Summer is coming up fast and here at Writers in the Storm we're marking the occasion with a little "Pimp and Promote." Of course, this always costs us some money, because we have to go out and buy lots of books. But there will be awesome "beach read" sales in next few weeks, so let's go for it!
How does this work?
To quote the genie in Aladdin, “There are a few provisos, a couple of quid-pro-quos…"
Pimp out somebody else’s work – this can be a favorite author, blogger, post or book you’ve read, a wonderful teacher or just someone who had profound influence on you as a writer or a person. Please limit your comments to one work.
AND
Promote one of your projects that you’re excited about – a hobby, a blog, a book, or a new direction your writing is taking you. You decide. Just tell us about it in the comments! (Please restrain your enthusiasm to just one of your WIPs.) The rest of us will jump in and “ooooh and ahh” at you, and likely promote your project even further because we’re just so darn excited today.
We'll start things off by doing some P&P with the gals here at WITS...
Jenny Hansen does ghostwriting, Wordpress sites, social media marketing and copywriting. Additionally, she's fine-tuning her first finished novel and training at an accounting firm. You can enjoy her silly fun at her personal blog, More Cowbell. Her post today is An Open Letter to America's Butt Impersonators...
Laura Drake's latest book, Against the Odds, released last week and it rocks. This is the final installment of her Widow's Grove series. Watch Laura read the first scene of her work-in-progress, Cross Roads,here.
Orly Konig-Lopez is participating in the Women's Fiction Writers Association Summer Reading Challenge. The mission, read as many WFWA member titles as possible during the summer months. There are weekly prizes and a grand prize announced after Labor Day. If you love women's fiction, this reading challenge is for you! Come join the fun.
See? Easy-peasy. Only one of us wrote this, but all of us are represented - that's the spirit of P&P.
Don't be shy -- tell your pals!
We are open for as many entries as you want, and you're welcome to send anyone who reads great stuff our way. We want to hear about it! Be sure to peruse the comments. You might find a few things you like in the plethora of pimping that’s about to ensue.
Thanks again for making WITS one of the top writer’s blogs. We appreciate you!
Writing dialogue gets a character out of my head (and his or hers) and alive on the page in a conversation with other characters, and ostensibly, with the reader. It’s one of my favorite parts of novel writing.
To make sure I keep my dialogue realistic, serving my story and my reader (and not my ego), I keep a Post-It on my laptop monitor that says:
Let the dialogue do the work.
My little yellow note reminds of four things to do while I’m writing and editing dialogue. And while there’s creative license with everything we write in our stories and our books, these guidelines help me with the pace and the content of my dialogue.
Dump flowery dialogue tags
Our readers can hear and see the dialogue if it’s well-written. He or she can infer tone because the character is already real and engaging (it’s why I don’t start books with dialogue, because the reader doesn’t know who’s talking, or care, although it works for many, it’s just not for me).
So, no fancy dialogue tags needed. I subscribe to the tenet that all we need is said, asked, and the occasional whispered. No need for “he implored” when the words used show that your character is imploring. No need for “she cried” if the words used show that your character cried out.
Try it. If you don’t think it works, rework your dialogue until it does. You know, let the dialogue do the work.
The absence of flowery dialogue tags allows the reader to listen to the conversation without distraction. It allows the readers eyes to even skip over (gasp!) the he saids and she saids.
Which means, of course, we don’t need all of those either.
Think of basic dialogue tags as mile markers. Once we’ve set up who’s talking to whom, the occasional reminder to keep the reader on track is all that’s necessary. If it’s a short dialogue run, you may not need tags at all. Adding someone new to the banter? Add dialogue tags to make the journey clear. Your characters’ voices and positions in the story should also aid in identifying who’s talking so that constant tagging (the dialogue kind, not the internet kind) won’t be necessary.
The conversation will flow and the pages will turn.
Limit stage direction
I see in my head what I then write on the page, meaning, if my characters are having a conversation I see them sitting/standing/walking/running/biking. I see them eating/drinking/flailing/eye-rolling. It plays out in front of me on the small screen of my brain.
Does that mean that everything I see should be transcribed using the coveted show don’t tell? Doesn’t that mean the reader needs to know everything so he or she can picture exactly what’s going on? No.
Just as flowery dialogue tags do, stage direction slows the pace of the dialogue. It also makes it less like, well, dialogue, by inserting bumps in the road that break up the conversation. The flow is gone.
Sure, sometimes we need to share our characters’ actions. So make it mean something. Doesn’t someone say “talk to me” but cross her arms and lean back? Does someone selfish lean in? Your characters’ actions must add to the story, contradiction something, add something, share something new, just like the word he or she speaks.
Flailing arms need not apply.
Eliminate chit chat
Face it. Sometimes our characters like to hear themselves talk. Therefore, I ask myself these questions when I am revising dialogue. What does the reader need to know? What do I want to hear the characters say? And, are these things the same?
They might not be, so be honest with yourself. You don’t want characters talking just so they, and you, can hear their voices.
Everything your characters say must be important to the story you’re telling right now. The dialogue must move the story forward, reveal something new, or a revelation about something the reader already knows. Going in for a little backstory? A chat that includes remember when? It should have a tie to the present storyline, or reveal something about the characters the reader doesn’t already know and helps her understand what’s happening right now.
