Category: grammar

Okay, not so much rant.

Well, no more than usual, I guess.

I try to have a running list of seven or eight topics for future blog posts. That way if nobody asks a question or something doesn’t leap out at me, I’ve got something to fall back on. One of the ways things end up on the list is that I’ll be dropping links into a post, pointing back at when I previously talked about this or that, and I’ll suddenly realize I haven’t talked about whatever it is for six or seven years.

At which point I’ll usually let out this tired sigh and think something like holy crap I’ve been doing the ranty writing blog for a long time.

Which brings us to me ranting.

No, wait. That brings us to dialogue.

Hopefully we all understand how important dialogue is, yes? It’s how we bring characters to life, making them sound and speak like real people (sort of—more on that in a moment). It’s also the absolute best way to communicate information to my readers (or any audience) about the characters, their world, or the situation they find themselves in.

Likewise, dialogue is one of the easiest, quickest ways to alienate a reader. If my characters sound forced or stilted or just… well, unnatural, it’s going to push my readers away. So it’s something I’ve got to get right.

I know! There’s so many friggin’ things I need to get right for this to all work. But this is why so many people give up and you’ve stuck with it.

Anyway, I’ve talked once or thrice recently about different aspects of dialogue—vocabulary, subtext, arguments—but it’s been a while since I did a big “here’s a dozen or so tips” rants. So what I’d like to do is toss out a bunch of general “hey, think about this” things I’ve picked up from years of screenplay reading and manuscript reading. Just little things I should to keep an eye on in my dialogue. If it’s something I’ve ranted about in a bigger way at some point, I’ll link back to it.

And, as always, not every one of these is going to apply to every situation in every book. Nobody knows your book better than you. No one. That’s why it’s up to each of us to figure out exactly how this character sounds and speaks to move my plot along, to develop their story, to keep my narrative going, and so on.

Here we go.

Grammar – As you’ve probably noticed in your own life, very few people speak in perfect, grammatically correct English. Our tenses don’t always match. Verbs don’t always line up with our nouns. A lot of “spoken” English can look awful on the page. And this makes some folks choke, because they can’t reconcile those words with the voice in their head. When I lean into grammar 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.

This doesn’t mean toss grammar out the window and write however you want. People still need to understand what my characters are saying and that I’ve chosen to have them speak this way. But dialogue does give us a little more freedom in how we say stuff. See?

Contractions– This is kind of a loosely-connected, kissing-cousins issue with the grammar thing I just mentioned. Some folks avoid contractions because they’re trying to write correctly! But most of us use contractions in our everyday speech—even scientists, politicians, professors, soldiers, everyone. It’s just human nature to make things quick and simple. Without contractions, dialogue sounds stilted and wooden. If there’s a reason for one of my characters to speak that way, 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. Win-win.

Transcription– Okay, some of you know I used to be a journalist and did lots and lots of interviews. One thing it taught me is, with very few exceptions, people trip over themselves a lot when they talk. We have false starts. We repeat phrases. We trail off. We make odd noises while we try to remember words. It’s really common and normal

BUT… 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. This kind of ultra-realistic dialogue will drive readers (and editors) nuts. Plus it wastes my word count on dozens of unnecessary lines. This sort of rambling can work well in actual spoken dialogue, but it’s almost always horrible on the page.

Similarity– People are individuals, and we’ve all got our own unique way of speaking. People from Maine don’t talk like people from California, people living in poverty don’t talk like billionaires, and fantasy elven princesses don’t speak like futuristic bio-engineered soldiers. My characters should be individuals, with their own tics and habits that make them distinct from the people around them. If a reader can never tell who’s speaking without seeing the dialogue headers… I might need to get back to work.

On The Nose—If you’ve ever heard someone call dialogue “on the nose,” they mean the characters are saying exactly what they’re thinking without any subtlety or subtext whatsoever. It’s the difference between “Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?” and “Would you like to come up and have sex in my living room right now?” There’s no inference or implications, no innuendos or layered meanings. 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 half the time it’s just exposition (more on that in a minute).

