Category: voice

            I know I said I’d talk about chefs when I got back from SDCC—which, granted, was two weeks ago—but I want to put that order on hold for a little bit.

            Over the past week or so, I’ve interacted with a few different folks online.  And while online interaction doesn’t work the same as face-to-face conversations, it still got me thinking about communication and points of view and characters.

            Which, of course, made me think about Go-Bots.

            Hell, there were Go-Bots that turned into rocks. Seriously.  Rock Lords turned from robots into lumpy, dull-gray balls.  That’s some serious, hardcore play action right there.

            Kids who liked Go-Bots were stupid.  No question about it.

            Thing is, as I got older, I actually came to realize why some people had this odd affection for Go-Bots, and still do to this day.  Their simplicity wasn’t a flaw, it was a feature. They had a different story behind them, and what they were worked fine for that narrative. In the end, they were just a different kind of toy for different kinds of kids (or nostalgic collectors).

            Of course, as adults we can argue about X-Box versus PlayStation.  Or Hunger Games versus Twilight.  Or socialism versus capitalism.

            As a writer, though, I need to be able to see both sides of any of these discussions.  That’s how I end up with a great cast of characters—a group of people who embody different beliefs and cultures.  They don’t all act and think and sound the same.

            I’ve talked about this a bit before with villains. Everybody in the story thinks they’re the hero, including the baddie.  They believe what they’re doing is right and just.  So to have a good villain, I need to be able to see things from their point of view. I need to be able to identify and understand with how they feel.

            We all know what it’s like when every character sounds just like the author. Or when they all agree with all the author’s beliefs.  We’ve all read that short story or the first few chapters of that book or sat through the first half of that movie.  It usually means I’m pounding home a message.  Or I’m just not a very good writer.  Sometimes both.  And if this is the kind of story I’m writing, I almost always end up with muah-ha-hah, mustache-twirling villains that feel like they’re… well, straight out of a Go-Bots cartoon.

            Female or male.  Progressive or conservative.  Pro-life or pro-choice.  Young or old.  Rich or poor.  Christian or atheist.  Black, brown, white, or Asian.  Omnivore, vegetarian, or vegan.  Straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or asexual.

            Y’see, Timmy, in order to be a good writer, I need to be able to see things more than one way.  This just isn’t a profession for the narrow-minded, unless I’m looking to only appeal to a similarly narrow-minded audience.  I have to be open. I have to be willing to learn.  I have to be able to see other viewpoints

            One of the main characters of my Ex-Heroes series is a black, bisexual woman.  I work like hell to make sure she sounds as real as possible, despite the fact that I am not one of these things myself.  It’s important to me.  And I worry constantly that I’ll have her do or say something that will offend somebody.  But I don’t want to be the straight, progressive white guy who only writes about other straight, progressive white guys and makes everyone else a secondary character at best.

            Because if I couldn’t see anyone else’s viewpoint… that’s all I’d be able to write.

            Next time—unless somebody wants to make a request in the comments—I’m probably going to go all passive-aggressive on you.

            Until then… go write.

            Spectacular spectacular!

            What I’m going to do this week is run through a few questions and requests that have shown up here this summer.  A few of them I can do a full post on, but some of them are things I’ve touched on before (or, at least, I think I have) so I think I can answer them with a few paragraphs and links.

            So… let’s get to it.

            Tricky question that’s going to be a little different for every writer and for every project.  For me, once I get a pretty solid draft, it’s really rare for things to change that much.  It happens sometimes, but not often.  I think once the plot and story are solid, for most writers, there won’t be any real changes to them.

            Please note, though, that I didn’t say no changes.  Every draft is going to be a little different as I tweak and cut and make other adjustments.  But all of these adjustments serve the plot and the characters.  Things are just getting tighter and clearer.  Maybe it means omitting a few story beats or changing someone’s second language from French to Spanish.  But these changes aren’t changing the bigger picture, they’re enhancing it.

           It’s probably worth mentioning that if I’m making changes that do radically alter my plot or characters, what it really means is that I don’t have a solid draft yet.  Yeah, even if I’ve done six drafts before this.  If I suddenly realize Yakko should be my main character while Dot’s the supporting character who dies in the second act… that’s a big change.  That’s a lot of changes.  It means different interactions between different characters, new motivations, possibly a whole new linear structure.  And it also means I’m kind of going back to square one.  Now I need to tweak and cut and make adjustments to this plot and story.

            Do you have any thoughts on working on multiple projects at once? Like editing one, drafting another, plotting a third? Is that something you do?

            Yeah, I do this, but in a bit more limited sense.  When I’m working on a first draft of something, I focus pretty much exclusively on that.  Once I’m out of that, though, and into the editing, I’m always jotting down character ideas, lines, beats—all sorts of elements—for whatever I’m going to be working on next.  So while I’m doing drafts on one I’m setting all the groundwork for another.  I’ve also  found this helps me as far as any kind of block goes—being able to dip my toes into something else helps keep my brain from getting stuck on a project.

            Overall, though, this is one of those things that’s definitely more advice than rules, because it’s all going to come down to the individual.  Am I someone who can split their attention or not?  And to what extent?  Some folks can do it (to different degrees), some folks can’t.  Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to try it once or thrice.  I’m comfortable at the level I just described.  You might be able to do two or three  things side by side.  Someone else might need to focus on one thing at a time.   

            I do think it’s worth noting that “another project” can easily be a distraction, too.  Sort of like eating when you’re bored.  I’ve also seen some folks use multiple projects (consciously or not) as an excuse to never finish anything. Sooooo… something to keep in mind.

I’m still struggling with how writers develop an interesting narrative voice – character voice I think I’m getting the hang of, but the narrative bits still sound like me reading a grocery list. 

            Narrative voice can be tough.  Part of it depends on how much I want to insert myself as the author. Some folks do this extremely well, others… not so much.

            As far developing a narrative voice goes, think of it like a narrator. Who’s actually telling this story to the reader?  I’m not saying my book or short story has to be in first person, or that a narrator even has to exist, but in my perfect world, who’s reading this aloud?  Christopher Lee?  Felicia Day?  Doug, the guy down at the garage?  Ms. Phoebe, my college English professor?  Knowing the narrator tells me how they talk and what kind of words my narrative voice will use. 

            So, from a certain point of view, the narrative voice is another character. Even if it’s me, it’s the version of me I’m choosing to project through my writing (a friendly me who wants you to enjoy the story and is going to tell it in fun, simple terms, and who also has much better abs…).  So narrative voice is a lot like character voice, which is something I mentioned here just a few months back.  Well, okay, a year and a half ago…

            It’s probably worth mentioning that if there isn’t some kind of narrative voice in my head to start with, that might be a sign of a bigger problem.  If I have no sense of how my story should be told—how my audience should be hearing the words in their heads—I may need to stop and think about things some more.   Maybe the plot or the story aren’t as solid as I thought, and if they’re not clicking with me, there’s a good chance they won’t click with anyone else.

            Do you feel  an author should stick to one genre for the most part?  I want to go write something as far from my current genre as possible. Will that throw my fans for a loop?  I notice that you and most other authors pretty much stick to one thing.

            Well, I’d argue not much of my work falls in the same genre, unless we’re talking in broad, sweeping terms.  I’ve got a superheroes vs. zombies series (sci-fi fantasy with some soft horror), a suspense-mystery-horror novel, a sci-fi thriller, a classic mash-up where I share credit with Daniel Defoe, and I just started work on a historical time-travel road trip story.  I’ve also got some short stories out there that are straight horror, some that are straight sci-fi, and even a pulp action war story.

            And I’m not alone.  The majority of writers work in a bunch of genres.  They may be known for one thing, but they’ve usually got a lot of other stuff past that.  Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Scott Sigler, Craig DiLouie, Eloise Knapp, Timothy Long—and these are just the ones I know personally. All of them have written in at least two or three genres.

            Heck, look at Stephen King.  He’s known as a horror writer, but Firestarter and The Dead Zone, two of his earliest works, are pretty much straight sci-fi when you really look at them (there’s a post in that alone).  Under the Domeand 11/22/63 are both pretty solidly sci-fi, too.  The Dark Tower series is an epic fantasy.  Eyes of the Dragon is a young adult novel.  And then there’s “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” a  prison drama/character study that was adapted into a wildly popular film by Frank Darabont.

            So, no.  I don’t think an author needs to stick to one genre.  Yeah, there are some fans who might get upset I’ve moved away from their particular interest, but there’ll be just as many who’ll be intrigued to see how I deal with something else, and new ones who’ll come to me because of that something else.  And it’s my opinion that flexing those other muscles, so to speak, usually makes someone a better writer overall.

