Category: dialogue

            Running a tiny bit late.  Trying to get a bunch of stuff done before the weekend and dealing with many disruptions and distractions.
            Anyway…
            I’d like to start this week by talking about  college.  It’s something I bet most of us here experienced, so it’s a great analogy for my real topic.  I’m sneaky like that.  Sometimes.

            If you’ve been reading these rants for a while, you know I grew up in a very small town in Maine.  For high school, my dad got a new job and we moved to a somewhat large town (arguably a small city) in southern Massachusetts for four years.  And then I went to a giant state school for college.  No joke, my freshman dorm almost had more students in it than the entire school system I attended in Maine.  And I wasn’t even living in one of the larger dorms.  The college had a larger population than my hometown.

            It was, needless to say, a bit overwhelming.

            There were lots of orientations, of course.  Then I was introduced to tons of people in my dorm, and then people on my hall (we won’t even get into classes).  We all talked about ourselves a bit.  I think so, anyway.  It was all a bit of a blur.  For a while there were just the two skinny guys across the hall,  the woman with the short hair who smiled a lot, the big guy with the glasses further down the hall. But after a while details and names accumulated, these people became clear in my mind, and they became Mike, Jon, Karen, Henry, and so on. 

            Most of us can relate to something like this, yes?

            When I’m introducing characters in my story, it’s a lot like this.  Sometimes things are a whirl of action.  Other times, everyone’s just sitting around studying each other.  Some people stand out—either on their own or because of my own interests—and other people just warrant rough placeholder descriptions for now.

            Context is everything when I introduce a character.  In the middle of a firefight, Wakko may not notice much about the person who dives in to join him behind the barricade.  They’re wearing body armor and they have a rifle—score!  If he’s dealing with a job applicant, though, he’s got time to notice how sharp the creases are in the slacks, how the tie is knotted and the hair is combed, not to mention the smell of shampoo and the state of fingernails.

            Likewise, during that firefight, there’s not much personal info Wakko needs to know past “you’re on my side, right?”  In the middle of the interview, he can ask “what are the three worst jobs you’ve ever had?”

            And in either case, he might not learn about that tattoo or the special shirt or the naughty story behind her nickname.  Some things are only seen or discussed in more intimate situations.  These are all details that come out with booze or debriefing or sex or some combination of all three. 
            Y’see, Timmy, there isn’t a certain way or time to introduce characters.  It’s all a matter of context.  Context, and a bit of relevance.  I need to think of it in terms of my narrative and my main character (or the character I’m focused on at the moment). 

            At this point in the story, is there time to notice more than a few basic physical attributes about this new character?  Is there any one or two things about him or her that my point-of-view character might focus on for the moment?  Is there even time to trade names?  If there’s a lot going on, I don’t want to bring things to a crashing halt with a page of description or exposition.

            I think one of the problems some writers have is they keep seeing examples of bad storytelling and character introductions in television and movies.  There’s an all-too common belief that things need to be frontloaded, that the audience needs to know everything about someone up front.  How many stories have you seen that begin with the “let’s all introduce ourselves” scene?  We learn their names and how they talk and their likes and dislikes and usually some clumsy anecdote about them or a blatant example of I’M THE UNSTABLE ONE!!!  GAHHHHH!!!  

            These scenes almost always feel unnatural because this isn’t how we meet people in real life.  Most of the time, we learn things about them in bits and pieces.  A little here, a little there.  Sometimes we never learn a character’s name, sometimes it’s the first thing we learn.  Some characters are willing to spill everything about themselves, others don’t want to know anything about you because it makes the job simpler.

            Now, I mentioned relevance up above.  It’s a close companion to context.  My story may end up in a place where we can take the time to get to know someone, but that doesn’t mean I need to say everything there is to be said about them.  Yes, everything in a character’s life helps define them, rich tapestry, all that, but if it really isn’t relevant to the moment at hand, or the story as a whole, there’s a good chance it doesn’t need to be there.  Bob explaining that he had to slit the throats of sheep growing up on a farm is important when we’re choosing who has to fight in the wolverine pit, not so cool during speed dating.  And someone telling you their sexual fantasies might be very exciting on a third date, but it can be a bit creepy during a job interview (no matter who’s talking).  When someone does this in real life, it’s called oversharing, and it tends to make us uncomfortable because… well, we don’t need to know these things in this particular situation.