Humor—Here’s another human nature thing. A lot of us tend to 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, be honest… people who never crack jokes make us a little suspicious or uneasy. Not everyone and not at every moment, but when there’s no joking at all, ever, it just feels wrong.

Plus, how a character jokes says something about them. Do they 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—Flirting’s like humor in that it’s almost universal. People show affection for one another. They flirt with friends and lovers and potential lovers. Sometimes—like with humor—at extremely poor times. It’s not always serious, it can take different forms, but that little bit of playfulness and innuendo is present in a lot of casual dialogue exchanges.

Flirting is also like joking because it’s impossible to flirt with on the nose dialogue. Flirting requires subtlety and implied meanings. If nobody in my story ever flirts with anyone on any level, I might want to take a second look at things.

Profanity—Yet another ugly fact of human nature. We make emphatic, near-automatic statements sometimes. We react verbally. We throw out insults. How we swear and respond to things says something about us. Phoebe doesn’t 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, again, that’s telling us something about her and making her more of an individual.

Fun fact—some 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. I mean, I had a character who often shouted “tarnation” or “pissbucket!”

Accents– Speaking of regional dialogue… Writing characters with accents. There are a handful of pros out there who can do truly amazing accented dialogue, yeah, but keep that in mind—a handful. The vast majority of the time, writing out accents and odd “language” tics will drive readers and editors nuts.

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

Dialogue Tags—I just talked about this a few months ago, so we won’t spend long on this. I don’t always need to put Yakko said, Dot replied, Wakko said, 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.

Names—Related to those dialogue tags, if I don’t need names 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. If I’ve got two established characters, 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. Most of us don’t talk for long. We don’t give lectures or monologues. We tend to talk in bursts—two or three sentences at best. When I have big blocks of dialogue, I usually 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 this monologue even necessary? Does it flow? Could I get all this across another way? Is this a time or situation where Yakko should be giving a four-paragraph speech? Especially if it’s the fifth or sixth four-paragraph speech…?

Cool lines— Our latest ugly truth (so much truth in this rant)—everything becomes mundane when there’s too much of it. If everybody can sink a basket with a hook shot from the three point line… sinking a basket isn’t that impressive, is it? If everyone can fly, being able to fly doesn’t seem like such a big thing, does it? As a wise supervillain once said, when everyone’s super… no one is.

The same holds for dialogue. We all want to have a memorable line or three that stands out and sticks in the reader’s mind forever, but that’s the catch. 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… well, it’s all at eleven. It’s monotone.

Exposition—Remember being a kid in school and that one teacher who just read right out of the textbook? Just raw, boring facts poured out in front of you, often without a lot of context? That’s what exposition is like to my readers.

Simple test. If a character ever gives an explanation of something the other characters in the room should already know (or my reader should know)… cut it. Seriously, just slice it out and see if it really makes that much difference. If nothing gets tripped up and things move faster…

“As you know…” – Closely related to exposition. I’ve mentioned this once or thrice before. I need to find every sentence or paragraph in my writing that starts with “As you know” or one of its cousins. “As you may recall…” “You all know…” Once I’ve found these, I need to delete them.

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. Past that, I need to get out my editorial knife and start cutting.

Listen to It—You may have seen the suggestion to read your manuscript out loud to help you see how things flow. Personally, I think this works great for catching errors, but not as good for catching dialogue issues. Since I wrote these lines, so I know how they’re supposed to sound and what they’re supposed to convey. When I read them aloud, there’s a chance I’ll be reading things that aren’t on the page, if that makes sense.

So if you’re worried about dialogue… get somebody else to read it out loud. A real person, not a text-to-voice program. Just a few pages. 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 fictional dialogue seem a little more real. Fictional-real, anyway. Not real-real.

