good writing, words become one with things.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

You’ve written story after story, but none of them ever seem to measure up to your favorite authors’ pieces. Meanwhile, the few of your stories that you thought were actually decent won’t sell. You’re starting to wonder if you have the natural-born talent to be a writer.

Before you start getting hard on yourself, we should explore your underlying assumption: that some people are born with a natural ability to write.

No one really knows if such a talent is “genetic.” There’s no doubt, however, that some people spend their formative years garnering the experiences and mastering the skills that later will make them good storytellers. So, with a qualitative “yes”, there are people with talent.

But they can squander it. Many become journalists, speech writers or college professors who never pen the Great American Novel despite their love of writing and literature. Others find their family’s needs and the daily grind of their jobs leave them too little time to write.

In any case, there are those with “less” talent who work at making themselves writers – and their writing shines brighter than many who are talented. Remember, George Orwell once was viewed as an average kid with no talent; today, he is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

So how do you “work” at becoming a “good” writer? Three ways:
• Read – Read a lot. Read the great works and authors of this genre, like Asimov, Bradbury and Heinlein. Read the great works and authors of all time, like Homer, Shakespeare and Hemingway. You can’t be a good writer unless you see how the masters did it.
• Write – Olympic weightlifters trained and practiced every day for years to achieve their success. Likewise, writers have to train and practice to achieve their success. Write every day, even if what you pen isn’t any good. It will get better over time.
• Get feedback – Placing your manuscript in a drawer for no one else to see rarely leads to improvement. Join a writers’ critique group (there are many online), attend writing workshops, hire a manuscript editor (full disclosure here: I offer such a service). See how others react to your work and use their advice to improve.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

“Books have to be heavy because the whole world’s inside them.” – Cornelia Funke

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.” – Umberto Eco

“Nothing is more human than a book.” – Marilynne Robinson

“A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is…like a life without pictures.” – Stephen King

“A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.” – Neil Gaiman

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

“I was inspired to write this book by those who are skeptical of the power of freedom to change the world.” – Nathan Sharansky

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” – Anne Frank

“I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren’t open that early.” – Daniel J. Boorstin

“It just happens to be the way that I’m made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.” – Haruki Murakami

“…Writing tells us we have choices. Writing tells us what those choices are. Writing tells us when we are shirking responsibility. Writing tells us we are overburdened…” – Julia Cameron

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks:

Along with achieving the right level of readability in your web text, you need to strike the appropriate tone. Tone is the author’s attitude toward a subject. It might be angry or weary or irreverent or any of a thousand other emotions and physical states.

Visitors to your author site who find your tone unbefitting almost certainly will leave. Though the desired tone varies among your website readers, we can anticipate what the average person expects.

Culturally, people have come to associate certain tones with specific genres. If your website’s tone is flirty and suggestive and you write westerns, you’ve likely misjudged your reading audience. Of course, each genre can possess a range of tones, but even then each one often is related to a subgenre.

A good strategy is for your website’s tone to match that used in your books. Readers often expect that. The website, after all, is like a book blurb. If the tone of either is humorous while the tone of your books are dead serious, the reader usually will feel jilted.

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If you’ve written multiple books in which each has a different attitude, then your website will need to use more of a default tone that works for any genre. To achieve that, follow these four basic guidelines…

Be personable
Write as if you are speaking directly to the reader by using words like you and your. In addition, use active voice to sound less bureaucratic and formal (passive voice also unnecessarily lengthens your sentence, reducing readability). Suppose you write a travel guide to national parks; your website text might say something like, “You’re visiting a national park but don’t have a lot of time. Maybe you’re just passing by or have only one day of your vacation to stop. What should you see, and how will you find those spots?”

Be upbeat
Always be energetic rather than dull and positive rather than negative. This helps generate interest and then excitement in the reader. Writing “The books’ trails are short enough that you can spend just a couple of hours on them so you can enjoy a leisurely day with plenty of time to do other stuff!” is a lot better than saying “Each trail takes about two hours to do. You’ll probably want to do a couple a day to keep the fat off.”

Be useful
If writing nonfiction, you want to show how visitors can benefit by reading your books. If writing fiction, you want to show that your books are suspenseful. Let your content or your writing style reflect this. To that end, a travel book website might include words such as “The series ensures you make the most of your limited time by focusing on the must-see wonders at our most visited national parks.”

Be descriptive
You don’t want to write long prosaic paragraphs, but you do want to sprinkle in descriptive phrasing and apt similes that connects the reader to your books’ subject matter. For example, in a travel guide to Wisconsin, you could write, “Bayfield County boasts crystal blue waters, lush green forests, and friendly Mayberry-like villages.”

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Usually issues with tone can be resolved by fixing a couple of sentences. Be forewarned, though, that sometimes you may need to take a whole new approach to the web page and start from scratch. As you outline each of your main points that you want to make in the text, focus on delivering them in a personable, upbeat way that demonstrates your book’s usefulness.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

Check out some of my writing guidebooks: