USE OLD SONG LYRICS TO HELP YOU WRITE ROMANTIC DIALOGUE

       While some writers listen to soft romantic music playing in the background for inspiration while writing romantic dialogue, I prefer listening to the lyrics of love songs from the 1940s.
      The words--especially those of Oscar Hammerstein ("Some Enchanted Evening") and Irving Berlin ("Always")--carry me to a special mental place where I translate their beautiful thoughts into beautiful words for my stories.
     Try inserting well-known lyrics into your romantic dialogue. Then, when you've completed the scene, go back in and substitute the songwriters' lyrics with words of your own. Paraphrase!
      Almost immediately, you'll see how the poetic lyrics from those 1940 love songs have influenced and improved your word choices. Try it. Your romantic dialogue will sing off the pages.

Through the Fiction Glass

         

     Fiction is a mirror we hold up to the world that reflects all of Earth’s nuanced drama.

     It takes only the reader’s imagination to replicate the sharp-eyed images provided by the author— the passions, the tensions, the emotions— and indulge, no, luxuriate! in these joyful capsules of life.

     Writers achieve richness for their characters while satisfying voyeuristic curiosity. Writers provide the pantry from which ebook readers re-supply their space-time continuum called Nook, Kindle or iPad—congruent portals to the Universe.

     Others, the purists, are content to caress their paper and hard back books fingering the vellum, smelling the ink, holding them close like soft newborns.

     We turn pages—each a fragmentary reflected piece of drama—where words become heroes or heroines, villains or benefactors, saints or sinners. Where words define good and evil, strength and vulnerability, love and hate. Where words provide exotic worlds into which the mundane or the intellectually curious may escape.

     “Where’s my mirror?”