Next time…

Holy crap! WonderCon is this week! Like, tomorrow! If you’re going to be there, I’m doing a Friday night panel called Neighborhood Nightmares, a Sunday afternoon session of The Writers Coffeehouse, and a later-Sunday autograph session. Plus I’ll probably be wandering the floor before/after those. If you’re going to be there, please stop by, say hello, ask a question or two!

Anyway… next time here, because it came up on Bluesky… I’d like to talk about twists.

Until then, go write.

Okay, yes, I said I was only going to do this biweekly now but this is me posting for the third week in a row. I messed up my schedule/lost track of time because… look, life is a mess sometimes. And now I’m trying to play catch-up because some of these were planned to come out on certain days and I want to pretend this is still slightly relevant.

Point is, the ranty writing blog is still biweekly. Mostly. With only a few exceptions.

Anyway…

If you’ve been following along here for any amount of time, you know I’m a big believer in the rules of writing. Yes, there are rules. No, I don’t care what they said. There are rules and we have to learn them.

Now, granted, most of these rules are just in place to make sure we don’t end up in a metaphorical car crash before we’ve gotten any real experience. It’s like that driver ed instructor who screams at you to keep your hands at nine-and-three on the steering wheel. That’s a real thing. They’re not wrong to teach it and there’s reasons we need to learn it. But eventually we’re going to hit a point where we understand that a lot of the time we can relax a little bit while we’re driving. And that there are still absolutely times we want to keep two hands on the wheel.

One solid rule is spelling. Spelling’s important because that’s how we identify a word. If my readers can’t identify the word I’m using, they can’t understand what I’m trying to say. And if they can’t understand what I’m trying to say, well… It’s going to be tough to get them interested in what my characters are going through.

Of course, some folks will arrgue that spelling doesn’t really matter. I mean, really all those spellings were just made up anyway, right? Some random guy decided this was the right way to spell it and we all just went along with it. It’s not a rule. I don’t have to spell things that way. People wil figure out what I mean from context.

Maybe? Y’see, one of the other cool things spelling does is it lets us keep readign without any intruptions. Every time we notice a misspelled word, our brains sort of trip fir a moment. It might not completely knock us out of the story, but it breaks the flow a bit. And after the flow gets broken again and again… well, we’re not reading the stor yany more, we end up auditing it. Watching for the next typo to land

A solid follow up here is vocabulary in general. Sometimes I may know how to spell a ward, but I don’t actually know what it means. Other times I may know what it means, but I’m not entirely sure how to spell it… and maybe I’ve accidentally spilled something else instead.

You probably noticed both of these things in the past few paragraphs, didn’t you? Ha ha ha, he’s talking about spelling and he’s got typos. And that’s kind of my point. It knocked your brain out of reading mode. You were still working your way through the paragraphs, but it wasn’t a casual, gliding-along thing, was it? And that’s just here on a random blog post where I’m not really trying to draw you in. Imagine if you’d been trying to read a story?

Thank goodness for spellchecker, right?

Welllllllllll…

Here’s the problem. A spellchecker wouldn’t notice half the mistakes up above. I know, because I ran this post through mine. See, a spellchecker will notice a word that’s blatantly spelled wrong, but it won’t register a word that’s spelled correctly but being used wrong. For or fir? Ward or word? Spelling or spilling? A spellchecker doesn’t see a problem with any of these, so it doesn’t care which one I’m using.

But my reader? They’re going to notice. I mean, you noticed, right? Every one of those, ping, ping, ping

Well, that’s no problem, says random guy #23. I’ll just use one of those more advanced grammar programs, or maybe even an AI. They’ll understand the difference between a preposition and a noun. They’ll know the word I want.

Ha ha ha haa haaaaaa no they won’t. Sorry.