            I will say, though (there’s a “however…” on almost all of these, isn’t there?), that I don’t recommend chasing the popular trend.  It’s tempting to jump on the nymphomaniac-android-biker-school-romance bandwagon, I know.  But it rarely works out well in the long run.
           

            And I think that’s everything for now, yes?  Okay, I went over three or four paragraphs for some of them, but if you’re going to complain about that… Also, if I misread your question somehow, or if my answer just wasn’t complete enough, please say so down in the comments and I’ll try to answer there.  Or maybe bump it up to a full post.

            Next time, I’m going to answer one of those larger questions I mentioned up at the top. 

            Until then… go write.

            Pop culture reference. Well, okay, ten-year-old pop culture reference.

            This week I wanted to talk about… well, talking.  Which I haven’t done in a while. 

            Dialogue’s the lifeblood of fiction.  It’s how my characters move beyond the page and become living, breathing people.  In any sort of storytelling, it’s going to be the key to making them memorable.  In screenplays, it’s going to be what makes them quotable. Sounds corny, I know, but it’s true. 

            Bad dialogue is the fastest way to make sure characters are dead to my readers. It’s almost always the second element of my writing to get picked apart (spelling will be the first).   All of us know what people sound like, so when someone speaks in flat, clumsy, expositional dialogue, it makes them unbelievable. And when a reader can’t believe in my characters, it means they can’t believe in my story.

            Here’s a dozen things I should be keeping an eye out for in my dialogue.  Some of them are related.  Others are unique to themselves

            On The Nose—You may have heard people talk about dialogue that’s “on the nose.”  In simple terms, this is when a character says precisely what they mean or what they’re doing without any subtlety whatsoever.   Nine times out of ten, if someone’s talking to themselves out loud, it’s on the nose.  I’d guess that at least half the time I stumble across it, on the nose dialogue is just exposition (see below). 

            A good way to think of this is old radio-shows, when people had no visuals at all and had to depend on doing everything with only dialogue.  If my characters are speaking like that, I’m doing something wrong.

            Grammatically Correct – Very few people speak in perfect, grammatically correct English, aside from a few freaks with inferiority complexes.  Or Sherlock Holmes.  Or robots.  As for the rest of us, we all speak differing degrees of colloquial English.  Our verbs don’t always line up with our nouns.  Tenses don’t always match.  Truth be told, a lot of “spoken” English looks awful on the page (see transcribingdown below).  This is where some folks choke, because they can’t reconcile the words on the page with the voice in their head.  Which is how I end up with several characters, all of whom speak in a precisely regulated manner which seems highly affected and does not flow by any definition of the term.

            Lack of Contractions– Often found with the grammar issue 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 don’t get branded a rookie, and ironically… 

            While this is a good practice for your prose, dialogue drags and sounds forced when every word is spelled out in full.  As I said above, most of us use contractions in every day speech—scientists, politicians, teachers, and even military personnel.  Without contractions, dialogue sounds stilted and wooden.  If there’s a reason for someone to speak that way (ESL, robots, aliens, or what have you), then by all means do it.  If my characters are regular, English-speaking mortals, though…

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

            Similarity– People are individuals, and we all have our own unique way of speaking.  People from California don’t talk like people from Maine (I’ve lived almost two decades in each state, I know), people living in poverty don’t talk like billionaires, and medieval idiots don’t speak like futuristic mega-geniuses. 

            In my writing, 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 knowing the complete context or seeing the dialogue headers, I need to get back to work.

            Extra descriptors—I just hinted at this, but it’s worth mentioning again.  Even if I’m using said with a character’s name, 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..

            Not only that, once I’ve got speech patterns down for my characters, I should need descriptors even less.  In my book, Ex-Communication, Stealth’s dialogue could never get confused with Madelyn’s or Barry’s or Freedom’s.  They’re all distinct, and their speech patterns identify them just as well as a header would.

            ExtraNames—Let’s come down on names a little more. If I don’t need them around the dialogue, I need them even less in the dialogue.  Pay attention the next time you get on the phone with someone.  How often do they use your name?  How often do you use theirs?  Heck, when 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.

            Accents– This is a common mistake by beginning writers.  I made it a bunch of times while I was starting out, and still do now and then.  Writing out accents and odd speech tics will drive readers and editors nuts.  There are a handful of professional writers who can do truly amazing dialogue, yes, but keep that conditional in mind—only a handful.  

