Ramble Writing of R.D. Hayes

Dialogue tags are words which refer dialogue to a specific character. “Said” and “asked” are two common examples of dialogue tags. “I won’t help her!” said Christina. Dialogue tags are an important aspect of writing. When scenes have several characters, they help determine which character is speaking. Novice writers tend to use dialogue tags with adverbs to make it more colorful. “I won’t help her!” screamed Christina furiously. “I won’t help her!” Christina shouted angrily. “I won’t help her!” shrieked Christina nervously. Dialogue tags like these are distracting and pull the reader away from the true dialogue. There are better ways to make your character come alive without using adverbs. The actions of the character and dialogue will be enough to bring your story to life. If possible, get rid of dialogue tags. Try using actions and descriptions to show who’s speaking and to increase intensity in your scene. Christina slammed the phone down. “I won’t help her if she refuses to help he...

By:  Seth Morabito  –  CC BY-SA 2.0 I know starting out in a writing career, especially with writing and publishing books, is tough one. There is so much information out there on writing a book that you don’t know where to begin. These blog post are some of the best that I have found on the web. They have helped me to see what it really takes to write an EBook that sells. I hope you enjoy this blog post on the tope blog post for writing books. These are only some of my favorite blog post on writing books. I don’t have a complete list but when I do, you can guarantee that I am going to blog about it. When I find other interesting post that will help you to get your book written and published, I’ll be sure to update this blog post.   What Software do You Use to Write books This blog post on writing an EBook goes through different software that is used for writing a book. I found this post and really enjoyed how well written it was and a lot of the software th...

  Some of you might find this humorous; I find it rather irritating but nonetheless, I am going to write about it to get it off my chest. Ironically; this was something that this guy, who this story is based off of, told me to do. He always said that I bottle things up until I finally exploded. Well, today was one of those days when I finally exploded and I exploded to the max. I traveled from Kellyville, Oklahoma to Bixby, Oklahoma to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and then to Stillwater, Oklahoma which is where this story took place. I was already tired from all the traveling and the lack of sleep I got the night before. I had planned on meeting this guy, my ex, earlier but he decided to sleep in late so he missed my text so I drove to Oklahoma City, bypassing Stillwater, just to turn around and have to drive all the way back out to Stillwater to meet him. I pull up and he is working on his car, and I must say that he looked rather hot but then again, I do like a guy when he has been wo...

I will be the first to admit I write articles as fast as I can to get them published. I will also admit, I may have skipped over the editing portion a time or two during my writing career.    The first article I had  wrote for an online company was on writing. I was asked by Associated Content to write a piece on the different styles of writing. I was about to miss the time frame so I skipped over editing and went straight to the review process.    Now, if you have ever written for Associated Content or Yahoo! Contributor Network, you know that they go through an editor before they ever publish anything. Well, either this editor was in a hurry or he didn't exactly know how to edit. The article was amazing; it flowed well, it grabbed the readers attention, it was almost the perfect article except one thing; the title was misspelled.   I didn't realize the title had been misspelled until I had a flood of comments, embarrassing commen...

It had been a long time since I wrote a short story. I use to write all the time, especially for my kids. I thought it was going to be something that I could easily pick up, kind of like riding a bike right? Yeah, that's right. It is more complicated than this. Sure, the thoughts were there, my will power had diminished, so why was it so difficult for me to write?    My thoughts were all over the place. It was as though my thoughts were coming at me faster than my hands could type. It wasn't like it was back in the good ole days when people used pen and paper and you kind of had no choice but to slow down. Nope, this was putting fingers to keyboard and the words weren't being put down like I had wanted them to be.    I took a second to look back at my work and I was disgusted. I had actually written that? I must be tired, hungry, or something. Nothing made sense.    During all of this all I could think of was, boy I sure am glad that I didn't publish this b...

The best article that I had written, and ended up getting the most page views, was in an article I wrote about kids getting tattoos.    I learned a long time ago that if you can create chaos, so to speak, on the internet and get people stirred up, they are likely to share your content and give you feedback after feedback. It didn’t matter if the feedback was negative or positive, the publicity was great.    This might seem a little odd to you, but it’s what makes or breaks most writers on the internet. I was never really any good at keyword stuffing or keeping up with html or any of that other jargon. I had to do something, my wallet was suffering and I had posted article after article with no response.    After my little stint I realized something that internet marketing gurus had been preaching all along, there is nothing wrong with creating a controversy as long as it is something that you believe in and you are willing to back it 100%.    The ...

You love writing. Writing is what you do and you have gotten pretty good at it. You set down everyday and try to write a little but the day seems to short and you have things that you need to do. The commitment seems harder and harder each day. You are finding it difficult to stay focused and you always seem to find something that needs to be done, other than writing. Most struggling authors call putting your tush in a chair, a commitment. It seems hard to do and once you are there, it seems hard to stay put. You need that commitment if you are going to get anywhere with your writing. Most writers that are just beginning their journey, usually has another job, a family, and about a million other commitments that they have to attend to each day. The writer's spouse will not usually understand their compulsion to write and their friends will sometimes remind them that they are just wasting their time. These are the people who you really need to get to understand your commitment to wr...