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Variations on said, like answered, commented, added, replied, asked, queried, muttered, snarled, roared, are best used sparingly. They call attention to themselves and sometimes seem strained. Adverbs in speech tags often sound corny—she said kittenishly, he responded sneeringly, she hissed angrily…

If you don’t create evocative settings, your characters seem to have their conversations in vacuums or in some beige nowhere-in-particular. Some writers love description too much. They go on and on as if they were setting places at the table for an elaborate dinner that will begin later on. Beautif…

Fiction writing is less susceptible than journalistic writing to another class of problematic words. These are vogue words that seem to spring into general use and then are heard everywhere. They come from the political bureaucracy, from science (popular psychology especially), and from news events…

Even single words can be clichés. All words are created equal, but some words have grown more tired than others. That’s true not only of adjectives like unique or azure but even of certain function words. As, for example. Over the years writers have used as to get more information into their senten…

E. M. Forster’s classic Aspects of the Novel (1927) talks about this dimensional declension of characters from flat to round.