Category: dialogue

If you’ve never heard that term and are grasping for a pop culture reference… don’t bother. I just made it up. The reasons why will soon be as plain as…

Well, you’ll see.

As I’ve said once or thrice before, good dialogue is everything. We learn so much subtle stuff from characters by what they say and how they say it. Does Bob call Cindy his girlfriend or his woman or his old lady? Is she his lover, his ho, his chica, his bitch, his significant other? No matter what their relationship is, the words he uses to describe it tell us something about him.

One term that comes up a lot while reading contest submissions–or writing of any type, really—is on the nose dialogue. I’ve seen it tossed out to beginners numerous times in feedback, but usually without any explanation. It’s the difference between “Why are you always so disrespectful to me in staff meetings, Bob?” and “What the hell’s your problem, anyway?” At its very simplest, what this means is the character (or characters) are saying precisely what they’re thinking with no subtlety to it whatsoever. There’s no inference, no implications, no innuendoes or layered meanings. It’s dialogue stating the obvious, and I’ve mentioned before what a horrible idea it is to state the obvious.

On the nose dialogue usually strips away character, too. When your gangsta drug dealers begin to lament the failed potential of their fallen brethren, they’re not speaking like people who grew up on the street. That’s the writer poking through and trying to tell us something. Often it’s to spew out some character elements or backstory, and it comes out awkward because it’s being forced from the character speaking.

To be clear, there is a difference between on the nose and exposition. While most exposition is on the nose, the reverse is not always true. You can have on the nose dialogue when people talk about their relationship (or someone else’s), the Thai food they had last night, or the movie they want to go see tomorrow.

Here’s a couple things you should be on the lookout for–these are all either common with on the nose dialogue or sure signs you’re avoiding it.

Proper English–I’ve mentioned before the difference between written English and spoken dialogue. When dialogue follows all the rules of grammar it starts to get wooden and lose a lot of its flavor. Sometimes there’s a point to this. One of my own characters in Ex-Heroes, Stealth, is a bit of a grammar Nazi. So is Data on Star Trek (robots and aliens always have great grammar for some reason). For the vast majority of us though, we get a bit loose when we speak. We use contractions and mismatch verbs and numbers. It just happens. When we don’t, dialogue becomes rigid, and that’s just a short shuffle from being wooden.

Characters talking to themselves–Nine times out of ten, if someone’s talking to themselves out loud, it’s on the nose. All those monologues about stress, Yakko psyching himself up, or Dot trying to figure out how to get past the thirteen ninjas to free Wakko… odds are every bit of that is on the nose dialogue.

Telling what’s happening–While it’s never good, on the nose dialogue is a killer in scripts, especially when it takes this route. It’s when characters describe what they’re doing for no real reason. Not when they explain what they’re doing (say, defusing a bomb), but when they’re just saying their actions aloud. Have you ever heard an old radio-show when the actors had to depend on just dialogue with no visuals at all?

“Lamont, is that you? Help me! I’m tied to this chair.”

“Easy, Margot. Just let me get this blindfold off you… there we go.”

“Oh, that’s better. I can see now.”

This kind of clumsy dialogue immediately tells the reader that the writer isn’t picturing this scene visually at all. For screenwriters, this kind of thing is almost guaranteed to get your script tossed in the big pile on the left.

Lack of jargon–The idea of slang has been around for a long time. Bram Stoker talked about it in Dracula 120 years ago, and it’s a safe bet printers had their own special jargon in the workplace less than a decade after Guttenberg made his printing press. Everyone has their own set of words and terms that gets used within their particular group, and these words spill out into most of their conversations. In other words, lawyers speak like lawyers, mechanics talk like mechanics, and sci-fi geeks with no lives talk like Klingons (or Na’Vi, these days, I guess). When these characters lose these basic subtleties, their dialogue starts getting on the nose.

