Category: tips

            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.

            A quick tip for this week.

            When I was still a scrabbling writer looking for my first real success, I was sure there was some sort of trick to writing.  That it wasn’t about putting in years of work and getting experience, it was just about finding the right topic or the right genre.   I wrote lots of stories that focused on all the wrong things, because I was convinced it wasn’t how I wrote, it was what I wrote about.

            Needless to say, this wasn’t true.

            It wasn’t just me, though.  Lots of writers think this at some point in their learning curve.  They think success is some wave that all those other people are riding.  They figured out what was going to be hot this year and jumped on that wave.  Young adult stories.  Werewolf stories.  Space opera stories.  Western stories.  All I need to do is aim my story at the next wave and then I’ll be successful, too.

            Again… this isn’t true.

            A while back I saw Joss Whedon’s fun and super-low budget Much Ado About Nothing.  Some of the actors were there and did a little Q & A afterwards.  Someone asked Alexis Deinsof about the wisdom of deciding to do a slightly-updated Shakespeare play as a movie.  He smiled and said “You can’t start at ‘success’ and work backward to ‘What should I write about?’

            When a story finds a home with an editor or a producer or a reader, it’s not because of trickery.  It’s because that writer knew how to tell a story and that story appealed to said reader or editor at that particular time.  That’s all.  So copying a theme or a genre from something successful isn’t going to help me.  Rushing to copy the current “hot thing” isn’t going to help me. 

            The only thing I can do to improve my odds at success is be the best writer possible.

            Next time, because it’s always good to have your website noticed by lots of people in the NSA, let’s talk about nuclear weapons and blowing up cities.  We can watch the hit counter go crazy together.

            Until then, go write.

            2014!  Welcome to the world of tomorrow!  Just with no flying cars.  Or jetpacks.  And far less moonbases than Space: 1999, Inherit the Stars, or 2001: A Space Odyssey led us to expect.

            Wow.  We’re only two days in and 2014 is kind of a letdown so far.

            Anyway, as I often do at the start of the year, I’d like to take a minute or three to talk about this page and the kind of stuff I babble on about.  And touch on a few of the things I don’t.

            And to do this, I’m going to dip my toe into a potentially controversial subject.  So hopefully I won’t offend anyone too much

            Maybe it’s just the circles I travel in, but I tend to see a lot of “after the fact” material.  It’s on pages I get links to or I get spammed with messages about it.  People with blogs about how to self-publish and why traditional publishers are dinosaurs.  About how to get past those evil “gatekeepers” and why they’re pointless.  Which ebook platform is best.  How to format for said platform.  Where to find a good agent. Where to find a good artist for my cover.  How to network.  Good places for self-promotion.  How much I should self-promote.  How much I should pay for that promotion.

            The reason I call this “after the fact” material is because it skips a major step.  Every one of those issues is about getting my book in front of readers.  None of it addresses the important question…

            Shouldmy book be in front of readers?

            Is my book ready to be published, by me or anyone else?  Does it deserve to make it past those gatekeepers?  Do I have something worth promoting?

            And that’s what I don’t see a lot of out there—help to get past that first step.  Because the best chef in the world can’t do anything with no tools and an empty kitchen.  If I don’t have a full, polished manuscript, all those other tips are kind of useless.

            This is why, in my opinion, self-publishing still has—and probably always will have—a stigma hanging over it.  There are some absolutely phenomenal self published books out there, and some authors who are making great money as self-publishers.  But the ugly truth is that, statistically, most self-published material is bad.  Now that it’s so easy and cheap to self-publish, I’d even say that these days the vast majority of self-published stuff is awful.  There’s a lot more good stuff than a decade ago, absolutely, but by the same token  there’s tons and tons more bad stuff.

            So, that’s what I want to do here.  I try to help with that first step. Every week I toss out some advice, tips, and observations on how to improve a manuscript and turn it into something people want to buy and read.  Things I was told or stumbled across (or learned the hard way) in the thirty or so years that I’ve been stringing words together.