            This can also help me weed out characters that… well, might not need to be characters.  If their introduction doesn’t fit in context, and the facts about them aren’t relevant… maybe I should question why they’re in my story here and now.  Maybe their introduction—or the full extent of it—should be pushed back or pulled forward.  Or maybe they’re just delivering the pizza and don’t have anything to do with the story at all.

            It all depends on context.  And relevance.

            And speaking of introductions, next time I’d like to go one step further and talk about dating.

            Until then, go write.

            Sorry about last week.  Still juggling a few things and the ranty blog drew the short straw.  It happens.  Many thanks for your patience.

            It’s not that I didn’t have an idea.  There was a solid idea.  And there was enough to fill a regular post (about three and a half pages).

            Sometimes I don’t have as much, though, and that’s okay, too.  There’s been more than a few times that I’ve jotted off a quick page or so and called it good.  It’s not like the ranty blog has any guidelines about length.

            A lot of markets do, though.  Anthologies, magazines, and journals often have specific minimums and maximums in mind.  Most publishers (big and small) are going to have pretty firm ideas about what counts as a novella or a novel.  And what doesn’t.

            The catch, of course, is that sometimes my story just doesn’t fit with a certain market.  This isn’t a judgment, just a simple fact.  Sometimes SUVs are too big for garages.  Sometimes my car is too small for the bookshelf I’m trying to move.  If I try to claim the people who make bookshelves are biased against my car… well, I’ll look pretty silly.

            But you’re not here to listen to me blab about bookshelves.  I’m supposed to talk about what goes on the bookshelves.

            Sometimes I might really want to place a story somewhere and it just isn’t the right size.  Even if it’s my choice to self publish, it’s safe to say most folks are going to feel cheated if my “book” is only 40,000 words.  What I used to do in this case, and what I’ve seen a few people do recently, is to artificially inflate things.

            Inflation is, no big surprise, when I try to make something bigger by adding more of the same.  It’s when I come up with ways to make every ten word sentence reach fifteen or twenty words.  Or when a two page conversation stretches out to a whole chapter.  Or when I segue away from the main plot for a while and just kind of put it on hold until I get back.  

           These things aren’t happening because of poor editing.  Well, okay, a bit because of poor editing.  Really, they’re happening because I’m stretching to reach a goal that my story really wasn’t intended to reach.  At least, not in it’s current form.  So the story starts to lose its flow and spin its wheels a bit as the reader waits for… well, things to happen.

            Let me give you an example…

            Monday is the tenth anniversary of the premiere of LOST.  Yep, on September 22, 2004, Oceanic Flight 815 broke up in the air and crashed on an uncharted island in the South Pacific.  The thing is, they were only supposed to be there for three years.  Four tops.  But LOST was a huge show for ratings and the network didn’t want it to end.  So, the story started to inflate.  And inflate a little more.  And a little more.  And it started to flail because it was clear to even the most devoted fans of the show that a number of these third and fourth season stories were just… well, filler.  And once the end was in sight it all started to tighten up again.

            I used to do this a lot.  It was a standard part of my storytelling, to have pointlessly long conversations or needlessly elaborate descriptions.  But I eventually figured out this was all just fat on the meat of my story (sorry, vegetarian readers).  Now I cut all of that, and I can’t help but notice my success rate with placing stories and books has gone quite a bit higher since I did this.

            It also made me more aware of what my stories were.  Some of my ideas were executed in a way that pretty solidly made them short stories.  One or two of them were novellas.  Many of them were novels.  And there were one or two I thought were novels that, well, they were novellas at best.  The number of characters and plot points, the way I’d structured the whole tale… it really didn’t work for a larger format.  But I forced them into that format by inflating them rather than expanding them.

            Here’s a couple of things I learned to look for that could be signs of inflation…

            Repeating information—This can take many forms, and in a way I’d guess more than half the cases of inflation I’ve seen burn down to this.  Sometimes it’s revisiting the same information with no variation.  Sometimes it’s characters repeating a certain phrase again and again for no real reason.  I just finished one book where a woman keeps reminding everyone again and again and again that  “I have a schedule to keep.”  Honestly, I could’ve cut two solid pages out of the book just by removing half the instances of that phrase.