Lack of flirting–It sounds silly, I know, but it’s one to look for. This is a fact of human nature. We show affection for one another. We all flirt with friends and lovers and potential lovers, sometimes even at extremely inopportune times. It’s not always serious, it can take many forms, but that little bit of playfulness and innuendo is present in most casual dialogue exchanges. It’s impossible to flirt with on the nose dialogue because it requires subtlety and implied meanings. If absolutely no one in your story flirts on any level, there might be something to consider there.

Five easy things to look for in your dialogue. They’re not the only ways your words can be on the nose, but they’re the most common, by far.

Next week, I’d like to talk to you about… well, you know. Everybody knows, right?

Until then, go write.

I’d love to say there’s more to this pop-culture reference than just the number three, but I’d be lying.

Maybe.

So, it struck me a while back that I haven’t really prattled on about characters in quite a while. I’ve brought them up as kind of a sideline thing while talking about other story elements, but I haven’t focused on characters specifically. So I started thinking about them and why some come across so well on the page while others leave a reader cringing.

That got me thinking about Bob. To be honest, first it got me thinking about Yakko Warner, my usual example, but Yakko’s a pretty well-established character already. So I ended up with Bob, and wondering what could make him a good leading man for my action-adventure story about cyber-ninjas from the future.

If we want to make Bob the best character he can be, I think there are three key traits he needs to have.

First and foremost, a good character has to be believable. It doesn’t matter if said character is man, woman, child, cocker spaniel, Thark warrior, or protocol droid. If the reader or audience can’t believe in them within the established setting, the story’s facing an almost impossible challenge right from page one.

Bob has to have natural dialogue. It can’t be stilted or forced, and it can’t feel like he’s just the author’s mouthpiece, spouting out opinions or political views or whatever. The words have to flow naturally and they have to be the kind of words this person would use. I saw a story once where one high school jock said in amazement to another “You broke up with her via text?” Via? Is that even remotely the type of word or phrasing that would come out of a teenage football player’s mouth?

On a similar note, the same goes for Bob’s motives and actions. There has to be a believable reason he does the things he does. A real reason, one that makes sense with everything we know (or will come to know) about him. It’s immediately apparent, just like with dialogue, when a character’s motivations are really just a veiled version of the writer’s.

Also, please note that just because a character is based on a real person who went through true events does not automatically make said character believable. I’ve tossed out a few thoughts here about the difference between real-real and fiction-real, and it’s where many would-be writers stumble. They think because the amazing story they’re telling about Bob is true, it’s somehow valid. He really did this, therefore the reader must accept it. Alas, it just doesn’t work that way. Remember, there is no such thing as an “unbelievable true story,” only an unbelievable story.

Second, tied very closely to the first, is that a good character needs to be relatable. As readers, we get absorbed in a character’s life when we can tie it to elements of our own lives. We like to see similarities between them and us, so we can make extended parallels with what happens in their lives and what we’d like to happen in our lives. Luke Skywalker is a boy from a small town with big dreams (just like me) who goes off to join a sacred order of super powered knights (still waiting for that–but it might happen). There’s a reason so many novels and movies revolve around the idea of ordinary people caught up in amazing situations. Heck, Stephen King has made a pretty sizeable fortune off that basic premise.

Some of this goes back to the idea of being on the same terms as your audience and also of having a general idea of that audience’s common knowledge. There needs to be something they can connect with. Many of us have been the victims of a bad break up or two. Very, very few of us (hopefully) have hunted down said ex for a prolonged revenge-torture sequence in a backwoods cabin. The less common a character element is, the less likely it is your readers will be able to identify with it. If your character has nothing but uncommon or rare traits, they’re unrelatable. If Bob is a billionaire alien with cosmic-level consciousness who sees all of time and space at once and only speaks backwards in metaphor… how the heck does anyone identify with that?

