August 24, 2023

It’s All Greek to Me…

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.

April 9, 2020

A2Q Part Nine—Editing

Well, if all goes well, we’re making a big time jump here. All the past things I’ve been blathering on about—plot, characters, story, theme—these are all elements that we can spend a day or three on. Maybe even less, if they’ve been fermenting in my head.

But between last week and this week, well… hypothetically a lot of time has passed. I’m really, really hoping you didn’t write an entire first draft in a week. If you did… well, that’s another issue we need to discuss. I’m hoping you took your time, within reason, and we are—hypothetically—a month or two or maybe even six later.

You have a first draft now. And it’s a beautiful thing. Maybe the file is so big it’s an entire meg on your computer. An entire megabyte of your words. I know that might sound laughable or dismissive, but seriously—you need a lot to hit a one megabyte Word file.

But…

(yeah, here comes the but)

…it needs editing. No probably. There’s a chance you wrote a perfect, flawless first draft, but more than likely… you didn’t. I haven’t yet and I’ve been doing this for a while.

It’s okay, though. Everybody needs to edit. Everyone. Anyone who says they don’t is either A) lying to you or 2) delusional. Our work needs editing and revising. If you remember waaaay back at the beginning of the A2Q, I talked about how ideas need to be cut and polished like diamonds? Well, that’s what we’re doing now. Figuring out what needs to be cut and then giving it all a good polish.

Again… this is okay. Don’t worry. Every book you’ve ever loved has gone through this process. And we’re going to go through it so this book can be one other people can love.

Ready?

First up, the easy part. This is a 100% complete draft, right? Beginning, middle, and end? I’m not going to get a hundred pages in and find blank space or notes to myself like [FIND WHAT THESE ARE REALLY CALLED] or [ASK ELLEN HOW TO DO THIS]. There’s nothing wrong with doing that on a first pass—I do it all the time—but before I start editing I need to fill in those spaces in my book with actual, y’know, book.

So, again… this is a 100% complete draft, right?

Fantastic.

Before diving in, may I suggest taking some time away from your book. You don’t want to finish a draft, then turn right around and start the next one. We want to get a little space, and let things fade in our mind a bit. I don’t want to be looking at the manuscript in my head, I want to be seeing the one in front of me—the one everybody else is going to see. We’re going to need some stark honestly for this, so I want to be clear what’s really there.

One tip for this—I’d suggest switching the font. Go from Times Roman to Courier. If you’re one of those folks who likes to write in Comic Sans, switch it back to Times. A different font is going to make everything sit differently on the page and it’ll make you actually read what’s on the page. You’ll become very aware of what is and isn’t there, and catch a lot of stuff that’s been sliding past you.

Once you’ve taken some time away, changed the format… read it. Just read through this new manuscript with those fresh eyes. Maybe make some quick notes, but for now just read it. Again—don’t remember it, read it. Try to see what’s really there on the page.

Now, I’ve talked about editing a bunch of times. It’s a big umbrella that a lot of things fall under, many of which I think can get broken down into three categories or types. It is my humble opinion that one of the big reasons people have issues with editing is they get these different types confused because they never get more specific than “editing.” I want to talk about each of these three types of editing and maybe give a few examples of each. You may have heard of one or two of them.

First up is story editing. This is when we try to improve the plot and story by reorganizing different elements, clarifying them, maybe even adding to them. Sometimes we might even add all-new elements.

Second is what I’m going to call reductive editing. This is when we’re cutting things, usually to tighten up dialogue, descriptions, and maybe even to simplify larger elements a bit. Sometimes, in all honesty, we’re just cutting to get closer to a certain word count.

Third is copyediting. This is when we’re correcting things throughout the manuscript. Formatting. Spelling. Grammar. The nuts and bolts things that are still important because they’re holding things together.

You may notice there seems to a bit of overlap here. I’d say it’s a little less “overlap” and a little more “weaving between lanes in high traffic,” as we’ll see. You may have also heard different names or definitions for these. Look, I never claimed to be an English major or anything. If you’ve heard it called something else, cool. I’m just trying to make this easy to distinguish.

Anyway… let’s go through these in a little more detail.

We’ve kind of talked about story editing already, in a sense. When we first had that pile of ideas and notes and we started sifting and arranging them into an outline—that was story editing. Trying to find the best order for things, the best way to introduce different elements, and so on. That’s what this is—taking what we’ve already got and figuring out if we can make it even better.

