Category Archives: The Writing Process

What Does Your Dialogue Say About Your Characters?

Ace Jordyn Character Craft & Skills Dialogue Rewriting 2 Comments

Sometimes life has a way of sitting you down hard, making you take stock and reevaluating what you took for granted.  During one of these angsty periods, I found myself rethinking life goals and roles. Then came the hard part – articulating it. Somehow I had to find the words to define my feelings but I also needed the proper ones to express in a meaningful way what I was learning.

That got me thinking about dialogue in fiction and how we use it to convey information about characters like how they truly see the world.

The tendency is to make our protagonists the hero with a few issues who overcomes them and saves the day. As they are the point-of-view character, we learn a lot about how the character sees his world and reacts to it. With good writing, all the senses can be engaged. But, what about dialogue? Good dialogue is a window to a character’s soul. It is an opportunity to reveal, not tell.

‘Please, sir, I want some more.’

Who can ever forget that one famous line from Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens? Not only does it convey a little boy’s desperation, his starved state and his courage, it also informs us about the society in which he lives. The repetition of that simple phrase first by Oliver, then by Bumble who runs the workhouse and finally by Limbkins, Chairman of the Board of Guardians, firmly places Oliver’s words in our minds thus forcing us to live the horror of the statement from several points of view. This one simple piece of dialogue allows us to see and feel several aspects of a society.

This is followed by an equally simple phrase uttered and repeated: ‘That boy will be hung,’ said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. ‘I know that boy will be hung.’ There are no exclamation marks and no grandiose gestures, yet that simple statement followed by the simple speech tag said leaves us horrified.

There is a tendency to want to make characters appear smart and witty with that great comeback we would have liked to have when we ourselves were in an awkward situation. As writers, we must take care not to be helicopter parents, hovering over our characters, making them experience their lives the way we’d like to if we were them. Helicoptering can lead to sitcom dialogue – flat, witty characters without real depth – with purpose perhaps but not with depth.

Of all the books I’ve read and all the movies I’ve seen, my favorite dialogue, all 131 minutes of it, comes from the screen play of Edward Albee’s play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The first time I saw it, I was a kid off the farm in first year university. I was appalled. For over two hours, these characters did nothing but fight. To me, it was simple, ordinary, and all too familiar. How could this movie be critically acclaimed?

Yet, it is the one movie which I remember vividly. That script keeps me spell bound. Using simple dialogue, Albee captures failed marriages perfectly. The characters are vile – definitely not sympathetic – yet I’m riveted to the script. The dialogue is not mannered, not witty – it is ordinary yet perfectly captured. It rolls quickly. It’s fast paced. The reveal, the show, are perfectly executed as demonstrated in this exchange between Martha and George:

M: (swinging around) Look, sweetheart, I can drink you under any goddamn table you want … so don’t worry about me!|
G: Martha, I gave you the prize years ago… There isn’t an abomination award going that you….
M: I swear …  if you existed I’d divorce you….
G: Well, just stay on your feet, that’s all… These people are your guests, you know, and…
M: I can’t even see you… I haven’t been able to see you for years….
G: …. if you pass out, or throw up or something…
M: …. I mean, you’re a blank, a cipher….
G: …. and try to keep your clothes on, too. There aren’t many more sickening sights than you with a couple of drinks in you and your skirt up over your head, you know…
M: …. a zero…
(Script excerpt from: C/file/view/Script+for+Who’s+afraid+of+Virginia+Woolf.pdf)

Take the time to understand not only what motivates your characters, but what their fears, their disappointments, their hopes and aspirations are for that will not only determine their actions and reactions, but it will give them unique and strong voices which will reveal more about them than any well written prose can tell.

Happy Writing!

Rule Six

Craft & Skills Editing First Drafts Ideas & Plotting Rewriting The Writing Process 2 Comments

What do you do when your brainchild is stillborn?  What do you do when the story you’ve spent months-years-in crafting and writing, the story you’ve almost literally sweated blood over, the story you love more than all your other literary children . . .

Just . . .

Doesn’t . . .

Work . . .

Last week I gave another writer a beta read on the second draft of a science-fiction novel he’s writing.  (All third-party pronouns in this post are generic, so don’t bother trying to guess who it was.  Not telling.)  I was able to report that the writing was really good.  I was also forced to report that the novel had issues that I felt kept it from being publishable.  (Said issues mostly lay in world building, but aren’t germane to this discussion.)

