Writing advice from my uni teachers:
If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.
Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.
Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.
Before you write your novel, write a page of anything from your characters POV so you can get their voice right. Do this for every main character introduced.
A bit of writing advice I enthusiastically cosign!
One thing, not to be self-absorbed, that I get complimented on in my writing is my strong sense of individual voice in characters. So to add to this I would say, one thing I do a lot when I’m alone is work through dialogue and MOVEMENT out loud. How does she move when she’s excited? What are her tells when she lies? When she’s stressed, does she push her hair back, or unconsciously straighten up, or curl into herself?
A really fun exercise I do for the two ‘worlds’ I keep the most track of (OW and MaS in my character bibles is writing roughly the same situation with different characters. It gives you a sense of what they sound like both externally and internally. What is their vocabulary like? You should be able to do this for your mains and they SHOULD NOT sound the same, even if all four of them are walking to the flower seller down the street for a bouquet. And it’s okay if you need to tool on it for awhile! It took me quite awhile to be like, “okay this is what X sounds like” and sometimes I actually have gone back, when it’s crossed my mind, and changed dialogue to make it more ‘correct” The gift of online writing, I guess.
ANYWAY YES.