Yeah, we’ve already done that. But now we’ve written everything out. We’ve got a better sense of the characters and the size of the events and how they’re going to land with my audience. Maybe that needed a little more description than we thought and that bit needs a lot less. And maybe we’ve realized some of this… doesn’t really serve any purpose.

This is one of the reasons we want to look at this with fresh eyes. So I can see where problems have developed. Or maybe they were there all along, but I couldn’t recognize them until it was all here in front of me.

F’r example, now that I’ve looked at all of this again, does it have a good dramatic structure? Does the tension start low and rise throughout the book (maybe with a few dips and drops here and there for our heroes)? How’s the pacing? Does it feel like there are any slow parts that just stretch on a little too long with nothing actually happening?

That’s a good one right there? Are things happening? Are events pushing the plot and my characters’ stories along? Or are they stalling out in places. Are people talking or thinking about doing things more than they’re… y’know, doing things?

This is story editing. Taking an honest look and deciding what story elements do and don’t need to be there. Or maybe just need to shift to somewhere else.

Also—don’t get scared here if it looks like you need to make big changes. If it turns out my outline was wrong, then it was wrong. So what? The first draft’s done. Make a new outline if you want and then write to that one. I’ve written a complete first draft and then gone back and completely rewritten the ending, or ripped out whole chapters. It happens. Don’t worry if it does.

Next up is what I’m calling reductive editing. This is something I’ve talked about a lot here on the ranty blog. We all get a little wordy in our first drafts. We use a few too many adverbs. We describe things with a bit too much detail. We let conversations go on and on. And we also tend to…

Okay, a thought exercise for you. If I said you no-questions had to get rid of three characters in this book—three characters with names and/or dialogue, who would you pick? Why did they jump right to mind? Is it because you knew getting rid of Wakko wouldn’t mean too much rewriting? Or because Dot and Yakko could be merged into one character (Dakko? Yot?) pretty easily? Because really… they don’t do that much.

We all do this. We bulk up characters and their descriptions and subplots, letting them take up a lot more space on the page than their actual contributions might warrant. I’m not saying every single character has to be a vital linchpin to the plot, but… well, how fast did you come up with three characters you could cut?

And I’m sure some folks reading this are thinking “Ha ha, good thing there’s absolutely no literary fat in my manuscript. Every single element is perfectly balanced and artistically necessary.” Which, yeah, there’s a chance it is. Maybe.

But remember this. As a first time author—hell, even as a successful one—the odds of a sale are better with a smaller, tighter book. No one’s saying a publisher won’t look at something big, but if I can trim two or three thousand words off my manuscript it can make a difference. Even just a psychological difference, when they look at that cover page and see 98K words instead of 101K words.

Finally, there’s copyediting. The often long and painful process of going through a manuscript line by line, word by word, and making sure everything’s correct. I’m using the correct words, spelled the right way. I’ve got commas where I need them and all my dialogue’s got quotation marks at both ends. Indents and spacing and page numbers.

People get contentious about this for a few reasons. Some folks will declare writing doesn’t have rules and they can do whatever they want, however they want. Others say it’s irrelevant because the genius of their writing will shine past all that to illuminate the heart and soul of the reader. And still others say, well… I mean, isn’t that the publisher’s job? They’ve got people for that, and they know this isn’t going to be perfect.

There’s a bunch of problems with all these views, biggest among them… what if I plan on publishing it myself? If I’m the publisher I need to be able to do all of this. And if I want someone else to publish it… well, why would they bother to look at it if I can’t be bothered to give them my best work? I mean, if they get those first fifty pages and it’s clear I didn’t even bother to fix my spelling mistakes, what else didn’t I bother with?

And to be clear—there are times my story might require typos and odd grammar. I occasionally spell words in odd ways. I sometimes take certain stylistic liberties with commas when I write. So do a lot of writers I know. But it’s always very clear this is a deliberate thing—I know I’m doing it and why I’m doing it. But these are exceptions, and exceptions by their very nature are rare things.

So there’s a bunch of editing thoughts. Let’s apply some of them. Remember that first page and a half  of our werewolf novel I wrote last time…?

