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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2573214" data-attributes="member: 5171">God no. Only in my satirical dreams. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I know you're kidding, but in my last read of Pride and Prejudice (for my most recently completed novel, a swashbuckling fantasy gender-reversed retelling called Courtship and Cutlery), what I saw was that while Austen tends to hit her settings in exposition, she is really really good at getting across character through dialogue while ostensibly talking about something else. There are a lot of conversations about marriage and the conventions of the time that come out just beautifully in the voices of her characters.What most surprised me, I think, was realizing that while my high school and college teachers had waxed rhapsodical about her language and how beautiful it was, Austen's writing is so incredibly angry when you get beneath the humorous surface. She's a woman who has no other outlet in her world save writing, and she's making some pretty cutting commentary without pulling her punches.Beyond that... when I went to a novel-editing workshop, the most surprising thing I heard was that too many novel writers learn to write from short stories. That's good to a point -- no sense making all your mistakes in a novel when you can make them on something shorter -- but it often results in people applying to novels what they learned from short story classes, and so you get novels by short-story writers that have well-crafted voice and perfect word choices and lovely sentence structure and don't waste space... but which don't have the structure to support a novel plot.According to the teacher, who has 75 novels published, what gets a short story rejected is its voice. If it has a good voice, it's on the road to acceptance, even if the plot is barely there. What gets a novel rejected is its structure. If the structure doesn't work, it's not going to fly, no matter how pretty the voice is -- but a novel with a good structure can sell as long as the voice isn't actively painful to read.(Note: This is not Tacky the unpublished guy saying this. This is the guy with 75 novel publications saying this.)So while it's good to get your dialogue polished, the absolute best thing you can do for your novel is get it plotted and outlined really well, and polish that outline, so that you know what's going to happen, you spend the right time in the right places, you keep tension and suspense, and you move the whole deal along at a good clip. If you do that, you're a lot of the way there, no matter what your voice is like. Go back and fix your voice later.None of which really helps people who don't write. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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