            There’s a writing idea I’ve mentioned before—something we don’t know is information, something we already know is noise.  This method of padding means a manuscript full of noise.

            Overly detailed descriptions—There’s two common versions of this.  One is a massive over-description of characters or objects or locations.  Two pages of irrelevant details about someone’s suitcase or the inside of a diner—no matter what some folks try to say, that’s just an attempt to stretch things out and it’s putting the plot and story on hold while I do.

            The other version is when I have a very complex set of actions like baking a cake or fixing a car or performing an operation and I describe every single step.  Every teaspoon, every bolt, every cut.  Granted, there are times I want to describe all this because I’m trying to build tension.  If I need to seal four bolts to keep the charging insurgents on the other side of this hatch, I’m going to describe every turn of the wrench and every time the threads catch.  But if there isn’t a need for such immediate tension, odds are this is just filler.

            Elaborate Action—This kind of ties to the above.  Some folks write the most over-detailed action scenes ever.  Each and every punch is described in painstaking anatomical detail.  Every time my pistol fires involves a list of facts about the action, the ammunition, and the sensation of recoil in exact foot-pounds.  As above, there are moments for this sort of thing.  A trained NSA agent probably isn’t going to have the same thoughts about firing a weapon that a suburban house-husband does.  But if it’s every moment, it’s just padding and it’s monotone.

            Overuse of names–Repeating names flattens out dialogue.  I’ve mentioned in the past that it’s just not natural to use someone’s name in every other response of a conversation.  So this is artificially adding to the word count and ruining the dialogue at the same time.

            There’s a corollary to this, too.  One book I read recently had a  character named Catherine, which is how she was described in all the text.  Except her friends called her Cathy in dialogue.  And the guy in her office always called her “system lord” for her computer skills and network access.   And her boss called her “Red” (for her hair).  And the semi love interest called her “surfer girl” (how they met).  And every one of these characters used their own name for her in every second or third line of dialogue.  So now, not only was it excess words and flat dialogue, it was also confusing as hell.

           Granted, these aren’t the only signs of things going wrong, but there ones I’ve learned to watch for in my own writing.

            This isn’t to say that a short story can’t be expanded into a novella or a full novel.  But if I’m going to do this, I need to actually add material.  Characters, plot points, story points… something.  I can’t just swell my story with empty words that don’t contribute anything.

            Because that’s the kind of thing that bursts apart with just the slightest prick.

            Next time I’d like to talk about Clint Eastwood.

            Until then, go write.

            Okay, I think I’m pretty much caught up with things on my end.  Even have the next four or five weeks planned out.  If there’s something you’d like me to babble on about, though, please drop me a note down in the comments.  There’s a good chance I can fit it into my semi-themed schedule before the end of the year.

            That’s what I’m saying at the moment, anyway.

            Speaking of which…

            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.  There are dozens of words for police, for teachers, for bosses, for jobs, and more.  Does Phoebe call Wakko her boyfriend, her partner, her man, or her boy toy?  Does Wakko think of her as his lover, his bitch, his piece of ass, his significant other, or his friend with benefits?  No matter what their relationship is, the words they each use to describe it tells us something about both of them. 

            One term that comes up a lot in criticism is on the nose dialogue.  I’ve seen it tossed out to beginners numerous times in feedback, but usually without any explanation.  I saw it a lot when I used to read for screenplay contests (and wrote it on many, many forms).

            At its very simplest, on the nose dialogue is when my character is saying precisely what they’re thinking with no subtlety to it whatsoever.  It’s the difference between “Do you want to come up for a cup of coffee?” and “Would you like to have sexual relations in my living room now?”  There’s no inference or implications, no innuendoes or layered meanings—no subtlety at all.  It’s dialogue stating the obvious, and I’ve mentioned a few times before how bad it is to state the obvious. 

            If I have on the nose dialogue, it usually strips away some layers of character, too.  How people avoid saying things is just as revealing as what they’re trying not to say.  If they don’t have those nuances and habits in their voices, they start sounding like robots.  Or cartoon characters. 

            Not the good kind of cartoon characters.

            In real life, people beat around the bush. We’re coy.  We feel each other out, in a verbal sense, and avoid saying things directly.  We use metaphors and similes and white lies and more.

