A story is only as good as your ability to tell it. For a writer, this means being able to use language in such a way that it draws the reader into the page and keeps her there until the end of your tale. When you're a novice writer, most of these tips will help in revision. As you practice and become a better technician, you will start to create cleaner drafts at the sentence level. Here are my top tips for "cleaner" more readable prose: 

1. Use strong verbs. This isn't groundbreaking advice. Replace "to be" verbs, got, and put wherever possible with stronger verbs. "She was walking over the leaves" becomes "She walked over the leaves." "I got a new car" becomes "I bought a new car" or "I stole a new car" or "I acquired a new car." 

2. Eliminate adverbs. Again, not groundbreaking advice, but please do heed it. If you have a strong and concise verb, you don't need an adverb. This doesn't mean that you have to develop an allergy to adverbs, just use them when you are at a loss for anything better. "I walked gently over the leaves" becomes "I minced over the leaves" or "I tiptoed over the leaves." 

3. Don't editorialize. Just tell the story. If you find yourself ending a paragraph with your general opinion about what you've just written, cut it. (Click on Read More below)

Writing dialogue in a memoir piece or personal essay often gives novice writers trouble. Writing good dialogue in fiction is difficult enough. Now you're asked to write "fiction like" dialogue and  it all has to be true. But does it? Here are some tips for writing effective dialogue in memoir.

1.  Do I have to remember the conversation between my neighbor's cousin, my mom's hairdresser, and myself when I was eight years old?

​Unless the dialogue was so memorable that it was seared into your eight year old brain, then no. And you can sill use that exchange. How? You don't have to write what anyone has said word for word. That would get tedious and boring even if you did remember it. You just have to nail the spirit of the dialogue.

For example, in my book, The Bird Market of Paris, I included exchanges between myself and my grandfather, many of which happened when I was a child. I was lucky, because my grandfather was a man who liked to repeat himself, so I heard the same stories and we had the same conversations many times. But was I able to transcribe every word that we ever spoke to each other? No. I was able to boil down those conversations into writing that was truthful as well as interesting.