            I show an accent by picking out one or two key words  at most and making those the only words I show it with.  If my character’s Jamaican, stick with “mah” instead of “my.”  For the Cockney fellow, keep the dropped H when he speaks.  Past that, just write straight dialogue.   Just the bare minimum reminders that the character has an accent.  Like most character traits, my readers will fill in the rest.

            Transcription– One thing years of interviews have taught me is 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 will tell you it’s awkward, hard to follow, and a lot gets lost without the exact inflection of certain words.

            One of the worst things I can do is try to write dialogue in such an ultra-realisticmanner.  It will drive my editor nuts and waste my word count on dozens of unnecessary lines.  While this sort of rambling can work great in actual spoken dialogue, when it’s written on the page it’s almost always horrible.  I want to keep it simple so I don’t scare off readers.

            Cool lines—  D’you remember in The Incredibles when Syndrome reveals his master plan?  “And when everybody’s super… no one will be.” 

            It’s an ugly truth–everything becomes mundane when there’s no baseline.  If everyone on my basketball team is eight feet tall, who’s the tall guy?  When everyone owns a Lamborghini, owning a Lamborghini doesn’t really mean anything.    If anybody can hit a bull’s-eye at 100 yards out, hitting  a bull’s-eye isn’t all that impressive.

            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.  For every fun, quotable line in Iron Man 3, there are also pages of dialogue that just advanced the story.  We all remember Tony mocking Rhodey about his friend’s new code name, but how much do we remember about Aldrich Killian’s business pitch about Extremis?

            If I try to make every line a cool line, or even most of them, I’m shooting myself in the foot because 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 readers.

            I should use something like the Ignorant Stranger method 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 (see below) or my readershould know, I need to cut that line. If it’s filled with necessary facts, find a better way to get them across.

            Monologues—This one’s closely related to exposition.  A good monologue can be a major point in any story or film.  By the same token, though, a bad one can bring your story to a screeching halt.

            Is my monologue necessary?  Does it read naturally?  Is it flowing?  Does it fit the moment?  If I’m breaking one of these guidelines and doing it with a 750 word monologue, my manuscript is going to end up in the ever-growing left hand pile.

            Second clue if it’s bad is to count how many monologues there’ve already been.  Yes, that may sound laughable, but you’d be amazed at some of the things I’ve seen.  One script I read for a screenwriting contest had half-page dialogue blocks on almost every page.  If I’m on page forty-five and this is my seventh full-page monologue… odds are something needs to be reworked.

            “As you know…” – If you take nothing else from today’s 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 all.  Gone.  Destroyed.

             Think about it.  If I’m saying “As you know,” I’m openly acknowledging that the people I’m talking to know what I’m about to say.  I’m wasting time, I’m wasting space on the page, and I’m wasting my reader’s patience.  This is probably the clumsiest way to do exposition there is.  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.

            And here’s a bonus tip.  One idea you may have heard is to read your dialogue out loud to find where it trips.  It’s not bad, but if I really want to find out how it reads, I should ask someone else to read it out loud—preferably somebody who hasn’t seen it before or heard me talk about it.  If I’m reading it myself, I know how it’s supposed to sound, where the breaks should be, and what gets the emphasis.  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 baker’s dozen of dialogue tips which should help your fictional dialogue seem a little more real.  Fictional-real, anyway.  Not real-real.

            Next week…

            I’m going to have to skip next week, I’m afraid.  Rewrites are due on Ex-Isle so odds are I’ll be up late second-guessing myself.  I may put up one of the photo tips.

            After that, I’m open to suggestions, if anyone has any.  Or if anyone made some good ones I’ve misplaced.  If not, maybe I’ll offer a quick idea about drafts.

            Until then, go write.

             Classic pop culture reference.

            Apologies for this being a bit late.  I’ve been bogged down with a bunch of publicity stuff for the new book.  Ex-Purgatory comes out next week, available at bookstores everywhere.  Check it out.  You can read a (hopefully) fun book and passively support the ranty blog.

            Speaking of which… on with this week’s rant.

            I haven’t talked about dialogue in a long while, and I though (if there’s no real objections) that I’d talk about voices.  If there are any objections… too bad.  You should’ve spoken up last week when I mentioned this was what I was going to talk about.

            Anyway…

            A character’s voice is a specific element of their dialogue.  It’s the little tics and subtleties of how someone speaks that makes them unique on the page.  Voice is why we can tell Gandalf from Magneto (even when they’re both played by Sir Ian McKellen) and why Jane Eyre and Katniss Everdeen sound different in our heads.