Kameron Hurley recently told a cute story on Bluesky about how she was looking through a blog about dentistry and the writer had capitalized the word tartar through several articles. When she asked why, the response was basically an internet shrug and “Grammarly told me to.” Because Grammarly can’t understand the difference between tartar (the build up on your teeth) and Tartar (an Asian ethnicity). This is a supposedly expert grammar program that doesn’t understand capitalization can drastically change the meaning of words. Which also should make you wonder about giving your Polish glassware a good polish, or that fine china you got in China.

Really, the more most of these assorted systems offer to do, the less they’re often capable of doing. I mean, heck, how many times have you gone looking for a specific book on Amazon and the algorithm instead recommends random Blu-rays? Or camping equipment? Or an anime t-shirt? None of these are bad things, but they’re definitely not what I asked the algorithm to find for me.

Again, spellcheck can’t solve all my spelling problems. A grammar program isn’t going to understand a lot of grammar situations. And this really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Human languages are complex, and English is one of the messiest, most confounding languages there is. Sometimes it’s hard for people to grasp subtext and nuance or even just basic meaning. So the idea that some guy threw together a machine that can understand all of that better than most people…?

Well, I mean, we’ve been talking about how they don’t. They just don’t. Sorry.

Let me be clear. I still use spellchecker all the time. But I’m not expecting it to do the work for me. It does help me catch the odd blatant misttake that crops us—and usually a lot faster than I could—but it also labels a lot of other things in my story as mistakes that aren’t. I still have to keep an eye on it and make sure it’s not screwing up. I don’t assume every correction or suggestion is right, and most of the time they aren’t.

Y’see, Timmy, too many folks get a result from a spellchecker or some half-baked LLM and they immediately accept it. It has to be right because… well, it’s a computer. It knows everything, right? That’s what decades of sci-fi has taught us. Computers are never wrong. Computers is geniuses.

This is why I need to know how to spell. I need to have a good vocabulary. Because ultimately, I’m the one who needs to be doing the writing if I want it to be my writing, saying what I want it to say.

As they said in the Princess Bride, anyone who says differently is spelling something.

Next time… well, crap, if I get back to biweekly posts, next time will be Halloween, so I guess we’ll talk about something scary. Or something we want to be scary, anyway.

Until then, go write.

About a year and a half ago, when the ranty writing blog was still out in the wild, I did a post about being a little cautious when I use made-up words in fiction. Y’know, words like cromulent or midichlorian or squale. In the comments, Oliver asked if the same would hold for real-world foreign languages as well. Should I be cautious using, say, Japanese words the same way I would be using Klingon technospeak?

Which is why I’d like to talk about paint.

I think we’re all familiar with the idea of slapping a quick coat of paint on something to make it look new or different, right? House flippers do it, painting rooms with the latest colors and shades. Not unheard of for a used car to get a fresh coat of paint on it either. Heck, if you’re familiar with Games Workshop, I’d guess 83% of their “new and different” armies are just a lot of the same models with different colored paint on them. Again, it’s not a new idea. It was blue, now it’s red. It was something we’d seen before and now it’s something cool and different and, y’know… red.

And sometimes… we do this with storytelling. It’s the same character, but now she’s a brunette instead of a blonde. It’s the same old capitalism, but now they’re credits instead of dollars. Same problems, but now he’s hooked on stimms instead of drugs. We slap on a quick coat of paint and whoa-ho! now it’s an alien future world with a different financial system and everything! Hey, those stimms are fifty credits each! Your Earth-dollars are no good here on our very different alien planet.

Now let’s talk about languages…

I want to be clear this is a “no easy answers” topic. Much like with completely fictional words, a lot of it’s going to depend on the story, my intended audience, and context. This isn’t something where I can say “only four foreign words per page and never do more than sixteen per chapter” and that answer will fit every scenario in every book by every other author. There’s just too many possibilities to cover.

