Talking Heads (or, When Life Hands You Dialogue, Throw in Some Action )

We’ve all seen it:

“Hello, Cindy.”

“Hi, Jane.”

“How are you?”
“Fine, thanks. You?”
“Fine. Got any plans for after work?”

“Maybe go out for a drink.”

“Mm. I was gonna go for groceries.”

“Well, that, too, but I’d rather get a drink.”

Boooooooring. And how many of you had to count the lines to remember who’s talking? Or how about those passages where one person provides exposition of the plot or background, then another person presents an opposing opinion, then a third tosses in an idea that negates everything the first two said, and it starts all over. 

Booooooring.

Talking heads are boring on TV and they’re boring at a party and they’re boring in a book. (I’m not talking about the Talking Heads you still hear on FM radio. Though some people find them boring, too.) Humans are visual creatures and we like action. It’s up to you, the writer, to give your readers action.

Take a tip from director Ken Burns, for instance, in his great series on the Civil War. As in so many of his films, he has actors read from letters written during that tragic conflict. Gifted though the actors are, the readings could be a snooze. But Burns also gives us action, in the form of photos. Not static photos--he zooms in on a heartbreakingly real face, pans across fields of broken bodies, or highlights a telling detail. The spoken word blends with the pictures to create an indelible image.

So how do you emulate Ken Burns? By adding action to your dialogue. For example:

Jane stopped by her friend’s desk late on a Friday afternoon. “Hey, Cindy, whatcha doin’ after work?”

Cindy rubbed her eyes and gestured at the stack of paperwork beside her computer. “All this, then I need to get groceries.”

“Hmmph. Me, too. Wanna go for a drink?”

“Sweet Goddess, yes,” Cindy said with a laugh. Her shoulders lost some of their tension.

See the difference? Instead of just reporting what each person says, you’ve now given your characters a setting, indicated how hard they work, and shown something of their personalities. You’ve engaged your reader in the passage.

As for those long expositions, report in dialogue only what is necessary to the plot. Summarized the rest from your character’s POV or break it up into shorter bits that can be inserted into scenes where they do the most good. Show the listeners’ reactions by indicating their body movements or interior dialogue. Maybe a word from the speaker triggers memories or makes a connection:

Jason’s mind wandered while the boss droned on. He caught the phrase “binomial equation” and drifted back to his high school algebra class. He’d been far more interested in that pretty girl Vanessa What’s-her-name than in… Now the boss was sketching on the white board, a complex pattern of cross-hatching and curved lines. Jason raised his hand. “Maybe we should get Professor Martin in on this,” he suggested.

If you must include long speeches, remember Ken Burns, any televised political debate, or a good science documentary. Include visuals like the audience reaction or appropriate clips of related action.

In short, do whatever you must to engage your readers’ visual cortex. Remember, we humans are visual creatures, and we like action.

Nikki Andrews is an editor at Champagne Books and a writer of mysteries and scifi. Visit her blog here for more grammar fun.

Mastering Structural Revision

Linear revision kills

Many writers jump into revision like a swimmer into shark waters. They wade through their draft again and again, focusing on different elements, and slowly they drift out deeper and deeper, moving in circles, making deeper changes without a proper reference. Then the sharks show up and guess who's on the menu?

Whether those sharks are the editors or agents who send out polite rejection letters, or the Gollum in your head that tells you the task is hopeless, linear revision is bound to kill you sooner or later.

It's madness, but there's method in it

Not all is lost! Time to stand up straight and learn how to master revision. The first stop is the posture clinic, aka the post-draft outline.

What is this, exactly? (Or, if you're a "pantser", the dreaded O-word might make you cringe.)

For me (an outliner) it is an outline, but if you prefer to avoid outlines altogether, consider this an exercise. 

Go through your manuscript and try to identify distinct chunks of your story. These are not necessarily scenes or chapters. They are segments, anywhere from 200 to 2000 words or so, where your story takes on a unique cadence and shape. For example, if your scene is a dialogue between conspirators overheard by your POV character, followed by your POV character's introspection while she rushes down a dark alley to warn her father about the plan to kill him, these events would stand alone. 

Develop a numbering system -- I use decimals to show divisions. For example, if I'm in chapter 1, the segments will be 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and so on.

Go through from beginning to end. If one of the sections is particularly long, don't worry, but do see if there is an inflection that breaks it up. For example, if you have a long conversation in one passage, have a look. If it starts out with an exchange on the history of the world, then someone interrupts with a recent event that changes the topic, then this inflection divides the action to make the two parts unique segments.