++++++++++
Chapter One
            “Luna!”
            Phoebe sifted through the laundry pile again, willing the black top to appear even though it hadn’t the last three times she’d looked. “Luna,” she bellowed again.
            Upstairs the sound of the shower finally stopped and she heard the thump of feet on the wooden floor. The bathroom door creaked open. “What?”
            “Where’s my black top? The one with the ribbing?”
            “I’m trying to get ready,” her little sister growled. “I’m going out!”
            “So am I! Where is it?”
            “How should I know?”
            “You borrowed it last night. You promised you’d wash it.”
            Silence. Then the bathroom door creaked again quietly.
            “Luna!”
            What?” Her voice echoed in the small house.
            “Where is it?”
            A sigh echoed down the stairs. “I’ll get you a new one.”
            “You’ll what?”
            “I kind of… misplaced it.”
            “You what?”
            “I lost it, okay. I said I’ll get you a new one.”
            “Goddammit. I wanted it tonight. It fits under my armor.” She looked at the leather sleeves, vest, and gorget piled on the bed. Her mom’s old hand-me-down armor. Stained dark brown with years of oil and sweat and blood that sank in before it could be cleaned off.
            “Wear the green one.”
            “It’s long-sleeved and I wore it last night. It stinks.”
            “It’s not like anyone’s going to complain.”
            Phoebe bit back a sigh of her own sigh and marched over to the hamper of dirty clothes. “How did you ‘misplace’ lose it?”
            “I was at a party.”
            “That’s not an answer.”
            “Yes it is,” Luna sang down the stairs. “I’m getting back in the shower now.”
            “We’re going to talk about this later.”
            “Whatever.” The bathroom door creaked shut and hot water started to gush flowed again.
            They’d have to talk about that too. The water bill and the gas bill had been high last month. Phoebe felt pretty sure Luna’s long showers were a major big part of that.
            She pulled the green top from the hamper. It had been warm last night, especially under all the leather, and she’d sweated a lot. The top was still damp, and it reeked. But it was that or she could try to find a Henley or turtleneck that wouldn’t bunch up under the armor and slow her down.
            She sure as hell wasn’t going to be some B-movie cliché, hunting werewolves with nothing on but a leather vest.
++++++++++

Let’s talk about some of the tweaks.

As far as story editing goes, you’ll notice I changed “mom’s old armor” to “hand-me-down armor.” Now it feels less sentimental and more a necessity from lack of funds—a subtle hint at their financial status.

For reductive editing, I snipped some adverbs and redundant words. Only seven altogether (when we count what I added in). Doesn’t seem like much, but this was only a page and a half. At that rate, we’re talking about 1,400 words cut out of a 300 page manuscript—closer to 294 pages at that point. And those were really minimal cuts, weren’t they?

There wasn’t a lot to copyedit because, well, I checked it all as a regular part of the blog post last time. But I remember there were two or three typos in it, because I scribbled that all out really fast. One of them was my thumb not hitting the space bar hard enough so two words ran together.

Also worth mentioning you don’t have to do all of this at once. Some people like to just work in a single document through the whole process. Others write, save it as a draft, do an editing pass, save it as a draft, do another editing pass, save a draft, and so on. I’ve talked about my own method before, but figure out what works for you.

Y’see Timmy, that’s one of the toughest thing about trying to explain editing—even just these small tweaks. A lot of it does just come down to figuring it out. Yeah, we can study grammar, but so much of the raw art of it is just experience. Being honest with myself about my own work. Writing a lot. Reading a lot. Making mistakes. Learning from them. It’s how we get a sense of which words fit and which ones don’t. And like so much of this, it’s a flexible thing. Just because it worked last time doesn’t mean it’ll work every time.

In the end, the goal is to make this the best I possibly can. Not the best first draft or the best it can before I get bored. Ugly truth is, it’s going to be work, it’s going to take time and there’ll be points when you go back and forth about cutting or keeping things. That’s just the way it goes. But it’ll get slightly easier every time. I promise.

…at least, until you try to write a more complex book.

But we’ll get to that another time.

I think I’ve still two or three post left in this whole big process thing. Hopefully you’re still interested to read them. But next time I may take a quick break from the A2Q to talk about some related ideas.

Until then, go write.

And edit.

March 14, 2019 / 4 Comments

Can We Just Talk a Bit…?

            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.
February 6, 2018 / 1 Comment

Help From the Internet

A random thought…

Well, not that random.

The other day I made a smart-ass response to a friend’s Twitter comment about different online writing aids and apps. There’s a bunch of them out there these days. Some of them highly publicized. My comment was… snarkily negative. Let’s leave it at that.

I know. Snarkiness with friends. What has the internet come to? It’s all downhill from here.