My friend accepted my thoughts with grace and class, and agreed that the novel definitely needed more work.  We parted still friends; which, to me, is perhaps the sign of a premier friend-the ability to accept criticism of a personal labor of love and still be warm to the critic.

A couple of days after our conversation, this thought occurred to me:  Should I have told him to cut his losses and move on to something new?

At first I was shocked that the thought had even crossed my mind, but then I realized what had prompted it.

Rule Three of Heinlein’s Rules of Writing states:  You Must Refrain from Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order.  Now most of us understand that rule not to mean that Thou Shalt Write Only First Drafts, but rather, that to spend excessive amounts of time rewriting and polishing a work is ultimately counterproductive and contra-indicated for building income.  (A writer I once read comes to mind who said that after he finished the first draft of each book, he would then spend a year reviewing every single word in the draft, one by one, considering whether it was the best word in that place.  Eep.)

So that was part of what was in the back of my mind, because I knew my friend had already spent a pretty fair amount of time on this work, and I had just indicated a lot of it needed to be taken apart and put back together differently, which would take a lot more work.

But there was something else in the back of my mind.

You see, I finished my first novel in 2002.  Before you congratulate me on that, I have to say I started it in 1977.

Twenty.  Five.  Years.

I was young.  I was stupid.  I was working solo, without the benefit of knowledgeable readers.  I had started it in a fit of temper after finishing a particularly bad SF novel which I threw across the room.

I wrote for a few weeks, then bogged down in the story.  I gave it up for a while, went and read some more good science fiction and fantasy, then came back and tried again.

That was the pattern for the next twenty-five years:  write until I became frustrated, then go away for months, or even a year or so, but eventually circle back to it, frequently starting over again.  By the time I finally drove it to a conclusion, I estimate I wrote over a half million words.  The finished manuscript was well under half that length, and it was too long.

It didn’t sell.

I gave it another full revision/rewrite/polish.

It didn’t sell.

Although I had never heard Robert Sawyer’s addendum to Heinlein’s Laws (Rule Six: Start Working on Something Else), I intuitively knew that I couldn’t just fixate on that novel; I couldn’t just hover over it and continue to try to pump life into it.  That way led to stagnation and sterility.  So I put it on the shelf, and moved on to other things, and before long did find my author’s voice and began selling professionally in 2007.

I still harbor love and affection for that first story, that first novel.  It still resonates in my mind.  But I realized something this week as I considered my friend’s novel:  mine will probably never be published, because I have too much new stuff I want to write to consider going back and trying one more time to build an edifice of words on a faulty foundation.

In the end, I answered my question about my friend’s novel:  “No.”  It wasn’t a warranted question.  It wasn’t my call to make.  And besides, there’s no doubt in my mind he can address the issues and write the story.

In the end, I answered my question about my novel:  “Yes.”   With a certain amount of sadness, I let it go.

Rule Six: Start Working on Something Else.

Tomorrow.

In Translation

Craft & Skills Leigh Galbreath Rewriting The Writing Life 3 Comments

A while ago, I got into a conversation with a friend of mine about whether or not he should use a commonly used term as a name for a certain magical phenomenon in his fantasy novel or if he should call it by a word he made up just for that book. It’s not a new conversation, especially for fantasy and science fiction writers. I’ve had that conversation a few times and I still find the argument a little odd. I mean, why use a made word when someone’s already come up with a word that works just fine?

His argument was that since his POV characters live on a different world, they don’t actually speak or think in English (the language the novel is written in), and so the made up word would be more correct.

It got me thinking. If that one word has to be in another language because the character doesn’t know English, why is the rest of the novel not written in this other language? Why bother with English at all?

The best example of this is when I heard people complain that a TV show set in ancient Rome used modern curse words. The complaint was that those words hadn’t existed in Rome at that time, so they shouldn’t be used in the show. To which I often responded that, if you really want to get technical, they were all speaking Latin, and Latin doesn’t use articles (such as the or a). Therefore, if we’re getting rid of words that didn’t exist at the time, we’d have to chuck those a well. Now do you really want to watch a show or read a book that doesn’t ever use the word the?

Me neither.

The way I’ve come to think of it is like this — every work of fiction where the characters are based in a time or place other than where the writer lives is a translation. It’s sort of taken for granted that those characters wouldn’t really know the writer’s native language, but since none of us are J.R. Tolkien, we take the other language (whether real or imagined) and turn it into English for the benefit of our readers. Our goal is to make the story easily comprehensible to anyone who picks the book up. And when you’re translating text, you don’t just leave the odd word untranslated to prove that the point of view was originally in a different language.

