Our brains use inductive logic; thus, pairing two specific actions together gives the readers all they need to understand.

In order to SHOW your character’s emotions, you need to know WHY the character feels that way. This is not as simple as it sounds.

Narrative will not deliver a feeling alone. Instead, zoom in. Give the image of an action that creates the feeling. Here's how.

As you improve, focus more on the nuances of what you know and not the novelty of something new. I call this learning to “write small.”

To write dialogue, invert the reading process. Don’t use dialogue to deliver information. Use it to imply emotions and psychology.

Invert your craft. Start with the deeper psychology, and then write what they'd say because of the feeling, not to explain that feeling.

Think about how dialogue affects many other elements of writing all at the same time. Below are my Top Five Dialogue Techniques.

I gave myself full permission to stop writing. I wasn’t going to write any more that night and I wasn’t going to write any more the next day

That’s why, to me, the worst Jeffery Eugenides book will always be remarkably better than the best Dan Brown book.

There are less-discussed and less-understood Time factors, such as the past perfect verb tense or the order of phrases and clauses.

When you use a verb tense without fully understanding it, you’re essentially sticking your reader into the Delorean and stepping on the gas.