Oh, but wait! I see a hand shooting up in the back. Watchmen has the all-powerful Doctor Manhattan, doesn’t it? Ahhhh, but y’see Timmy, one of the primary character traits we remember about him isn’t his omnipotence. It’s his awkward fumbling when he tries to interact with the people in his life. He’s the ultimate social outcast–trying to fit into a clique (humanity) he’s grown out of, and aware that every day he’s a little less a part of that group. He even acknowledges that losing his girlfriend–his last real connection with the clique–means he probably won’t even try to fit in anymore. If that’s not universally relatable, what is?

If readers can’t identify with Bob, they can’t be affected by what happens to him. Which brings us to our final point…

Third, a good character needs to be likeable. As readers and/or audience members, we have to want to follow this character through the story. Just as there needs to be some elements to Bob we can relate to, there also have to be elements we admire and maybe even envy a bit. If he’s morally reprehensible, a drunken jackass, or just plain uninteresting, no one’s going to want to go through a few hundred pages of his exploits… or lack thereof.

Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean a good character has to be a saint, or even a good person. The lead character of The Count of Monte Cristo is an escaped prisoner driven all-but-mad with thoughts of revenge who spends most of the book destroying the lives of several men and their loved ones. In Pitch Black, Riddick is a convicted mass-murderer who likes mocking all the people around him. Hannibal Lecter is a compelling, fascinating character on page and on the screen, but no one would ever mistake him for a role model. Yet in all these cases, we’re still interested in them as characters and are willing to follow them through the story.

A good character should be someone we’d like to be, at least for a little while. That’s what great fiction is, after all. It’s when we let ourselves get immersed in someone else’s life. So it has to be a person–and a life– we want to sink into.

Now, I’m sure anyone reading this can list off a few dozen examples from books and movies of characters that only have one or two of these traits. It’d be silly for me to deny this. I think you’ll find, however, the people that don’t have all three of these traits are usually secondary characters. Often they’re also stereotypes, too. The creepy neighbor, the gruff boss, the funny best friend, the scheming villain. They don’t need all three traits– three dimensions, if you will–because they aren’t the focus of our attention. They’re the bit players, so to speak, and a good writer isn’t going to waste his or her time pouring tons of energy into a minor character who has no real bearing on the story.

Yeah, up top when I said I was lying about the 3-D thing, I was lying. I do that.

So there you have it. Three steps to stronger, three-dimensional characters.

Next time… well, I’m running short of ideas again, so unless someone suggests a good topic, next week might be a bit of a cop-out.

Before I forget, a quick shout out to Brave Blue Mice, a fun little fiction ‘zine which asked to publish the RSS feed for the ranty blog on their site. For the record, no, I didn’t know what that meant when they asked, but Greg explained it to me in simple terms even a caveman could understand. Go visit, read some stories, and send him a few of your own.

And go write.

A long-overdue pop culture reference for the title, just to get us moving.

It’s always interesting to me when I try to figure out what next week’s blog will be about, for that little teaser at the end of this week’s blog. This week’s started off when I was passing quick notes back and forth with a friend who’s doing the NaNoWriMo challenge this year. He had a clever idea for one of his upcoming chapters, about midway though his work-in-progress, and I… well, I was advising against it. Then someone brought up the same issue on a publisher’s message board I frequent. A few days later, I was reading scripts for a contest and found one where said issue had become one of the problems crippling the screenplay.

What is said problem, you ask?

Well, the first time I ever saw Doctor Who was halfway through a very trippy story arc called “The Deadly Assassin” (which has finally become available on DVD). It was probably the worst set of episodes to try to start watching the show on, because the Doctor spent a good chunk of it in the mind-twisting reality of the Matrix (yes, Doctor Who had a Matrix decades before Keanu Reeves did). A few months later I tried again and WGBH (which only had so many episodes) had circled back around to “Robot,” which was the first Tom Baker story, also featuring the lovely Elizabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane. And that’s how I became a Doctor Who fan, and have remained one for most of my life.

What the heck does that have to do with any of this?

Well, it’s hard to tell, isn’t it? Suddenly bam I’ve gone from the usual rant to some senile doddering about my childhood without any sort of transition.

Ahhhh-haaaahhhhhh…

Transitions are what I wanted to rant about this week. That moment your story goes from this to something else. It can be a shift in character, person, location, or time. Every time you switch, you’re asking your audience to take a moment to readjust. The bigger the shift, the bigger the time of adjustment. Most of us could make it past either a six inch step or a three foot drop, but one’s going to take a lot more effort than the other.

As a writer, you don’t want the audience to think about that adjustment. If everything’s done right, the transitions will be as invisible as the word “said.” If there are too many transitions, though, going in too many different directions, it’s too much like driving on a road covered with speed bumps. You’re asking the reader to pause again and again and again and again. If a manuscript has too many transitions, or too many extreme ones, it’s going to go into that large pile on the left. What would you do if a manuscript made you pause half a dozen times in the first ten pages? Would you keep reading or get back to folding laundry?

I mentioned my friend who started all this off (and who most likely is reading this). Let me be blunt and hope he forgives me. In the middle of his superhero action-intrigue story, he wanted to do an entire chapter in verse. Chaucer-style, Canterbury Tales verse. Why isn’t important for our purposes, just that he was going to do it. He had a very solid reason for it, and I have no doubt he could’ve pulled it off.

The thing was, he’d actually had several point of view shifts in his novel already. Some of them were basic shifts– we’d go from third person focused on him to third person on him. Then there would be jumps to first person narratives. And epistolary chapters. And flashbacks. Plus a frame that was a flash-forward. So it wasn’t just that he wanted to do a chapter in verse, it’s that he wanted to do a chapter in verse on top of everything else. All fine and good on their own, but as they begin to pile up…

As a brief but relevant segue, let me talk about Dean Koontz for a moment, author of (among many, many others) Watchers, Dark Rivers of the Heart, and the Fear Nothing series (which I really hope he goes back to some day). Early in his career, Koontz wrote a great little book called How To Write Best Selling Fiction It’s gone out of print, and the author himself has said he’s got no interest in seeing it re-issued. I think a lot of the reasons for both are political, because in this book young Koontz did say a lot of blunt, rather unkind things about publishing, gurus, and wannabe writers. Now, in all fairness, many of these things were completely true, and still are today. They’re not what people want to hear or admit, but, as a friend of mine once told our boss, if you wanted a cheerleader you should’ve hired one. If you can find a copy– grab it (they go for big bucks on eBay). If you can find it online, download it, memorize it, and delete it. Than write an angry letter to Writers Digest Books telling them how they’ve forced you to resort to piracy.

Back on track, though.

One thing Koontz stresses, and you can see it in his work, is to never shift viewpoints within a chapter. Use the chapter break itself as the big pause and try to have as few little ones within it as possible. Now, I’d never go as far to say you should never switch within a chapter, but I also think Koontz has a solid track record backing him up.

So, a few quick tips for transitions…

Fewer – This is the easiest one. The simplest way to avoid troubling shifts is… well, avoid them. Look at the transitions in your writing and figure out how many of them can be trimmed out or consolidated. Is it harder to tell a story with fewer transitions? A bit, yes, but far from impossible. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope doesn’t have one transition in it. It’s a single continuous film narrative from start to finish. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe only has two in the entire novel. It switches to an epistolary journal for a few dozen pages and then back to the regular narrative. There aren’t even chapter breaks.

Smaller – As I mentioned above, it’s easier to go down a six inch step than a three foot drop. It’s easy for a reader to go from third person, past- tense to another third person, past tense. It’s a bit harder to start in third person, past tense and jump to second person, future tense section and then back… or to a first person, present. Likewise, jumping between the thoughts of a Harvard professor and a golden retriever is going to be a bit jarring. Bigger jumps mean bigger pauses to adjust, and also more of a disruption in the flow of your story.

Smoother – One way to lessen the impact between sections is to make the transition as organic as possible. A common way of doing this is by creating parallel structure in text or dialogue to keep up a certain rhythym. Another is to do continuations, where, for example, a question gets asked in the first part but the answer is given after the transition.

Make Them Have Purpose – Is there a real reason the story’s going from this point of view to that one? If so, your readers will be more willing to accept the change. If not, it’s just going to frustrate them more. Much like when I prattled on about structure, if the shift doesn’t accomplish something in the story, you shouldn’t be doing it. Make sure the story as a whole is focused, and that there’s a real reason we’re suddenly spending a page with Wakko, the wannabe actor who’s working as a waiter on weekends and about to serve a drink to the main character.

Now, there is sort of a halfbreed flipside to this. A common problem, especially in screenplays, is a complete lack of transitions. Gurus and how-to books tell people to cut description, cut words, cut everything. So fledgling writers take that advice and cut… well, everything.

The problem with that approach is, while it sounds wise on the surface, what it really does is leave you with nothing on the page and nothing between scenes. Suddenly, we’re in a house with Jane. What kind of house? Old? Modern? Is it the present day? Are we in the kitchen at lunchtime? The bedroom at midnight? And while I’m still reeling trying to figure out where we are and why Jane is yelling at George, suddenly we’re in an office. A newspaper office? A telemarketing office? Is it real office or a field of cubicles? Too late, now we’re with George in his car…

I’ve set down a lot of scripts like this while I was reading for contests. None of them went in the pile on the right.

So, there’s my random musings on transitions. Hopefully not too random.

By the way, the reason “The Deadly Assassin” was so hard to follow as an introductory episode was because it took place across a virtual landscape formed from the stored memories of the Time Lords. In other words, it was a mish-mash of settings with no transitions between them. It would’ve been so much smoother if I’d said that up front, yes…?

Next week we’re getting into the holidays, so I won’t take up too much of your time. I may talk about it, though.

Until then, go write.

Michael Jackson, as promised.

So, this week I wanted to talk about… well, talking. I prattled on about dialogue descriptors just a few weeks back, and the simple power of said. However, a few recent things I’ve read over the past couple weeks– plus one god-awful movie I saw which was supposed to be about a real American hero– have had me thinking about dialogue as a whole.

Dialogue really is the lifeblood of fiction. Sounds corny, I know, but it’s true. If you’ve got dialogue problems in a novel or short story it’s really bad. In a screenplay it’s pretty much fatal. It’s a killer because everyone knows what people sound like. They may not all disarm warheads, fight ninjas, or race dinosaurs, but everybody talks to people, so it’s the first place a writer’s work can get picked apart.

So, here are five easy things to spot in your writing which can keep dialogue from flowing naturally.

Extra descriptors— Even if you’re using said, you don’t always need to use it. After a point, it should be apparent who’s talking. Look at this…

——————————————————–

Tom cracked his knuckles. “You really want to do this?”

“I do,” said Jerry.

“No holds barred?”

“All out. Mano e mano.”

“You’re going to get hurt.”

“I better, for your sake.”

“Cocky little rodent, aren’t you?”

——————————————————–

No problem keeping track of who’s talking, is there? Plus with less words it’s leaner and faster. You can feel the tension building in the exchanges because you’re not getting slowed down by excess words.

Not only that, once you’ve got speech patterns down for your characters, you should need descriptors even less. In my book Ex-Heroes, Gorgon’s dialogue could never get confused with Stealth’s. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy doesn’t speak the same way as Belloq, and neither of them sound like Toht, the black-coated Gestapo agent. Their voices identify them just as well as a header would.

Spoken names— It’s very rare to address someone by name. Pay attention during your next phone call, or look at The Road by Cormac McCarthy. We never learn the character’s names because they never say them. Why would they? They’re the only two people around, and have been for ages now. Look at that last example up above. Tom and Jerry know each other, and we get the sense they’re speaking directly to one another, so they don’t have to keep saying each other’s name again and again. It just starts sounding kind of cartoony.

——————————————————–

“You know, Fred…”

“Yes, Barney?”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Wilma. Fred, do you remember that week Betty was away and you had to work late a lot down at the quarry?”

“Barney, you son of a–“

“We didn’t mean to, Fred. It just happened! It was–Fred, no! Put the club down, Fred! FRED!!!”

——————————————————–

Even if you’re doing it a bit more seriously than I just did, spoken names can also come across as a bit fake. It’s the author acknowledging the audience may be having trouble keeping track, and throwing in a name is the easiest way to deal with it, rather than the best way. Remember, if you’ve got two characters who have been introduced, it’s really rare that they’ll need to keep using each other’s names. Especially if they’re the only ones there.

Cool lines— D’you remember that bit in The Incredibles when Syndrome reveals his master plan? “And when everybody’s super… no one will be.” It’s an ugly truth–everything becomes mundane when there’s no baseline. If everyone’s a millionaire, being a millionaire isn’t all that great. If everyone on your basketball team is eight feet tall, who’s the tall guy? If anybody can hit a bullseye at 100 yards out, hitting a bullseye doesn’t really mean anything, does it?

The same holds for dialogue. We all want to have a memorable line or three that sticks in the reader’s mind forever. The thing is, they’re memorable because they stand out. Even in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s old films, when he had piles of one-liners, he also had piles of lines no one remembers that just advanced the story. We all remember the first line he says to the Predator, but do you remember the first line he says to Dylan? What about any line he gave to Hawkins, the skinny guy?

Fun side note–believe it or not, Hawkins is screenwriter Shane Black, the guy who wrote Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

If you try to make every line a cool line, or even most of them, you’re shooting yourself in the foot because none of them are going to stand out. When everything’s turned up to eleven, it’s all at eleven– it’s monotone.

“As you know…” – If you take nothing else from today’s rant, take this. Find every sentence in your writing that starts with this phrase or one of it’s halfbreed cousins like “You know, (insert character name)…”.

Once you’ve found them, delete them ALL.

This is probably the clumsiest way to do exposition there is. Think about it.

“Yakko, you know I get grumpy if I don’t eat.” If he does know, maybe you should just get to your point.

“As you know, Wakko, my birthday is coming up…” Well if Wakko knows, why does the speaker need to point it out?

“You know, Dot, we’ve been friend for twelve years now…” Did Dot have a head injury and needs to be reminded of this? If so, cool, if not…

“As you know, men, this war against the Zentradi has been going on for seven years now…” Seven years and you’ve got to tell a room full of soldiers who they’ve been fighting against and for how long? Where did these folks get shipped in from?

If you’ve got a really solid manuscript, you might be able to get away with doing this once. Just once. As long as you don’t do it your first ten pages or so. Past that, get out your editorial safety scissors and start cutting.

Grammatically Correct – very few people speak in perfect, grammatically correct English, aside from a few freaks with inferiority complexes. We all speak differing degrees of colloquial English. Our verbs don’t always line up with our nouns. Tenses don’t always match. Fact is, a lot of “spoken” English looks awful on the page. If you’ve got the grammar function on in Word (and, seriously, why is it on? Kill that thing right now. And the spellchecker while you’re at it), spoken English is a nightmare.

This is where a lot of new writers choke, because they can’t reconcile the words on the page with the voices in their heads (so to speak). Thus, they end up with several characters, all of whom speak in a precisely regulated manner which seems wooden, affected, and does not flow by any definition of the term. To help beat this, you want to have someone else read your words out loud. Not you, because you know where to pause and emphasize. See what someone else does with it, how natural the words really sound, and how well they really flow.

And that’s that. Five things you should be able to spot and fix with almost no effort at all.

Next week… I don’t know. Part of me was thinking about talking about action scenes, but I’ve also been bouncing around some thoughts about antagonists. Any preferences?

Regardless, go write.