Going over your whole story and dividing it up will allow you to appreciate where certain segments wander. Imagine each segment as a plunge under water. If you keep pulling your reader into the depths without giving them a breath, they're going to politely swim away to another tour guide. Similarly, if you pull them under for a long time once in a while (which you should!) then it had better be worth the view.

Once you have your manuscript divided up, go over and ask what each segment does -- how it helps the story as a whole. Cut, develop, re-write. Be honest. Be brutal. Be thorough. 

Most important, watch out for the sharks!

Graeme Brown is a junior editor with Champagne Books. This post is based on Step 10 of his Storybuilder Inc. series, which he adds to every Tuesday at Worlds of the Imagination. To find out more about Graeme visit his website: http://www.graemebrownart.com

ANOTHER EPISODE OF ... ‘BEFORE YOU PUSH THE SEND BUTTON’

I know we sound like a broken record regarding submissions, but there are many things to consider before you press that all important send button.

After you’ve read your manuscript one last time to catch any little niggling mistakes, THEN run thorough spelling and grammar program check. You’ll be stunned and chagrined at what you find. I’ve experienced many a head-to-desk moment when I thought I’d fixed everything. Please spell check.  Please.

As you work through your manuscript, see if you have any long and complex sentences. She was taken at once by the beautiful and vast spread of the desert before her with small dips and hollows, and was grateful she had taken some time studying about the plants and animals that had lived in this area and thrived regardless of the harsh weather conditions.  How many times did you have to read this to figure out where it was going? You don’t want to lose your reader in a quagmire of unnecessary words.

Instead – maybe... She marveled at the vast and beautiful desert spread before her. After learning about the plants and animals that lived here, it still amazed her how they thrived in these harsh conditions. This brings the sentences into a pleasing cadence and simplifies it at the same time.

One trick to help detect these long, stumbling-block sentences is to read your work aloud. I know you’ve heard this before, and it can be embarrassing if you’re discovered reading to the family pet, but it really works. If you can’t read it aloud without tripping over the words, your reader will probably trip over them, too.

In your read-through, you may notice words you’ve used way too many times – pet words. Be aware of those as well. The Search and Replace tool is awesome for this job.

A necessary search-and-replace task will include eradicating ‘felt’ ‘began to’ ‘about to’ and ‘started to’.  As an example, ‘he felt like he was about to hurl’ could simply read ‘he nearly hurled’. More punchy? Yep. ‘Felt’ isn’t a very strong word – and there are so many replacements available. Try variations of these words instead: sense, experience, suffer, undergo, think, believe, consider, deem, suspect. There are many others as well.          

How about ‘he began to walk to the store’? It’s stronger as ‘he walked to the store’. Or ‘it began to pour buckets’ is better as ‘it poured buckets’.

Another search-and-replace task should include ‘was’ ‘that’ and ‘had’. Most incidences of ‘that’ can go away completely, as long as the sentence still makes sense. The words ‘was’ and ‘had’ may be part of a Passive Voice sentence, which we discussed a few weeks ago, and leads to weaker sentences and descriptions.

Sigh.

Yes, preparing a manuscript for submission is a TON of hard work. Almost as hard as writing it. However, if you want your readers captured by your story and eager for your next one, you have to take care of the structure that supports it. And the hard work will be so worthwhile. 

Monica Britt, editor
http://www.facebook.com/authormjbritt

Twitter @mons1954

Bring It Here, Take It There

Cranky Old Grammar Lady threw the newspaper across the room yesterday. The offending photo caption read (paraphrased to protect the guilty), “The car crashed into this convenience store and the victim was brought to Central Northern General Medical Center and Wallet Removal Service Inc.” (Disclaimer: no such hospital exists in this state.)

What’s wrong with it? The misuse of the verb bring. Or in this case its past form, brought. COGL has noticed a marked uptick recently in the confusion between bring and take, and will now clarify the difference. Pay attention, you there in the back row.

Ahem. To cite Merriam-Webster, bring means “to convey, lead, carry or cause to come along with one toward the place from which the action is being regarded.” Take means “to lead, carry, or cause to go along with one to another place.”

In other words, one can bring something here, or take something there.

Example:

Incorrect: “Did you bring the outgoing mail to the post office?” he asked, as we sat at home.

Correct: “No, dumkopf, I took it to the post office. But here, I brought home a letter from your mother.”

Mnemonic--If the person or item is going there, use take. If the person or item is coming here, use bring.

