Prose, Dialogue and Point of View
In brief: Nobody notices good prose the first time through. They notice that they forgot they were reading. This lesson is the craft of getting out of the story's...
Language and craft is where the story judge scores your control: precise prose, dialogue that sounds like people, a point of view that never wobbles, and mechanics clean enough to be invisible. It is the least glamorous dimension and the most fixable one, because almost everything in it is technique rather than talent. A story that scores low here usually has no single disaster, just a hundred small frictions that keep shaking the reader awake.
The standard to hold in your head is transparency. Contest prose does not need to be beautiful; it needs to be frictionless, so the reader stays inside the dream of the story. Every awkward tag, every head-hop, every sentence that must be read twice is a hairline crack in that dream. This lesson is a repair kit for the five commonest cracks.
Precision Beats Decoration
The strongest prose move in fiction is the exact noun and the exact verb. "She walked quickly through the rain" is four vague words doing one word's work: "she hurried through the drizzle" or "she ran" says more with less. Adverbs are usually the receipt for a weak verb; whenever you find one, ask whether a stronger verb could eat it. The same for adjectives stacked two deep: pick the one that works and release the other.
Vary sentence length deliberately, because rhythm is meaning. A paragraph of same-length sentences flattens even dramatic events. Long sentences gather and accumulate; short ones land. The oldest trick in the book still works: build with two or three long sentences, then hit. Like this.
Economy is a scored virtue: the rubric's low band for craft reads padded and awkward. In a 2,000-word ceiling, every sentence pays rent. The revision pass that helps most is the one where you cut ten percent by weight, not by scene: the throat-clearing phrase (he began to, she started to, it seemed that), the double-told beat, the second example where one would do.
Dialogue Is Action in Quotation Marks
Dialogue earns its place the same way scenes do: it must move pressure or reveal character, ideally both at once. Real people say hello, discuss the weather, and repeat themselves; characters must not, because story-dialogue is not transcription, it is compression. The craft is to keep the rhythm of speech while cutting its redundancy: contractions, interruptions, unfinished sentences, and no character ever answering exactly the question they were asked.
That last technique deserves its own paragraph: people speak past each other. In life, "Did you post the letter?" is answered with "I had a lot on today." Evasion, deflection and subtext are where dialogue becomes drama. If your characters answer each other directly for a whole page, the scene has no undercurrent, and an undercurrent is usually cheap to add: decide what each speaker wants from the exchange and let neither say it.
Tags and beats: said is invisible and therefore almost always right; exclaimed, opined and chuckled are speed bumps. Better than either is the action beat, a small physical act attached to the line: "She folded the letter twice. 'You should go.'" The beat carries the tone, anchors the scene in a body, and spares you an adverb. One beat per exchange is seasoning; one per line is noise.
Point of View: Pick a Skull and Stay in It
Point of view is a contract: you tell the reader whose eyes they are behind, and then you do not break it. The commonest violation in contest stories is the head-hop, where a close third-person story about Asha suddenly reports what Vikram is thinking mid-scene. Each hop is small, but the cost is total: the reader is no longer anywhere, and emotional impact drains out precisely because caring was attached to one consciousness.
Close third and first person are the workhorses of short fiction because intimacy is efficient: everything on the page doubles as characterisation, since it is filtered through one sensibility. The filter is the point. Behind Asha's eyes, a kitchen is not a list of objects; it is her mother's kitchen, and what she notices in it is who she is. If your narration would read identically behind any character's eyes, you have a camera, not a point of view.
Two practical rules keep the contract intact. First, the narrator can only know what the point-of-view character can perceive, remember or deduce; the moment you write "unknown to her," you have left her skull. Second, keep psychic distance consistent within a scene: do not zoom from cold report (the woman stood at the window) to inner monologue (God, let it not be him) in adjacent sentences without meaning to. Both are legal positions; lurching between them is the wobble judges feel even when they cannot name it.
The Mechanics Pass
The story rubric names clean mechanics because errors are not cosmetic: a page-one typo tells a judge, fairly or not, that no one read this twice, and every error after that reads as confirmation. The fix is a separate, final proofreading pass that has nothing to do with art: tense consistency, dialogue punctuation (commas inside the quotes before tags, a new paragraph per speaker), its and it's, dropped words from fast edits.
Read the whole story aloud, slowly, once. The mouth catches what the eye forgives: the doubled word, the sentence with no landing place, the dialogue no human could say without inhaling twice. It costs fifteen minutes and it is, minute for minute, the highest-scoring revision technique that exists. Writory judges every story in its own language and tradition, so this pass applies whatever language you write in: the ear is the universal editor.
Head-hop and padded prose
Asha began to walk quickly into the kitchen, feeling very nervous inside. Vikram watched her and thought she looked tired, and he wondered silently to himself if she knew the truth yet.
Two skulls in two sentences, a began-to, a doubled adverb, and thoughts reported from a head the story does not own. The reader is nowhere.
One skull, exact verbs, subtext
Asha hurried into her mother's kitchen. The third teacup was already out. 'You're up early,' she said. Vikram kept his eyes on the kettle. 'Traffic,' he said.
Everything is filtered through Asha: the cup she notices, the eyes he keeps averted. Nobody answers the real question, which is how the scene tells us there is one.
Exercises
- Take one page of your draft and eat every adverb with a stronger verb. Then cut ten percent of the page by weight: throat-clearing, doubled beats, second examples.
- Rewrite a dialogue scene so that neither character ever answers the exact question asked. Decide privately what each wants from the exchange and let neither say it.
- Find every sentence in your draft that reports something your point-of-view character could not perceive, remember or deduce. Rewrite each from inside the skull.
- Read your story aloud, slowly, marking every place your mouth stumbles. Fix only those places, then read it aloud once more.
Key takeaways
- Exact nouns and verbs beat decoration; adverbs are receipts for weak verbs, and a ten-percent cut by weight tightens everything.
- Dialogue is compression with an undercurrent: nobody answers the exact question, said stays invisible, and action beats carry tone.
- Point of view is a contract: one skull per scene, only what it can perceive, at a steady psychic distance.
- Finish with the mouth: one slow read-aloud catches the frictions that quietly cost craft points.
Related lessons
Part of Story Craft in the free Writory Academy: about 10 minutes, Intermediate level, with a quiz that counts toward a signed certificate on the Certificate Track. By the Writory editorial team. Updated July 2026.