            Here’s a couple things I should be doing to make sure my dialogue doesn’t get too on the nose…

            Casual 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.  We’ve been taught to expect that aliens, androids, and super-geniuses tend to have very good grammar in stories.

            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.  Look up above where I said “Here’s a couple of things I should be doing…”  When we don’t, dialogue becomes rigid, and that’s just a short shuffle from being wooden.

            Jargon—Somewhat related to the last point.  The idea of slang has been around for a long time.  Bram Stoker talked about it in Draculaover a century ago, and it’s a safe bet printers developed their own special terminology 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, doctors speak like doctors, engineers talk like engineers, and sci-fi geeks speak like Dothraki.  When my characters lose these basic subtleties, their dialogue starts getting on the nose.

            Humor—Many years back I was on a road trip with a friend and we got horribly lost on the way to meet up with some folks.  It was all back roads and single-lane highways.  When we finally found a sign I could use to locate our position, I discovered we’d somehow got about a hundred miles off-course in about an hour and a half.  No chance we’d meet up with our friends on time.  Possibly no chance of finding a gas station, leaving us stranded in the middle of nowhere.  He saw my expression as I checked the map again and asked what was wrong.

            “Well, the bad news is we’re lost.  The good news is we’re making excellent time.”

            We make jokes at the worst possible times.  Office reviews.  Breakups.  Traffic accidents.  Courtrooms.  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 tend to be 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.

            Flirting—Similar to the above, this is another 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. 

            Like joking, it’s impossible to flirt with on the nose dialogue because it requires subtlety and implied meanings.  Flirting without subtlety generally comes across as propositioning, which gives a very different tone to things.  If no one in my story flirts with anyone on any level, there might be something to consider there.

            Not Using Names—There’s an old mnemonic trick of repeating someone’s name after you meet them.  Great for real life, not so great in fiction. 

            If I use someone’s name every time I speak to them, it starts to sound a little mechanical.  Yeah, even nicknames.  Yeah, even in crowds. We just don’t use names that often.  Think of your last few conversations and think about how often names get used.  Watch your favorite movie and see how often people address each other by name.

            Show Don’t Tell—You’ve probably heard a version of this before, but I’m talking about it in a slightly different way here.  Yeah, it’s clumsy if I’m just using my narrative to describe what’s happening.  It’s even worse if my characters are describing what’s happening.  Especially when they have absolutely no reason for doing it. 

            To be clear, I’m not talking about when they explain what they’re doing (say, trying to perform CPR or maybe cook dinner), but when they’re just speaking their actions aloud.  If you’ve ever heard an old radio-show where the actors had to depend on just dialogue with no visuals, you know what this sounds like.

            This kind of clumsy dialogue immediately tells the reader that I’m not picturing this scene at all.  For screenwriters, this kind of thing is almost guaranteed to get my script tossed in the big pile on the left, because I’m clearly not thinking about what’s on screen.

            Talk with other characters—This may sound silly, but if someone’s talking, they should be talking with someone else.  Nine times out of ten, if a character’s talking to themselves, it’s on the nose dialogue.  All those monologues about stress, long ethical debates, Yakko psyching himself up, Dot trying to figure out how to get past the thirteen Hydra agents… odds are every bit of that is on the nose dialogue.

            I also shouldn’t try to get around this with a “sounding board” character.  Talking is communication, which means it has to be a two-way street.  If I’ve got someone who serves no purpose except to be the other person in the room while someone thinks out loud, then they’re not really serving any purpose. 

            And that’s six things I should be doing with my dialogue.  I don’t need to do all of them, but if I’m not doing any of them… well…  Maybe my dialogue’s a little on the nose.  Or maybe a lot on the nose.

            Next week, I want to talk about inflation.

            Until then, go write.

            I tried to come up with a clever title using Flo from those Progressive Insurance commercials, but I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t feel… well, kind of awkward.  They weren’t bad titles, they just didn’t read well.  Or they required a bit of mental gymnastics to make sense.

            Either way, they didn’t work.

            Which is, oddly enough, what I wanted to blather on about this week.

            Have you ever read a book you just couldn’t put down?  One where you start reading just after lunch and suddenly realize it’s two in the morning?  Or maybe it was a movie that sucked you in and you were stunned to realize that the 163 minute run time was already used up.