            Now, the two main things you’ll find here is advice on writing and ruleson writing.  Yes, there are rules.  No, I don’t care what he said.  No, I don’t care what she said either.  There are rules that have to be followed.  Bear with me.

            Adviceis optional.  When to write.  Where to write.  What to write.  How to develop characters.  How to edit.  How many drafts I need to go through.  What kind of structure a particular story should have.  What point of view to use.  I’d say the ranty blog is about 60-65% advice.

            This is the kind of stuff that’s going to be individual to each writer.  I like to write in the afternoon, but you might be more productive in the morning, and she’s more productive after midnight.  I tend to plan a rough outline in my head, but you might need three really detailed pages before you begin, and he might be fine with a dozen notecards taped to the wall.  I might need music to write but you need absolute silence and she can’t write unless she’s outside and wearing a Ren Faire outfit.  The thing about advice is that it’s rarely wrong, it just might not be advice that works for me or you.  That’s one of the main tenets here, my golden rule.

            It drives me nuts when I come across someone insisting advice must be strictly followed.  I think a lot of would-be writers get messed up by this, and these are the folks who end up staring at a blank page every morning in a silent room, wondering why they can’t write the opening of the goth-witch-lit novel they have no interest in but were told is going to be the new big thing.  They often get stuck wearing an itchy corset, too.

            Y’see, Timmy, rules are the real non-optional stuff.  Spelling.  Grammar.  Structure (you have to have some kind of it).  Likable characters (not necessarily good characters, but someone my readers won’t mind following) with believable arcs.  Flow.  Coherency.  This page is maybe 35-40% rules, at any given time.

            Most of us had at least five or six teachers during our lives who tried to teach us the rules of writing—the basic mechanics of how words go together to express ideas.  If I want to make a living at this, I need to know those mechanics.  If I don’t know how to spell, if I don’t understand structure, if commas and apostrophes are baffling to me, if I can’t sense how my readers will react to something… well, it’s going to be very hard for me to have any success as a writer.

            The flipside of what I mentioned above, it’s also very damaging when some folks try to insist that rules are just loose guidelines, that it doesn’t matter if I follow them or not.  I think a lot of that comes out of folks who see the rules broken by an experienced professional and assume they can be ignored from the start.  They point to the exception and use that as their reason to not learn the rules.  This kind of deliberate ignorance leads to poor writing and bad habits, and it means a lot of potentially good writers never improve. 

            Y’see, Timmy, if I don’t understand the rules, I’m not going to know how to break them.  A good writer can break some of the rules, but it’s like playing Jenga.  I can’t pull out all the blocks holding up the stack, and if I’m going to pull out this one I need to make sure that one is rock-solid.  If I don’t understand the basic rules of how the tower stands, I’m going to bring it crashing down on my second turn.  Maybe even my first.

            Actually, that’s an even better analogy.  Breaking rules is like demolishing buildings.  It looks simple, but the folks who do it actually need to know more than the people who built it.  They need to understand which walls are load bearing and which beams are supporting, but they also need to know how the material’s going to break or crumble or shatter and how much explosive is needed for each result without there being so much that the building collapses out rather than in.

            Because it might look really cool and fun when the building collapses out across the city, but it doesn’t get a lot of repeat customers.

            What else, what else, what else…

            Do I repeat myself here?  Well… yeah.  Especially if you’ve been following along for two or three years.  I try to come up with new ways to approach the same problem.  Sometimes I’ll hear something new and clever that I’ll try to share, or maybe even expand on.  At the end of the day, though, this page is more like a mid-level class on writing.  You can take the same class twice and get more out of it, but by the third of fourth time there’s a serious case of diminishing returns.  I’m not saying any of you long-time followers should leave, but don’t be too surprised if I end up talking about dialogue or character voices or something like that.

            Speaking of which, next time I wanted to talk about dialogue and character voices.

            Until then, go write.

            Probably not the one you think of when you think of professional writers…

            I’m a bit pressed for time this week, so I wanted to revisit an idea from a few weeks ago.  Hopefully in a way that may resonate with a few of you.

            There are, in my experience, four stages of being a professional.

1) Not knowing what you’re doing

2) Thinking you know what you’re doing 

3) Realizing you don’t know what you’re doing

4) Knowing what you’re doing

           I first came up with this rule set after about eight or nine years in the film industry.  I can’t remember how I came to it, but when I did I realized it mirrored my career.  As I looked around, I realized it was possible to place almost everyone on set in one of these categories.

            To explain…

            I ended up in the film industry by chance.  A guy I knew needed grunt labor and I was thrilled with the idea of working on a movie.  There was an immediate culture shock, believe me.  Different terms, different hierarchies, different expectations.  I spent my first month on set trying to soak up everything I could, because it was clear I didn’t know anything.

            Of course, by a week or two into my third project, I felt like I had it down.  I knew all this stuff, and I made sure that everyone knew I knew how to do it.  There was no doubt in my mind that I could do my boss’s job at least as well as him, if not better.   

            It was another year or so before I had the chance to be the boss… and learned how unprepared I was.  There were tons of basic things I didn’t know.  My assistant (a friend of a friend who’d offered to help) knew far more than me, and it was a minor miracle she didn’t smack me three or four times a week.  And I deserved to be smacked, believe me.  Then my next job went the same way (although I still hold that one was a 40-60 share with very unrealistic producers).

            So in the end, I sat down and decided to see what I had to do to be better at my job.  I took a good look at the tools and equipment I was going to need.  I paid attention to everything, not just the stuff that interested me.  I planned ahead.  I was more careful with the projects I chose, and the people I chose to work with.

            At which point I noticed other people were telling me I was good at my job.  I didn’t need to tell them.  It was apparent in the work I was doing.

            A while after this, I noticed this pattern applied to almost everything.  Almost any job you could name.  I saw it in many other jobs on film sets past mine.  I had a friend who was a cop, and he agreed a lot of police officers followed the same pattern.  So do programmers.  Watch a show like Kitchen Nightmaresand you’ll get to see some restaurateurs go from step two to step three and head toward four.

            Because that was the other thing I noticed.  There were some folks who weren’t that good at their job but were convinced they were.  They were stuck at step two because they never had (or never acknowledged) that slap down moment.  So they never bothered to improve.  They just stayed at those early, flawed levels.

            So why am I bringing up the film industry and cooking shows here?

            As I’m sure many of you have realized, being a writer follows this path, too.  Not knowing what you’re doing. Thinking you know what you’re doing.  Realizing you don’t know what you’re doing.  And then knowing what you’re doing.

            When I first sat down to write a story, every aspect of it was a mystery to me.  How to structure my plot, how to reveal character, how to describe action.  Hell, I barely understood what plot, character, and action meant.  But I waded in and tried to put my own twist on other stories.  And at some point I decided I was at least as good as half of these people writing for Marvel or DC or Del Rey.  And my mom agreed that I was very talented for an eleven year old.  So I started submitting stuff.  And I got rejected for some reason.  And I submitted other stuff.  And that got rejected, too.

            After many years and even more rejections, I was struck with the wild idea that maybe the problem wasn’t all those editors.  Maybe it was me.  Maybe my stories just weren’t good enough yet. 

            I went back over some of the things I’d sent out in earlier years and realized they were… well, pretty awful.  Some of the basic ideas were neat, but the stories were clumsy, my dialogue was awful, and my vocabulary was grade school level at best.

            So I decided to improve.  To write stronger stories, better characters, more believable dialogue.  I read everything I could in several genres and tried to figure out what worked and what didn’t.  And did it really not work, or did it just not work for me?

            And, well, years after that… here I am today.

            Some people never get past that second step.  Most people don’t, to be honest.  Especially these days when its easier to skip past possible rejection and claim almost anything as “success.”  These folks don’t need—or don’t want—to admit they need to improve, so they never do.

            How many steps are you down the path?

            Next week…. well, next week’s Thanksgiving, so I’ll be watching The Day The Earth Stood Still, Casablanca, and The Maltese Falcon while I make eggplant parmigiana from scratch for the vegetarians in the home, and some turkey for the rest of us. 

            But the week after that, I’d like to talk about that fantasy world you’re living in.

            Until then, go write.