It's All About the Dialog III

Last month I wrote a bit about dialog, but it was all just mechanics. But remember that good dialog is so important to your fiction because dialog is the best place to reveal your character’s inner self.  It is also the place where you can most easily destroy your character, and your book.  I know you’ve been told that every writer should have his own individual voice.  If you want your characters to become real people, they too should each have an individual voice, and that voice should grow organically out of who that person is.

You must think of every character you create as a real person, as real as you or me.  How you speak is the result where you come from, your age, your ethnic background, your gender, whether you’re a leader or follower, and whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert.  So you need to know all of that and more about every character before he opens his mouth. Your speech is also affected by what groups you have belonged to.  For example, ex-cons and retired soldiers have distinctive speech patterns that are very different.

One final tip on making your dialog fresh and believable.  When you have a conversation written and you think it’s the way it is supposed to be, the final test is done by ear.  Read your dialog aloud.  Say exactly what you wrote, and if you find yourself tempted to change it in the reading, consider changing what is on the page.  If you stumble over an unintentional tongue twister, change that too because people don’t usually say things that are hard for them to say during conversations.  And pay attention to the word choices.  Consider this sentence from a book I was asked to critique: 

“Your sourpuss persona is rubbing off on everyone, including Whimsy.  She’s seven years old and by now you should have adjusted to being a parent—-she deserves more from you.  It’s Christmas, for pity’s sake!”   

Now, if you had written that and then read it aloud, I hope you would ask yourself - would the person who used a phrase like “sourpuss persona” also use a phrase like, “for pity’s sake?” 

The test by ear is the final test of whether you’ve written strong, believable dialog.  I hope these few tips will help you put better words into your characters’ mouths.

It’s All About the Plot – II

Last week I said I’d explain how I go about plotting a story. Let me remind you that this is MY approach, and it may or may not fit your writing style.

My plots usually start with a “what if” idea. For example, the big idea for Blood and Bone came from a news story I was working on about a bone marrow donation program. I thought, “what if” someone needed a transplant and the only possible donor was missing?  My detective Hannibal would have to find the missing person.

So I have an idea of where the plot starts.  Hannibal needs to find a missing person. And I know where it ends.  Hannibal will find the missing person in time and save the day.

Now you may not have noticed, but I just gave you the outline of a story. 

Hannibal is asked to find a missing person =è Hannibal finds him and saves the day.

If I was writing something simpler, say, a fairy tale, the outline might be:

Hansel and Gretel get lost=è Hansel and Gretel get home.

This is the basic outline and from here I just add more and more detail until I’m ready to write. Notice that the story starts when the normal state of things is disturbed, and ends when the normal state is restored.   

The next step is to fill in a slightly more complex diagram:

                          Now what?                                             What now?                       

Problem presented==è much bigger problem appears --à  high speed finish=è hero saves the day.

The “problem presented” section is about a quarter of the book.  It only looks like our hero has a big problem until the second bit.  This is what I call the “now what?” point, at which our protagonist is temporarily at a loss for what to do next. (Goldfinger’s not just smuggling – he plans to rob Fort Knox.) That second bit is around half the book. At the end of that point it what I call the “what now?” point, or better yet, the “we’re doomed!” point, when all appears lost. (The Death Star is moving in and powering up!) Then the hero figures out the solution and it’s a race to the finish.  If you watch Hollywood movies with a stopwatch you’ll see they almost always use this three-act framework. For our familiar example it would look like this:

                    

Hansel & Gretel are lost=è  h & g are captured by a witch ===è  h & g escape & kill witch =è 

h & g get home.

Once I get this far I start looking for the secondary plot. Why? Well, that’s the topic for next week.

What's It All About?

I’ve been contemplating some of the questions I am often asked at writers’ conferences and clubs. It seems to me, contrary to obvious assumptions, that the simplest questions draw the most complex answers.

For example, there’s “What should I write?” If the person asking is seeing me as a fellow writer, they might really want to know what books are selling right now. If they see me as a publisher, they may really be trying to find out what my company is looking for. Either way I tend to take the questions literally. Therefore I answer the question with a question: “What do you read?” When I get a quick, strong response the rest is easy. If you’re an avid reader of romance or legal thrillers or horror tales, that’s what you should write. Write that book you really want to read. Occasionally someone is honest enough to admit they don’t read much. In which case my answer is: “Don’t write.”

Almost as often I’ll be asked something like, “What’s the most important part of a story?” Among fiction writers, this is sometimes a confusing issue. The person I’m talking with may want my take on whether fiction writing is an art or a craft (of course, it is both, and they are equally important.) Or they may be focused on the so-called elements of fiction. Perhaps they’ve written a character driven novel and are being told that a story is all about the plot. Or they have something to say, a strong theme but their first readers say it’s the dialog that pulls the reader into the story. Or they’ve created a wonderfully complex universe in their speculative fiction story, and a good friend has tried to help them by explaining that world-building isn’t what people want. They need to have a unique voice.

I get it. We all want to assemble the parts and build a sturdy novel or short story, and we want to know what part to focus most on. Sadly, the true answer is to the “most important part” question is: “All of them.” A great story with weak characters is as big a fail as wonderfully developed characters who spout weak dialog. Every one of those elements is vital to a great story. And the worst part is, you can’t even develop them separately. Those elements grow organically, like crystals, and rely on each other to grow strong. The setting helps shape the characters whose actions drive the plot that expresses the theme revealed in the dialog IF the story is being told from the right point of view.

That said, the elements of fiction can be discussed separately, and I’ll try to do some of that in the next few blogs.

What Else Am I Doing Wrong?

Before the wildly successful Creatures, Crimes & Creativity Con I posted a blog about some big mistakes authors make, and during the Con there were several conversations involving that topic.

One thing we agreed on was that many writers underestimate the importance of editing. With 300,000 or so books being published every year, quality is an important discriminator for readers. Even if your story and prose are both great, if your book is poorly edited readers will not become fans and reviewers won’t want to finish reading it. I think poor editing is the most common complaint I hear about books, especially self-published and small press books.

It’s less specific, but one big mistake I think writers make is failing to get good advice. People ask their friends and family what to do with their stories, but sadly, those people are generally not experts at publishing or promotion. Those same writers often fail to take advantage of opportunities like the C3 Con, where they can sit with best-selling authors and get marketing advice from highly successful writers. There are lots of other, often free sources of reliable good advice such as social media groups and writers’ blogs. The wise author takes advantage of these resources.

Yet another major blunder some writers fall prey to is not putting enough focus on their specific market. The cool thing, as CJ Ellisson shared in her master class at C3, is that today’s social media platforms let you find and target the people who read books in your genre. And there are lots of ways to cultivate these readers beside just getting them to read, buy, read and review your work. Look at the number of writers who have built up a solid group of beta readers – those people who read their books before publication. Aside from providing valuable insight into the appeal of your story, these folks become invested in your book and that can start the word-of-mouth support you need to succeed.

I also have to list impatience as one of the biggest errors authors commit. As John Gilstrap reminded us in his keynote address at C3, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. It takes almost all writers many years to become an overnight success.  By the time you hear about a writer he or she has probably already spent a lot of time working on their craft, getting published, finding their audience and building a following. You need to have a marketing plan, and you have to approach it with the long-term in mind.

I can think of three or four other big career-killing mistakes writers make, but they’ll have to wait until next week.