Getting back to the newspaper. The victim is “carried to another place” from the convenience store in the picture. In other words, the victim “went there.” If the photo showed the ER at Central Northern etc., then the caption could correctly say the victim was brought to it--“conveyed to the place from which the action is being regarded.”

So far, so good. This being English, there is an exception, which accounts for COGL’s chronic crankiness. Actually, if you pay attention to the definitions, it’s not so much an exception as a nuance. Suppose COGL contacts her son and invites herself for a visit. In return, she offers some genuine New Hampshire maple syrup, which the poor boy can’t get in Pennsylvania. “Would you like me to bring you some? I’ll bring a gallon for you,” she says. Huh? The syrup is going there. Why is bring the correct verb and not take?

Because “the place from which the action is being regarded” is the son’s house. If that confuses you, think of it this way--because COGL has called/written/emailed/contacted the son, she has in effect put herself beside him and is regarding her own action from his location. It’s a courtesy, if you like; putting oneself in another’s shoes.

Of course, if COGL were speaking with her husband, Cranky Old Car Guy, she would say, “I’m going to take a gallon of maple syrup to our son’s house.” To which COCG would say, “You’re gonna spoil that kid.”

Cranky Old Grammar Lady, aka Nikki Andrews, is an editor at Champagne Books and a writer of mysteries and scifi. Visit her blog here for more grammar fun.

True or false: write what you know

I’m an editor mostly now but I started as an author. I’d like to share with you something I still hear, taken literally, that I think means something else entirely.

Always, authors are told to “write what you know.”  I did some research on who first said this and while this is most frequently attributed to Mark Twain, there is a general consensus that no one really knows who first said it. Surprisingly, the general consensus is also that the saying should be banned. Or at least an author’s reliance on it.

So, what does “write what you know” mean, really?

Well, some believe it should be taken literally— writers should not write about things we have not personally experienced. This is actually the definition I heard many years ago. Now, I find it very amusing and my reaction to it can be summed up by a quote from Robert Duncan—“If I write what you know, I bore you; if I write what I know, I bore myself, therefore I write what I don’t know.”

Isn’t that great?

Here’s another by Howard Nemerov that made me laugh—“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”

So true. Now, I don’t consider myself uninformed. I’m smart. I know stuff. But I don’t know enough about places and things to infuse my stories with the atmosphere readers want. Because while we read about characters, we also read for places and things. If I were to write only about what I know, I’d be writing short, flat stories.

I write paranormal stories. I have yet to meet a fallen angel, demon or a shape-shifting rock (Relic Defender: Key of Solomon). I have yet to experience life in a futuristic Earth (Hit Me With Your Best Shot) or travel to another planet. I have yet to visit Egypt and see the pyramids at Giza (Children of Egypt: Blood on the Moon). I have yet to explore the Mayan ruins in South America. Yet, these are all places I have visited in my research and in my imagination.

I’d like to leave you with another great quote on author’s writing what they know. This is from Valerie Sherwood: “Don’t write what you know—what you know may bore you, and thus bore your readers. Write about what interests you—and interests you deeply—and your readers will catch fire at your words.”

Would my writing be any better if I experienced some of these things? Maybe. I don’t know. I think what makes it great is that I haven’t been there so I can infuse my stories with the passion of discovering something new. And that’s what I try to do.

If you read my books, I hope you agree.

Cassiel Knight

http://cassielknight.net/

Dialogue - Five Tips for Natural and Realistic Flow

There are times when, reading dialogue, I both recognize and sympathize with how hard it can be to make it sound right.  Conversations can so easily come out stilted and monotone. So I came up with a few tips that can help strengthen passages with dialogue.

1.  Adverbs describing speech - get rid of those -ly words.

Example: “Get out of this house,” she said angrily.

Solution:  “Get out. Now.” Her arm shook as she pointed to the door.

Or, if you prefer to describe the voice:

“Get out. Now.” The sting in her voice bit deeper than a rattlesnake’s fangs.

2.  Don’t show me an emotion or action IN the dialogue and/or action, then tell me.

Example:  “You feeling okay? You don’t look so good,” he said, studying his friend.

            (since he’s commented on how the guy looks, we already know he’s studied him.)

Solution: “You feeling okay? You don’t look so good.”

Example: At the loud report, he raced to the garage and threw open the door. “What happened?” he asked, concerned.

Solution: Let the dialogue say it all. Leave off that  “he asked, concerned”. And “threw open the door” isn’t needed, either. It’s implied when he races to the garage. It’s much stronger and keeps the reader in the action to simply say:

At the loud report, he raced to the garage. “What happened?”

