Matt Bell > Quotes

“Another unnecessary usage is what’s called an expletive construction—look for “there is,” “there are,” “there were”—which can be fixed simply by finding the stronger subject within the existing sentence and giving it a better verb to work with: “There were several new clues in the starlet’s hotel room” could be written as “The starlet’s hotel room offered up several new clues.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“The trick I’ve employed in the last five years is to have characters chatter away and then, in the next draft, take out every other line. Oddly enough, the speech has more life, more surprise.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“go through and take out as many section breaks within chapters as I could, deleting the white space and other markings between them. (By section break, I mean the smaller divisions of text that sometimes exist within chapters, usually set off by a string of three asterisks or something similar.) Late in my revision, I found that many of these mid-chapter breaks, all of which had seemed so essential, had become unnecessary and that losing those interruptions let my chapters read as more continuous and seamless.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“I’m a writer because I was a reader who wanted there to be more books like the books I loved.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“Remember also that people rarely say what they mean, and they often talk over each other without listening.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“In many drafts, there’s an overabundance of filler actions, a plethora of sighs and smiles and shrugs and winks, the occasional eyebrow rise or forehead furrow.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“To name something well can be one way to love it. You will have to love your novel for a long time. So, give it a name you can love, as soon as you can.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“If the purpose of a conversation is merely to deliver information, try condensing it as much as possible by converting it into summarized dialogue.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“As you proceed through your dialogue pass, analyze the inherent conflicts in each conversation: What do characters want in this scene? What are they willing to say to get what they want? How are they acquiescing to or resisting the demands of others? How does the tension in the conversation escalate as it progresses, and where are its complications and reversals?”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“The gap between the person a character is and the person they used to be (or are assumed to be) contains a lot of potential power.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“Over the years, I’ve come to believe that revision and rewriting are most of what good writing entails: writing a successful book isn’t only making the most of the first burst of inspiration, as pleasurable as that is. It’s also the sustained and often small-scale work of making a promising manuscript better hour by hour, day by day, slowly but steadily moving it closer to your imagined ideal.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“Sometimes a showier verb can be a bit much, but consider what you might use in place of any verb that feels so obvious it verges on the default. Your verbs are literally the most active part of your sentences, the place where the action occurs. More often than not, the more interesting the verb, the more interesting the action.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“There’s one notable exception to this advice: dialogue tags. Here, the most commonly used verbs, said and asked, will be the right choice most of the time, precisely because they’re so unremarkable.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“Use the Find function to search for each of the words I’ve just mentioned, as they appear in the particular tense of your novel. When you find a usage, delete the tag, then reread the paragraph in which it appears. If it’s clear that the recently untagged sentence or clause is a thought, you’re all set. If it’s not clear, rewrite the sentence to make it so without restoring the tag. These thought tags mediate the experience between the narrator and the writer;”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“While you’re working through these choices, be sure to reserve some time to revisit the endings of your chapters after you’re done rearranging.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“As Flannery O’Connor famously wrote, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“what your novel tells you it wants to be is ultimately more important than what you wanted it to be when you began.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“Scene by scene, look at the verbs you’ve chosen: Are they the best verbs, the most active, the most surprising? Or are they more pedestrian, everyday, overly mundane? Replacing even some of the most typical verbs with more precise and interesting ones will lift the level of your prose.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“Direct dialogue is where you report exactly what a character says; indirect dialogue is where you render the substance of the dialogue but not the exact language; summarized dialogue is a summary of a longer conversation. As you work your way through your dialogue pass, consider your cocktail of these three kinds of dialogue, what you’re using when and why. We don’t need a long passage of back-and-forth direct dialogue establishing what time characters should meet for brunch. We usually do need to see the crucial confession that breaks open a murder case”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“Remember that characters don’t need to rehash information the reader’s already learned, even if one person needs to update another. “The detective told the captain what they’d learned at the slaughterhouse” is as effective as an in-scene recounting of it, up to the point where the captain starts asking questions or offering new information.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“The various forms of to be (be, is, am, are, was, were, been, and being) are necessary and important parts of the English language, and in certain kinds of purposely flat or cold styles, they provide much of the intended effect. But for most prose styles, you might find you can profitably reduce the number of times you use them.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“To me, their presence in a sentence means I haven’t made the language fully mine.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“One category of verb you might be able to dramatically reduce are those indicating that a character is thinking: I thought, he wondered, she understood, they knew.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“I discovered the entire plot of the novel by doing this: the central mystery of that book came out of exploratory writing, not out of planning and outlining.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“I’d do a search for every one of these and try to reduce and replace wherever I could, looking to insert more telling action and the kind of character-specific movements and descriptions that will more accurately give dimension to the dialogue. What you’re looking for are details or actions demonstrating the emotional subtext of your character’s speech: A character who stares at the floor while saying “I promise to love you forever” might not mean it. Another who admits to a crime while trembling nervously in front of his mob boss employer might’ve been pressured into his confession, no matter how nakedly he recounts his supposed crime.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“You can also get rid of many verbs used to indicate that a character is looking at something: I saw, I looked, I watched. Cut those verbs and describe the thing being seen. Where you wrote, “she looked at the approaching car,” try “the car approached,”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“We wanted to rob the casino that was owned by the unscrupulous land developer” can more concisely be written as “We wanted to rob the casino owned by the unscrupulous land developer,” or, even better, “We wanted to rob the unscrupulous land developer’s casino.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“Avoid the Most Obvious Pairings of Words”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“Take the time to do a pass through your manuscript in which you edit only the dialogue,”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

“But note that there are plenty of reasons you might use to be: the goal here isn’t to eliminate it entirely, only to be sure you’re always using the strongest verb you can, on your way to making the best sentence possible.”
― Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts