Category: dialogue

I’m a big fan of recycling. Fan’s probably not even the right word. It just seems like a no brainer to me. Why wouldn’t you do it? Why would someone be against it? We recycle our glass and plastic. We compost a lot of our food waste and cardboard and even some old clothes. Yeah, you can compost old clothes.  Weird, I know.

We reuse and repurpose a lot of stuff, too. That comes out of, well, being poor.  Even though I’m on a much better footing these days, financially, I still try to reuse things. We never broke the habit of using those spaghetti sauce mason jars as glasses. Half our Tupperware is take-out containers. And I still look at frozen pizza boxes as potential tanks.

What’s odd, though, is a certain subset of folks who’ll mock you for doing this with your writing.

I’ve brought up many, many times the need to cut manuscripts.  We write so much stuff that gets trimmed away.  Clever bits of descriptions.  Cool dialogue.  Sometimes whole scenes, subplots, or even whole characters. When it comes time to hone and focus that first draft, all these things can fall under the editorial knife.

Now, weird as this may sound—like I said, for most of you this is going to sound bizarre, but—some people think this cut material’s gone for good. It’s been deleted. Even if some record still exists, it’s unusable now. Toxic. Radioactive. It’s somehow been tainted forever.

I think a lot of this comes from people who lean a little too heavily on the art side of writing. Oddly enough… the ones who don’t write that much.  They get a little too focused on the idea and the craft and the ART of it. I put these words together in this way for this story.  I didn’t use them like that or like that, and so pulling them out and putting them somewhere else would just be wrong.  It’s not what I first intended.  It’s not what those phrases were created to do.

If I listen to those folks too much… or maybe if I am one of those folks (it’s okay, admitting it is the first step)… I probably have a somewhat shallow view of recycled material.  Those dialogue exchanges that I cut, or that subplot or character… they’re not going to work anywhere else.  I’m not being artistically honest or something like that.  How could a character crafted for story A possibly work in story B? Dialogue that I’d intended for X just shouldn’t work coming out of Y’s mouth, especially if Y’s in a completely different book.

And if I do try it and it does work… well, that just says something about me, doesn’t it?  I probably don’t know what I’m doing. My writing must be pretty thin and generic if I can just pluck some material from here and drop it in over there.  I’m probably lazy as hell in other aspects of my life, too.

If you happen to be the one out of four who thinks this… sorry.  It just isn’t true.  In any way.  Just in case my tone wasn’t carrying through.

Of course I can repurpose material. Artists have done it throughout history.  We jot down notes for one thing and end up using them for another.  We cut from that and then repurpose it for this.  Exchanges of dialogue. Neat ways to describe something.  Maybe a whole scene of morning-after awkwardness or a supporting character who got nixed for space.

Granted, none of this is going to slide right in without a bit of work and some tweaks.  I’m probably going to have to change a few proper nouns, and possibly a few personal pronouns, too.  Maybe an adjective or three.  That’s just the nature of such things. But it’s still absolutely fine to use it.

And honestly, because it’s older stuff I didn’t use before… I may have improved since I first wrote it (hopefully I have). That was a great bit back then, but y’know, if I just did this it’d be fantastic.  Or maybe he seemed like a good character for back then, but now I realize this should all really be centered around her.

I’ve got a book coming out later this summer/early fall called Terminus(that’s probably what we’re calling it), and it’s got a discussion between two characters I’ve been trying to use for almost eight years now. Seriously. I had to cut it from another book, but it’s got some great character stuff and I’ve always wanted to use it. Terminus finally gave me a great place where it could fit. And, yeah, it needed some adjustment to fit in this story with these characters at this point in the overall story. But it’s still 80-85% the same and I think folks are going to love it when they read it.

Still not convinced? Are you one of those one out of four who’s ready to pop down to the comments and point out I’m one of those lazy hacks who barely qualifies as a real writer?

How about Ray Bradbury? Is he a lazy hack? Most of Fahrenheit 451 is recycled ideas, after all. Bradbury had already used the firemen (the book burning ones) in a bunch of different short stories.  They even show up in The Martian Chronicles.  He’d also done longer stories about book burning and corpse-burning (seriously).  The spider-like Mechanical Hound is from an old short story he’d never finished.  There it‘s a law-enforcement tool used by sheriffs and police. He lifted the entire description, almost word for word, and dropped it into 451, along with some dialogue about it. Heck, the whole book is an expanded version of his short story “The Fireman” which he expanded into a novella and then expanded again into a full book.

And he’s not alone. Lots of writers have files of material they had to cut. And they’re always trying to find that material a new home.

Y’see, Timmy, yeah, writing is an art. But like every kind of art, the “how I do it” is entirely up to me. My manuscript might be pristine and pure and new. It might make Frankenstein look like somebody with a small appendectomy scar. But honestly, none of that matters. The only thing that matters is the manuscript I have at the end. Does it flow? Are the characters believable?  Is the plot interesting? Does the dialogue ring true?

Then it’s good.  And that’s all that matters.

Next time… okay, to be terribly honest, next time is the day before my birthday. One of those milestone, “we should make note of this” birthdays. What I’m saying is, I’m probably going to be drunk. Which means I’ll end up talking about Godzilla or something.

Until then… go write.

A few weeks back, a superhero movie kinda came and went in the world. No, not that one. That one’s still doing fine.  The other one, that came out two weeks before it. I admit, I didn’t see the other one. I’m not against reboots or remakes, but it felt like all this had going for it was… it was R-rated.  So the protagonist could swear.  And the filmmakers could show more gore.  And maybe a butt or a boob or something.  Again, didn’t see it.

Thing is “profanity” isn’t really much of a selling point once we’re past… what, ten years old? Blood and gore usually just draws attention to it vanishing between scenes. Seeing a naked butt on screen lost a lot of its appeal once the internet became a thing. I guess you could make an argument for whose butt it is, but even that’s only going to get you so far…

We’ve all known for a while now that this sort of stuff doesn’t make a good movie.  It doesn’t automatically mean my movie is bad, but if these are the only elements I’m pushing to say my movie is good… well, I can’t be surprised if I don’t do well at the box office.  As A. Lee Martinez noted a few weeks back, ”I never trust a story that wants to impress me with its gore and vulgarity. I have enjoyed many a story with gore and vulgarity, but never one that was sold to me that way.”

I think this is true of most storytelling. There isn’t much we’d consider taboo in stories anymore.  And there’s an audience for almost everything.  There are sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and when you go deep enough pretty much anything goes.

Because of this, though, I think sometimes writers get caught up in the idea of just showing everything.  All the gore and sex and violence they can manage, all written out in long, elaborate detail.  I mean, it fills up the page and, hey, check it out.  Bet you’ve never pictured someone getting split in half that way before, have you?

We need to understand, though, that these excessive and explicit moments are very rarely part of the story or plot—they’re just descriptions.  If Bob dies, it rarely matters if it took me one sentence or seven pages to kill him.  In the end, Bob is dead and it kinda boils down to how much of this actually advanced the plot, and how much of it my readers could just skip over with a yawn.

And yeah, sure, sometimes there’s a point to it.  There’s a narrative reason I need two pages of gore or three pages of sex or a character who drops f-bombs in every sentence they speak or think.  Nobody would say otherwise (nobody you should listen to, anyway).  But this is a lot like adverbs, adjectives, or exclamation points.  The more I use them, the weaker they get.  They start to clutter up the page.  So I want to be a little conservative with them.

Here, lemme give you a very non-conservative example….

My friend Autumn Christian wrote a wonderful book called Girl Like A Bomb. The main character (and narrator), Bev, discovers she’s got an unusual superpower. When she has sex with people, they get… better. They clean up. They get focused. They become the best, self-actualized version of themselves.

Now, you might guess sex is a big part of this book, and you’d be right (consider that your warning if you decide to pick it up). The first few times Bev has sex—like any teenager—it’s a wild ride and it’s very explicit. It’s an all-new experience for her, she likes it, and she is, as they say, DTF.

But after those first few encounters—and one much more violent one (consider that your other warning)—Bev becomes all-too-aware of the effect her gift is having on her partners. It’s still fun, but it’s also a responsibility, and this shows in her narration.  Less than halfway through the book, her various encounters becomes a quick sentence or less, sometimes coming across as more of an annoying obligation or burden.  Because while the story involves sex, it’s not really about sex—it’s about what Bev can do with her superpower. So that’s what Christian focuses on.

And this holds for everything.  If I push any story element up to ten for my whole book—sex, action, violence, gore, cool lines—it’s going to get boring fast.  Sure, there’s a small percentage of readers that’ll be thrilled, but it’s reeeeeeeeeeeeeally tough to find any sort of wide appeal that way.

Plus… in a way, all this extensive description is me feeding everything to my reader.  I’m telling them everything instead of showing them everything.  And, yeah, I know that sounds weird but…

Okay, look… I’m going to let you in on a secret.  This is one of the six Great Secrets of storytelling that you can only learn from a crow after they eat 169 peanuts in a row from your hand.  It’s the first and easiest of the secrets to learn, but I’m just going to give it to you for free…

You’ve probably heard people talk about showing vs. telling all the time, but we rarely bring up the obvious.  We haveto tell.  That’s all we can do. I’m typing words for you to read, telling you what the characters see, hear, feel, smell, think, whatever. On the surface, telling is pretty much it for us as writers.

When we talk about showing, we’re talking about making images appear in the reader’s mind. And the longer it takes for those images to form, the less effective they are at creating some kind of emotional response. So, to speed things up, we want the reader to do some of the work for us. We want them to tell them just enough—just the right things—and have them fill in the blanks.  They supply the horror or the excitement or the disgust so it’s instantly summoned to their mind, rather than waiting for me to spell it all out. It’s the difference between me telling you a joke that you immediately get and me having to explain the joke to you (“Because, y’see, the last guy was hiding in the refrigerator, so when they threw it over the railing he ended up…”).

That’s what showing is.

See, when I wrote out that little bit of dialogue, you got that.  Even if you didn’t recognize the joke, you understood the situation of having to spell out the punchline for somebody.  You filled in everything around that sentence fragment.

Truth is, the big majority of readers like doing this. They enjoy it when we trust them enough to understand things. When we don’t spell everything out for them.  In graphic detail.  Billy Wilder used to say you could let the audience add 2 + 2 now and then and they’d love you for it. Heck, I’ve got a whole loosely-scientific theory about how this kind of writing sets off the pleasure centers of our brain.  No seriously.

So y’see Timmy, I don’t need to wipe every single one of these excessive, over-described bits from my manuscript.  But, like adverbs, if I’ve got a bunch on every page… ehh, I might want to stop to reconsider some of my choices.

Next time, I’ve got a few more ideas to bounce off you.

Until then, go write.

            Well, this one’s going to be a little awkward.  We just said this weekend that we’d talk about dialogue next time at the Writers Coffeehouse.  But then we got a request for it here, so… overlap.  One way or the other, the second time is going to end up making me look a little lazy, little bit like a hack.

            I mean, more than usual.

            Ha ha ha, you’re welcome critics.  Just tossing that one out there for you.

            Anyway…

            Dialogue.

            I’ve  blabbed on once or thrice about how important dialogue is.  Yeah, I know I’ve said characters are the most important thing, but dialogue’s how we bring those characters to life.  It’s the fuel for the fancy sports car, the foam that hides the gigantic wave, the beautiful full moon that shows us a bloodthirsty werewolf.  You get the idea.  They’re interdependent.  I can’t have good characters without good dialogue, and bad dialogue is almost always going to lead to bad characters.  It’s the circle of fictional life.
            If a character doesn’t sound right, if their dialogue is stilted or unnatural, it’s going to keep me—the reader—from believing in them. And if I can’t believe in them, I cant get invested in them or their goals.  Which means I’m not invested in the story and I’m probably going to go listen to music while I organize my LEGO bricks or something like that.

            So here’s a bunch of elements/angles I try to keep in mind and watch out for when I’m writing dialogue.  Some things to watch out for, some things to make sure I have.  All sorts of stuff.  And I’ve talked about a lot of these before, so some of them may sound familiar…

            Transcription– Okay, some of you know that I used to be an entertainment journalist and I did lots and lots of interviews.  One thing that never really struck me until then was that, with very few exceptions, people trip over themselves a lot verbally.  We have false starts.  We repeat phrases.  We trail off.  We make odd noises while we try to think of words.  It’s very human.  However, anyone who’s ever read a strict word-for-word transcription of a conversation (or typed up a lot of them) will tell you it’s awkward, hard to follow, and a lot gets lost without the exact inflection of certain words.

            I don’t want to write dialogue in this kind of ultra-realistic manner.  It’ll drive my readers and editor nuts, plus it wastes my word count on dozens of unnecessary lines.  While this sort of rambling can work great in actual spoken dialogue, it’s almost  always horrible on the page. 

            Grammar – As you’ve probably noticed in your day to day life, very few people speak in perfect, grammatically correct English, aside from androids and a few interpretations of Sherlock Holmes.  The rest of us speak differing degrees of colloquial English.  Our verbs don’t always line up with our nouns.  Tenses don’t always match.  Like I just mentioned above, a lot of “spoken” English looks awful on the page.  And this makes some folks choke, because they can’t reconcile the words on the page with the voice in their head.  When I do this I lose that natural aspect of language in favor of the strict rules of grammar, and I end up with a lot of characters speaking in a precise, regulated manner that just doesn’t flow.

            Contractions– This is kind of a loosely-connected, kissing-cousins issue with the grammar one I just mentioned.  A lot of people start out writing this way because they’re trying to follow all the rules of spelling and punctuation so they write out every word and every syllable.  They want to write correctly!

            Again, most of us use contractions in every day speech—scientists, politicians, professors, soldiers, everyone.  It’s in our nature to make things quick and simple.  Without contractions, dialogue just sounds stilted and wooden.  If there’s a reason for someone to speak that way (ESL, robots, Sherlock Holmes, what have you), then by all means do it.  If my characters are regular, native English-speaking mortals, though…

            As a bonus, using contractions also drops my word count and page count.

            On The Nose—Okay, in simple terms, this is when a character says exactly what they’re thinking without any subtlety whatsoever.  It’s the difference between “Hey, do you want to come up for a cup of coffee?” and “Would you like to come up and have sexual relations in my living room right now?”  There’s no inference or implications, no innuendoes or layered meanings—no subtlety at all.  And the truth is, we’re always layering meaning into what we say.

            Pro tip—I’d guess nine times out of ten, if a character’s talking to themselves out loud, it’s on the nose dialogue.  It just works out that way.  I’d guess that at least half the time it’s just exposition (see below). 

            Similarity– People are individuals, and we’ve all got our own unique way of speaking.  People from Californiadon’t talk like people from Maine(I’ve lived almost two decades in each state, I know), people living in the twelfth century don’t talk like people from the fortieth, and uneducated idiots don’t speak like innovative quadruple-doctorate holders. 

            My characters need to be individuals as well, with their own tics and habits that make them distinct from the people around them.  If a reader can’t tell who’s speaking without seeing the dialogue headers… I might need to get back to work.

            Let me follow this with a few specifics…

            Humor—Here’s a basic fact of human nature.  We make jokes at the worst possible times.  Breakups.  Office reviews.  Funerals.  It’s just the way we’re wired.  The more serious the situation, the more imperative that release valve is for us.  In fact, we kinda get suspicious or uneasy around people who never crack jokes.  Not everyone and not at every moment, but when there’s no joking at all… it just feels wrong.

            Plus, how we joke says something about us.  Does someone make non-stop raunchy jokes?  Do they have a dry sense of humor?  A completely awful sense of humor.  Do they have any sense of when it is and isn’t appropriate to tell a certain joke?

            Flirting—Similar to humor in that it’s almost universal.  We show affection for one another.  We 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 a lot of casual dialogue exchanges. 

            Flirting is a lot like joking because it’s impossible to flirt with on the nose dialogue.  Flirting requires subtlety and implied meanings.  Flirting without subtlety sounds a lot more like propositioning, and that gives a very different tone to things.  If nobody in my story ever flirts with anyone on any level, there might be something to consider there.

            Profanity—another ugly fact of human nature.  We make emphatic, near-automatic statements sometimes.  We throw out insults.  How we swear and respond to things says something about us.  Phoebe does not swear like Wakko, and Phoebe doesn’t swear in front of Wakko the same way she swears in front of her mother.  Or maybe she does.  Either way, that’s telling us something about her and making her more of an individual.

            Fun fact—profanity is regional.  The way we swear and insult people here is not how they do it there.  So this can let me give a little more depth to characters and make them a bit more unique.

            Accents– Speaking of regional dialogue…  Writing in accents is a common rookie writer issue.  I made it a bunch of  times while I was starting out, and still do it now and then.  There are a handful of pro writers out there who can do truly amazing accented dialogue, yeah, but keep that in mind—only a handful.  The vast majority of the time, writing out accents and odd speech tics will drive readers and editors nuts. 

            I usually accent by picking out just one or two key words or sentence structures and making these the only words I show it with.  Just the bare minimum reminders that the character has an accent.  Like most character traits, my readers will fill in the rest.

            Weird note—this can become odd with audiobooks, because the narrator will most likely add an accent of some sort to differentiate the character. So the most subtle of written accents can almost become an uncomfortable stereotype once they’re combined.  Another reason to think about dialing things back.

            Extra descriptors—I’ve mentioned once or thrice that said is pretty much invisible on the page.  But it can still wear thin.  I don’t always need to use it, because after a point it should be apparent who’s talking.

            Plus with less words, dialogue gets leaner and faster.  Tension builds in the exchanges because the reader isn’t getting slowed down by ongoing reminders of who’s talking.

            Not only that, once I’ve got some of these speech patterns down for my characters, I should need descriptors even less.  In my book, Dead Moon, Tessa’s dialogue could almost never get confused with Cali’s or Jake’s or Waghid’s.  They’re all distinct, and their speech patterns identify them just as well as a header would.

            Names—If I don’t need them around the dialogue, I need them even less in the dialogue.  Pay attention the next time you’re on the phone with someone.  How often do they use your name?  How often do you use theirs?  Heck, if my friends call my cell phone I know who it is before I even answer—and they know I know—so I usually just say “Hey, what’s up?”  We don’t use our names, and  we definitely don’t use them again and again in the same conversation.

            Spoken names can also come across as a bit fake.  It’s me 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 I’ve got two characters who’ve 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.

            Monologues– Here’s another observation.  We don’t talk for long.  People rarely speak in long paragraphs or pages.  We tend to talk in bursts—two or three sentences at best.  There’s always rare exceptions, sure, but for the most part we get our ideas out pretty quickly (if not always efficiently)

            When I have big blocks of dialogue, I should really think about breaking them up.  Is this person just talking to themselves (see above)?  Is nobody there to interrupt them with a counterpoint or question or a random snarky comment?  Is my monologue necessary?  Does it flow?  Is this a time or situation where Yakko should be giving a four paragraph speech?

            A good clue when examining a monologue–how many monologues have there already been.  One script I read a while back for a screenwriting contest had half-page dialogue blocks on almost every page.  If I’m on page forty-five and this is my fifth full-page monologue… odds are something needs to be reworked.
            I also shouldn’t try to get around this with a “sounding board” character who’s just there to bounce things off.  Talking is communication, which means it has to be a two-way street.  If I’ve got somebody who serves no purpose in my story except to be the other person in the room while someone thinks out loud… they’re not really serving a purpose.

            Cool lines—  Our latest ugly truth–everything becomes mundane when there’s no baseline.  If everyone on my mercenary team is two hundred pounds of swollen muscle… who’s the big guy?  When everyone owns a seven-bedroom mansion, owning a seven-bedroom mansion doesn’t really mean anything.  If anybody can hit a bull’s-eye at 100 yards out, then hitting  a bull’s-eye isn’t all that impressive, is 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.  They’re rare.  If I try to make every line a cool line, or even most of them, none of them are going to stand out.  When everything’s turned up to eleven, it’s all at eleven– it’s monotone.

            Exposition—Remember being a kid in school and being bored by textbook lectures or filmstrips that talked to you like you were an idiot?  That’s what exposition is like to my readers.

            Use the Ignorant Stranger as a guideline and figure out how much of my dialogue is crossing that line. If any character ever gives an explanation of something that the other characters in the room already should know (or my readershould know), cut that line. If it’s filled with necessary facts, find a better way to get them across.

            “As you know…” – I’ve said this before, but… if you take nothing else from this rant, take this.  I need to find every sentence or paragraph in my writing that starts with this phrase or one of it’s halfbreed cousins. 

            Once I’ve found them, I need to delete them.  Gone.  Destroyed.

            This is probably the clumsiest way to do exposition there is.  Think about it.  A character saying “As you know”  is openly acknowledging the people they’re talking to already know what’s about to be said.  I’m wasting time, I’m wasting space on the page, and I’m wasting my reader’s patience.    If I’ve got a rock-solid, lean-and-mean manuscript, I might be able to get away with doing this once.  Just once.  As long as I don’t do it my first ten pages or so.  Past that, I need to get out my editorial knife and start cutting.

            What is that, fifteen tips? Here’s one more for a nice, hexadecimal sixteen.

            You’ve probably heard someone suggest reading your manuscript out loud to catch errors and see how things flow.  Personally, while I think this works great for catching errors, it’s not as good for catching dialogue issues.  We wrote these lines, so we know how they’re supposed to sound and what they’re supposed to convey.  There’s a chance we’ll be performing what’s not on the page, if that makes sense.

            So if you can stand to listen… get someone else to read it out loud.  Maybe just a chapter or two.  Let a friend or family member who doesn’t know it read it out loud and see what they do with it.

            And there you have it.  A big pile of tips which should help your dialogue seem a little more real.  Fictional-real, anyway.  Not real-real.

            Next week… I think it may be time to talk about superheroes.

            Until then, go write.