            Oscar-winning screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin made a wonderful observation a while back.  To paraphrase, we experience good stories in our gut, not in our head.  A good story grabs us at an emotional level—in the gut.  But whenever something goes wrong, we start to analyze and examine it—we go into our head. 

            The best term I’ve heard for this is flow.  Put at its simplest, flow is the readability of my story.  It has to do with how much effort it takes for the reader to keep reading.  Having good flow means my writing is smooth and slick, that every line, paragraph, and chapter rolls into the next and carries you along for the ride.  Readers can’t stop because it’s actually easier to keep turning the page than to put the book down. 

            On the other hand, a story with bad flow will make a reader stumble a lot.  If I’m reading a book, whenever I pause to roll my eyes, scratch my head, or go back two or three pages to figure something out… each one’s another bump in the road.  If you’ve ever tried a book and just couldn’t get into it, odds are the flow sucked.  You’d read, trip over a page or two, and put it back down.  You can’t get into it because you keep getting knocked back out.

             Flow is a large part of editing.  I’ve mentioned giving things a polish before, and it’s just what it sounds like.  It’s going through my manuscript and smoothing down the rough edges. It’s me knowing this could be a little clearer and people might get hung up on that.

            Unfortunately, this means flow isn’t something I can just fix by changing a word here or there.  It’s one of those things where you can tweak each element but still not affect the final outcome.  Getting good (or even better) at flow is an experience thing that just comes from writing.  The more I write, the more subtle methods and tricks and fixes I develop.

            That being said… here are a few things my story needs to do if it’s going to have good flow.  Or, if you prefer, these are some of the things a story with bad flow often won’t do…

            Be interesting–  Easiest way in the world to keep my story from lagging—don’t be boring.  This doesn’t mean I need five explosions and a swordfight on page one, but when I’m telling a story, I need to get to the story.  If it’s sci fi, I should show the reader something amazing.  If it’s a love story, my characters need to display some passion.  If it’s a horror story, I need to scare some folks, or at least weird them out a bit.

            Have characters act in character–  A writing coach named Drusilla Campbell once commented that when the nun viciously kills a gardener, that’s also when most people remember that laundry they have to fold.  People who are blatantly incompetent at their jobs, cruel people who do nice things, people who are just a little too smart or too scared or too law-abiding when it suits the story.  It’s jarring when my characters act in contradictory ways to what the reader’s come to expect.  And that jarring is what gets books and screenplays tossed in the big left-hand pile.

            Have smooth  dialogue–  Kind of related to the last point.  I can get away with one character who talks like a computer.  Maybe another who keeps slipping into a foreign language.  But too much stylized, unnatural, or just plain bad dialogue brings things to a grinding halt.  Adults should talk like adults, kids should talk like kids, and cybernetic lizard men should talk like… well, you know.

            Watch the word choice–  If I’m picking obscure or overly-long words just to create flowery descriptions or show off my vocabulary, there’s a good chance I’m disrupting the flow of my writing.  It’s really cool that I can describe someone as a female with resplendent obsidian ink ornamented across her glabrous scalp, but it’s much smoother and just as visual for me to say she’s a bald woman with dark tattoos.

            It’s worth noting that typos and misused words fall into this category, too.  Anytime someone sees something like that in print, it pulls them out of the story and puts them back in analyzing mode.  In their head.  And that’s not where I want them to be.

            Take it seriously.  Everyone makes a joke now and then to break the tension, but things need to carry the correct amount of gravity in my writing.  Death, rape, unrequited love, violence… I shouldn’t bring these things up and not address them in an appropriate way.  If my characters are drowning cats, threatening their employees, or punching strangers in the head, these acts should all be getting a response from my characters.  If the reader thinks I’m not taking the events in my book seriously, well… why should they?

            Again, though, just adjusting these elements doesn’t guarantee that my writing now has great flow.  Every story is unique and has its own path to follow.  But if you keep at it and continue to work on it, one day you’ll start to see the patterns.  And then you’ll be able to go with the flow.

            Next week, unless any of you have some requests or suggestions, I’ve been thinking about Captain America and superheroes a lot lately.  So I wanted to make a small distinction.  

            Until then, go write.