I mean, why force your reader to slog through dialect and odd terms when they don’t have to? Sure, a few bits of dialect can give the text a little color and texture. You may even run into the occasional term that just won’t translate.

But if you decide you just have to have that made up term, it will require context and explanation for the reader to understand what you’re talking about. When you’ve already got enough to explain with world-building and character development and plot points, this seems like effort you could put to better use. Why make things harder for yourself by having to explain one term in a believable fashion, without slowing down the story, when you could easily have just used a common word that people will understand in an instant?

Not that there aren’t writers out there who are gifted at slipping in the odd dialect and crazy, made-up word that just zings. If you’re one of those people…well, I’m insanely jealous. You are a rare breed. But as for the rest of us, it’s better to err on the side of the easily understandable.

So, I ask you, when you find yourself wanting to use that cleverly created magical lexicon you’ve come up with, or just feel the need to toss in a made-up term, to make sure you really need it. Ask yourself why a normal, everyday word can’t do the job, and make sure you really want to put in the time and effort it will take to make the reader understand what you’re talking about (and no, creating a dictionary at the back of the book ala Frank Herbert doesn’t count).

Please, be kind to your readers. Don’t make them work any harder than they have to. Treat the text like you would a translation and make it easy to understand so they can focus on what’s really important-your fantastic masterpiece of a story.

Why I like to write myself into a corner

Colette Black Conflict Craft & Skills Ideas & Plotting Rewriting No Comments

Most writers say your first idea is cliché, your second idea is mediocre, so you should always go with your third or fourth. For this reason, I like to write myself into a corner, or at least plan myself into one. But that’s bad, you say? I don’t think so. At least, not always.

The reason I think it’s a good idea is the same reason I think most of us, at least me, get ourselves stuck in the first place. We’re going along with our story saying to ourselves, “Well, if this happened, this character would do this, then this would happen…” You get the idea. But we reach a point and go, “Uh-oh, then everyone dies, or then this plot-point won’t work, or then we can’t end up over here.” The corner. But, this is where we can force our mind to come up with a better story, and NOT by saying, “well, if so-and-so does this then it’ll work.” The whole reason we ended up in the corner is because so-and-so wouldn’t do that. We have to come up with a better twist that will allow our characters to be true to who they are, while still moving the story forward. An example:

A few days ago, my family and I were driving in our van listening to a book on CD. I wont’ name it, but some of you will figure it out based on this example. Please know that this author is heads and more heads above me in every area, but this one scene….

We have a quick-thinking girl who has the ability to light anything that’s not alive on fire. Her and her friends are being chased by worm-filled, worm-controlled zombies. Listening to this, my kids immediately said, “Zombies means dead. Light them on fire!”

It took forever for the character to finally figure it out, then it took forever for her to figure out she could save energy by just setting their heads (their control-center not full of worms) on fire.

The comment was made, “Well, how could the author do anything different? If she figured it out immediately then the zombies are no longer a danger.” (The corner)

So we played around with the truth that this character would immediately, or at least very soon, come upon the solution herself. So how could one keep the story going?

“Wouldn’t it be cool if she lights them on fire, but the body explodes and worms fly everywhere and the heroine and her group are nearly contaminated.”

Now that’s chilling, it ratchets up the suspense, and it makes the obvious solution a surprising added danger.

“But then they have no defense and they’ll all die.” (Corner)

No, then it makes sense for her to wait before lighting their hair on fire, or for her to  just ignite the tops of their heads as a last resort, and since the brain is left mostly intact by the little wormies, it makes sense that their fat bodies won’t be close enough to the fire to puff up like popcorn and explode. But of course, it’s easy to be critical of someone else’s work. Like I said, this writer is brilliant, but I used this small scene as an example because my family had fun playing with the plot.

A couple of months ago, I found myself in a corner with a book I was working on. I struggled and struggled with how to move the plot forward. I won’t bore you with the details, (mostly because it was complicated and spanned several scenes) but I worked out the semantics and turned a mediocre middle into a hair-raising rise in tension that went much better than  originally intended.

So, if your characters are pushing your story into an unsolvable dilemma, maybe instead of trying to steer them clear of the danger, let them take you to the cliff’s edge. Like them, on the brink of utter destruction, you might find an unexpected twist that will catapult you to a higher ledge with a better view. Just make sure it’s not a convenient fix. I’ll talk about those in my next post.