There’s also that whole gray area of words I can feel relatively confident most people don’t think of as foreign-language words. Even here in the United States, where the majority of our paler citizenry famously only knows one language, most folks would understand words like bonjour, quesadilla, dosvidania, kaiju, aloha, or gesundheit. So should we be counting them? Do I need to explain what a quesadilla is? Or a kaiju?

Anyway, rather than give out any firm rules for how to do this, I’d like to offer you a couple of loose guidelines to keep in mind.

First off, why am I including these words? In a general sense, but also specifically this one and that one and those three on the last page. Am I trying to establish a setting or a character’s speech pattern? Or am I just slapping down that coat of paint to give my characters or setting a thin veneer of “otherness”? Yeah, look, we’re definitely in Cairo now– see, the guy said shookran instead of thanks.

I want it to be clear these words are necessary. They’re an integral, load-bearing part of the setting and the characters. And just in case you didn’t know… paint isn’t load-bearing.

Second, is it going to be clear to my readers what these words mean? Maybe not exactly crystal clear, but is there enough on the page, in context or subtext, for a reader to figure out this is a piece of clothing (maybe outerwear), that was her brother’s name, and that was an expletive (and definitely not one you’d use around your mother)? If there’s not enough there for my reader to understand it, is it going to get explained to them? And if they can’t figure it out and I’m not going to explain it… is it really a word I need?

There’s a bunch of ways to use words in my writing that my readers might not know. I want to remember that hitting an unknown, indecipherable word will break the flow of my story for a reader.

Also worth noting an important aspect of this—my chosen audience. We all want our books to be international best sellers with three or four million readers, but the truth is we’re probably going to be aiming at a specific group of people. Even if it’s just something like “sci-fi fans” or “religious thriller fans.” And hey– religious thriller fans might know a lot more Latin than the average reader. So I might not need as much context/explanation for some of those words.

Third, am I absolutely sure I’m using these words correctly? Look, languages are tricky, complex things. They all have their own subtleties and nuances and… look, this may come as a shock to you but Google Translate is not quite on par with the Federation’s universal translator. Especially now that they’ve plugged it into their half-assed AI. There are languages out there that do things English can’t even wrap its head around. Like, you may remember from high school that a lot of other languages have feminine and masculine verbs. Heck, y’know how English has singular and plural? Well, Arabic has dual. Yep, a whole way of dealing with verbs and nouns that’s specifically for two people. Spend a few minutes thinking how that changes how you write. And think. And if I’m using these words in the wrong way…

Or how about this–there are some words in English that have multiple meanings, but in other languages they’re actually multiple words. If you don’t know the difference, just looking up how to say this word in German could cause problems, he said, from personal experience. When I was writing The Broken Room, at one point in an earlier draft I’d unknowingly used the Spanish verb “shield” (as in, this lead vest will shield you from the X-rays) as opposed to the noun “shield” (the thing Captain America uses). Still can’t remember what made me check it again, but around the third draft I suddenly just had this weird, gnawing worry about it.

Anyway, those are my three personal rules-of-thumb for using other languages.

And I’ll leave you with this one other thing to consider. Benjamin Dreyer, reigning copy editor supreme at Penguin Random House (that’s his actual title) has suggested maybe we should stop italicizing foreign words. Italics generally mean emphasis, and we used to italicize words in other languages to highlight their difference. These weren’t normal words. They were Spanish words, words people used in some strange, different place.

We’re all past that, right? I mean, did any of you have a problem with aloha and gesundheit not being in italics up above? Maybe it’s time to admit words in another language are just… words.

Things to keep in mind when you write.

Speaking of which…

I haven’t had any suggestions or requests in a while now. I’m sure I can struggle on for a bit longer, coming up with ideas on my own. But if there’s something you’d like an answer to or some help with or just wondered what my thoughts were on a topic… please let me know in the comments. And if not, i guess next time I’ll just blather on about, I don’t know, creative writing classes I took in the past or something like that.

Until then, go write.