3.  Don’t use dialogue tags where they aren’t needed. He said/she said are superfluous most of the time. I’d always been taught that he said/she said are invisible and should be used over more explanatory tags, but often these aren’t needed at all, unless it’s a conversation between more than two people.

Example: “What do you want for dinner?” he asked.

Solution: “What do you want for dinner?”

4. Do use action tags, but not on every line of dialogue. Here’s a brief conversation to show how a quick action tag will do so much more than a dialogue tag:

“What’s for dinner?”

She cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t know. What are you cooking?”

“Hmmm. I guess that means we’re eating out.”

“I like that idea.”

“Yeah, thought you might.” He grinned.

5.  And here’s the biggie: Does what you’ve written sound like your character would speak? There are nuances and accents we all try to infuse our characters with, but make certain it works. Read the dialogue out loud, without the tags. Does it sound like they are reading off a card or like natural conversation?

Dialogue is a huge way to show your reader what the character is thinking and to move their interactions forward (or backward, depending on what you have in store for them). So make it real, and make it count.

Laurie Temple is an editor at Champagne Books and writes under the pseudonym Laurie Ryan.

www.laurieryanauthor.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lryanauthor

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laurie.ryan.79

Guest blogger Rayne Hall: Body Language in Dialogue Scenes

Body language can add another dimension to your dialogue scene, because it reveals a person's intentions, feelings or mood.

The five main types of body language are gesture, posture, movement, facial expression and tone of voice.

Gesture Examples

She pointed to the orchard. “I saw him there.”

He slammed his fist on the table. “I've had enough.”

She scratched her chin. “Are you sure this will work?”

“Welcome.” He pointed to the couch. “Why don't you make yourself comfortable?”

Posture Examples

She raised her chin. “You can't make me do this.”

He locked his arms across his chest. “No way.”

She leant away from him. “This isn't working between us.”

“I consider this an insult.” He stood with his shoulders squared and his legs braced. “Take it back.”

Movement Examples

“Maybe another time.” He turned to leave.

She walked faster. “I told you I don't want a date.”

“All right.” He shuffled forward.

“Follow me!” She leaped across the brook.

Facial Expression Examples

Her eyes narrowed. “You expect me to believe this?”

His cheeks turned tomato-red. “What do you mean?”

“I'm sorry.” She stared at the floor. “I didn't want it to be this way.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled, and his lips twitched. “Really?”

Tone of Voice Examples

“We will stand together in this.” His voice was deep and resonant like a church bell.

“I've told you a hundred times, and I'm telling you again.” Her voice sounded like a dentist's drill, high-pitched and persistent. “Why don't you ever listen?”

“You know that I'm going to kill you, don't you?” He sounded as casual as if he were discussing the weather. “Do you prefer a shot in the heart, or the head?”

“You've been with that floozy again, you cheating bastard!” Her voice was loud enough to wake up the whole neighborhood.

Body Language instead of Dialogue Tags

Using body language allows you to cut boring dialogue tags (he said, she asked, he answered) because it shows who's talking.

Tag versions:

“What about the girl?” he asked.

“Bastards!” she shouted. “I won't let you get away with this.”

“What now?” he wondered aloud.

Body language versions:

He jerked his chin at her. “What about the girl?”

“Bastards!” She slammed her fist on the table. “I won't let you get away with this.”

He scratched his head. “What now?”

Point of View

Most people aren't aware of their body language. Therefore, use body language for the character who is not the PoV.

If the body language is intentional, for example gestures, you can use it for PoV and non-PoV characters.

Lies and Secrets

Advanced writers can use body language to hint at secrets and lies. The characters' words say one thing, but their body language another.

“Yes, tell me the rest of your life story, it's so exciting.” She glanced at her watch. “It's a pleasure to hear all about it.”

He hugged his arms around his chest. “I'm not frightened.”

His face paled. “That's all right, honey. It doesn't matter at all.”

If a character avoids eye-contact, this suggests that they're not telling the truth or are hiding a secret.

“Don't wait with dinner for me tonight, darling. Arabella and I will have to work late again.” He did not meet Sue's eyes. “It's a bore, but the workload is getting heavier every day.”

Rayne Hall is an author and editor.

After writing and editing, her great love is teaching, and she teaches online classes for writers, which you can find out more about by visiting: https://sites.google.com/site/writingworkshopswithraynehall/

Follow her on Twitter: @Raynehall