Anyway, it did get me thinking about these different sites a bit. I mean, a good writer wants to use all the tools available, right? Is this just me inching ever-closer to cranky old manhood?

I don’t think so.

Okay, first off, let’s not even talk about the information side of this. If someone wants to hand over a bunch of their intellectual property to a random website and feels completely confident they’ve read and understood every single line of the terms of service… that’s up to them. We’ll leave that discussion for others.

I want to blather on about how useful these sites are, both short-term and long-term.

So… let’s talk machines.

(I feel hundreds of fingers poised over keyboards, ready to lunge at the comments section…)

The most common computer tool we’re going to encounter is a spellchecker. Pretty much every word processor has one.  Lots of websites do, too. Blog sites like this one, Twitter, Facebook—they’ve all got some basic spellcheck capacity.

That’s the important bit. Basic. The absolute best spellcheckers are, if I had to put a number to it, correct maybe 97-98% of the time. Don’t quote figures at me—I’m saying right up front that’s just based off my own experience. These are the spellcheckers we usually find in the word processors. The online ones… I’d drop it down into the 88-90% range. Maybe even a tiny bit lower.

What does this mean? Well, there are words that have accepted alternate spellings, but a spellchecker will say they’re wrong. There are also lots of common words—especially for genre writers—that won’t be included. I was surprised to discover cyborg wasn’t included in my spellchecker’s vocabulary. Or Cthulhu. Okay, not  quite as surprised on that one, but still…

Keep in mind, spelling is a basic, quantfiable aspect of writing. We can say, no question, whether or not I’ve spelled quantifiable correctly in that last sentence (I didn’t). That’s a hard fact (and, credit where credit is due, the spellchecker kept insisting we needed to change it).

Also—a spellchecker doesn’t know what word I meant to use.  It can only tell me about the word on the page. Or the closest correctly-spelled word to that word on the page.  Maybe it’s the one I wanted, maybe not. At this point it’s up to me to know if that’s the right word or not. And if I don’t know… well, things aren’t looking good for my manuscript.

Consider all the things I just said. The gaps. The problems. The rate of accuracy. And this is with the easiest aspect of writing. Spelling is a yes or no thing. It’s right or it isn’t. This is something a computer should excel at… and the online ones are getting a B+ at best.

How accurate do you think an online grammar program is?

Grammar’s a lot more complex than spelling. Spelling’s just a basic yes or no, but grammar has a ton of conditionals. Plus, in fiction, we bend and break the rules of grammar a lot. I tend to use a lot of sentence fragments because I like the punch they give. A friend of mine uses long, complex sentences that can border on being run-ons. I know a few people who remove or add commas to help the dramatic flow of a sentence.

And hell… dialogue? Dialogue’s a mess when it comes to grammar. A big, organic mess. Fragments, mismatched tenses, mismatched numbers, so many dangly bits…  And it needs to be. That’s how we talk. Like I’ve mentioned in the past, dialogue that uses perfect grammar sounds flat and unnatural.

Think about this. I’ve talked before about Watson, the massive supercomputer that was specifically designed by MIT to understand human speech… and still had a pretty iffy success rate. Around 72% if my math is right. And it might not be–I’m not a mathematician, after all.

D’you think the people who made that grammar website put in the time and work that was put into Watson?

So, again… how accurate is that online grammar program going to be?

More to the point, how useful is it going to be as a tool? Would you pay for a DVR that only records 3/4 of the shows you tell it to? Do you want a phone that drops one out of every four calls?

Now, I’d never say there’s no use for these tools or sites. But it’s very important to understand they’re not going to do the job for me. They’re the idiot writing partner who’d really good at one thing, so I kinda need to keep both eyes on them when they’re set loose to do… well, that thing. I need to know how to spell words and what they mean. I still need to know the rules of grammar—even moreso if I plan on breaking them.

See, that’s the long-term problem. Assuming this professional writing thing is my long-term goal, at some point I need to learn spelling and grammar. If I’m going to keep depending on someone (or something) else to do the work for me… when am I going to learn how to do the work?

Y’see, Timmy, these programs and apps are kinda like alcohol. They won’t make up for a lack of knowledge. They’ll just emphasize it. I definitely don’t want to be dependent on them. At best, if I know what I’m doing and I’m careful (and use them in moderation), they might make things a little more smooth and painless.

Next, a quick screenwriting tip.

Until then, go write.

You go write. Not your computer.

Go on…  go write.

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