            Now I thought about how to approach this for a while, and it hit me last night to scrap most of what I had and go back to basics.  So I want to bounce a couple very, very simple characters off you.  As I do, try to imagine a conversation with said man or woman.  You’ve probably had one at some point.

*The Babbler—That person who fills every moment with talking.  She hates silence.

*The Military Guy—He’s been in for four years and is planning on four more, at least.

*The Expert—Pick a topic and they’ll explain it to you… or correct your every statement.

*The Sports Nut—That guy who loves the game. Did you see the game? Go Piggers, right?

*The European—The elegant woman who could be a supermodel… if she wasn’t already an artist.

*The Indirect Person—You know that girl who kind of talks around everything and it takes forever for her to get to the point of, y’know, that thing we’re talking about…

            Now, granted, each of those characters is a broad stereotype.  We could probably come up with a dozen more, easy, and a dozen past that without much effort.  But here’s the thing—we know exactly how each of these characters speaks, don’t we?  As soon as I described them, you could hear this person in your head.  The military guy speaking with the etiquette and manners drilled into him.  The sports nut using football terminology to explain his day at work.  You knew the kind of words these characters would choose and how they’d use them.

            That’s their voice.

            Again, this is broad.  I like to think of it as the foundation for building the voice I’ll use in the story.  For example, in the Ex-Heroes books, Barry a.k.a. Zzzap is a huge sci-fi fan.  Comic books, space operas, monster movies, Trek, Galactica, you name it, he loves it.  He’s the geek version of a sports nut.  This is the base I used for him as a character and for how he would talk.

           Now the thing is to layer on top of that.  Build up that character from a flat stereotype into someone with some depth.  It’s just like making character sketches, except we want to be aware of how these elements will affect their dialogue.

            For example, what kind of person is this character?  Are they generally positive or negative, and to what degree?  Enough that it spills out into their dialogue? I decided Barry was going to be a very positive, fun guy—someone who’ll crack jokes no matter how inappropriate the timing, and who’ll try to find a bright side even in desperate situations.

            Another layer to add is education.  Is my character well-educated, street smart, or maybe… well, stupid.  There are stupid people in the world, after all, and uneducated folks, too.  When characters make observations, they say things based off their beliefs and understanding of the world.

            Also, where were they born, or where have they spent most of their life?  We all know that people in Great Britain use different names for car parts than folks in the US (boot and bonnetvs. trunk and hood), but did you know that people call soft drinks different things depending on what state they’re from?  Not to mention the whole hoagies-subs-grinders thing.  Does your setting have taxis or cabs?  Fountains or bubblers?  These are great little details which help to build unique voices.

            These are all just suggestions, mind you.  There are tons of details about a person that could affect how they talk.  Social status, financial status, political beliefs, religious beliefs, sexual orientation.  Any one of these could come across in the way someone talks.  How do they say yes (yep, yeah, uh-huh)?  How do they say no (nah, nope, uh-uh)?  How do they swear? 

            I will toss out a warning on the accents, though.  When dealing with people from other countries—or other planets—it’s tempting to  try to phonetically add little differences in their pronunciation.  About twelve years back I wrote a story years with bird-aliens (the Kroot from WarHammer 40K, if you happen to be that kind of geek) and figured their beaks would make them sound a little more grrrowly, so I’d put three R’s instead of one whenever the letter was used.  I also decided their soft S sounds would come out more like a raspy Z.  Two little tweaks like that would give them a very distinct voice, and how distracting could it be, right…?

             For the record, that’s the first line of alien dialogue in the story.  I had, no joke, almost twenty-six pages of this. As you can see from this one paragraph, it gets old reallyfast.  And I almost did it again with Oskar, the German landlord in 14.  I came up with three verbal tics for him, but realized almost immediately what a mess it would make his dialogue.   So I cut it down to one (using F’s for V’s, so he’d say “What do you haff there?”). 

            If the accent needs to be there, I try to make it as minimal as possible.  Both in use and impact.  Because if a reader has trouble working their way through my dialogue, they’ll find something that’s easier to read.

            And that’s voice in a nutshell.  Well, a coconut shell, maybe.  Just look at the character elements I already have—and I do have them, right?—and use them to give this character a unique voice.

            Next week I’ve got to be in San Diego for a book signing (Mysterious Galaxy—show up and say “hi”), but I’ll try to come up with something quick before I get on the road.

            Until then, go write.