Reduce repetitiveness
But, helping the reader understand what’s happening doesn’t mean beating her over the head. When writing dialogue, don’t repeat yourself. I mean it. Don’t repeat yourself. Really, don’t do it.
See? You don’t like it when a point is pushed at you when you got it the first time, do you? The same is true for your reader. You know that scene where your main character meets her sister for coffee and tells her what happened last night even though the reader was there when the protagonist danced on the table? We do that because we want the sister to know. The sister needs to know. But, no one likes hearing the same story twice. If we’re corned by Uncle Joe at a family dinner, we can’t always duck away. A reader can skim a book. Or close it.
Give your reader credit to know that your characters have had some conversations without them.
To insure that the dialogue I’m writing only has what the reader needs to know, I sometimes pretend I’m eavesdropping, but only have twenty seconds to spare. Maybe less. I hear only what I must in order to continue my day, to learn something new, to pique my curiosity, or in order to make a change in plans. I don’t have time to simply hear something that’s nice to know if it doesn’t do something for me, if it doesn’t serve any purpose. I just don’t have the time.
Neither does your reader.
Refining dialogue can be tricky, even counterintuitive at times, but it’s worth the time and effort. The payoff is engaging and meaningful conversations between your characters for the benefit of your story, and readers---who I bet will say thank you.
Do you like writing dialogue? What do you find most helpful or challenging? What is your biggest dialogue pet peeve?
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About Amy
Amy Sue Nathan is a novelist, freelance editor, and blogger, but not always in that order. She is the author of The Good Neighbor and The Glass Wives, both published by St. Martin’s Griffin. She founded the Women’s Fiction Writers blog in 2011, and has been a freelance fiction editor and writer published in more than two dozen publications, including Writer’s Digest, the Chicago Tribune, and the Huffington Post. Amy teaches writing workshops online and in the real world, although the Internet is pretty real to her. You can find Amy online, often when she shouldn’t be, @AmySueNathan.
The good news is I survived eight days of hiking in Yosemite.
The better news is I got great pictures of a setting for some important scenes in my WIP.
The best news is that I had a wide range of deeply emotional experiences that will help me write with a deeper understanding of what my characters feel.
Could I, with critiques and revisions, eventually "get there"? Sure. But by paying attention and allowing myself to fully explore my emotions on my vacation, I am better prepared to show the similar feelings of my characters.
First, I drove many hours to get to Yosemite Valley. Getting out of the car, my body probably looked like a cowboy who'd been on the trail for days. The next day, with no intention of hiking (read: no boots, no poles), I ended up hiking Vernal Falls. Four miles in, then four miles out.
I'd hiked this trail with my dad and older sister when I was six. Wow, have times changed. If I thought it took forever to get to the bridge to see the falls then, (I don't remember it like that) it was an eternity last week. And all the way I was going up, I knew I'd have to come down. My terror rose. Wet. Slippery. Steep. My dad wasn't there to catch me if I fell.
My WIP character is a young woman who leaves her planet for an education. She knows it will take three weeks, in a battleship, to arrive at the university. I had her engaged in various shipboard activities. What I didn't know (before my experiences) was how long it seems to her. She is not prepared for shipboard routine and everything-the food, the abbreviated language, the speed, and the gruffness of the ship personnel-is different from her home planet.
You know how everyone says, "Write what you know"? Well, I don't know about life onboard a galactic battlecruiser, but I do know about sliding between rock walls with other (speedier) people trying to go around me. Frustration with my fear and inability to move like the more seasoned hikers is something I can write about. In my character's POV.
Before the trip:Alarm bells ringing and lights flashing, Talia moved to the side of the crowded corridor. Uniformed bodies passed her inconvenient mass with little loss of speed, rushing to battle stations. She had no battle station, no training, no skill. Heck, she didn't know if this was a drill or if hugging the cold metal wall would be the last act of her short life.
After the trip:Talia's ears registered the initial warning. A thready siren spiraled its wail over her head, followed by pounding of what sounded like thousands of military boots. Her back met the cold metal of the bulkhead. Uniformed bodies sprinted past her to battle stations. She spread her arms and flattened her palms against the plazsteel in an effort to give ship personnel more room.
Someone tramped on her foot then cursed. Heck with renegade missiles, she might die right here from the stampede of rushing bodies. Air gushed into lungs that had locked up tight. She wanted to drop to her knees and pray this was merely a drill. Instead, she hugged the corridor wall, inching her way to the safety of her rack. She may have no battle station and no skill, but she was not going to die in a narrow corridor surrounded by cold metal walls.
Exchange those steel bulkheads for sheer granite, the siren for thousands of gallons of water pounding over a cliff, add slippery footing from the mist off the falls and, yes, someone stepped on my foot and cussed me out! I am Talia. frozen in fear, afraid to move for what seemed like long, dragged-out hours. Crowded, narrow trail. Yep, I just wanted to be back in my bed.
Give your writing juice. If we pay attention to our feelings, the whole range of our feelings, we are better prepared to show our characters' emotions, not just tell our readers what we want them to feel. Which doesn't work, anyway.
So pay attention to your thoughts and feelings this summer. They are your own private gold mine for your characters. When those scared spitless moments you lived through make it into your WIP this summer, it will be just between us. Our secret. No one else needs to know why your characters leap off the page with emotion. Your emotion.
No matter your genre, humans are human, and we feel--sometimes very deeply. Show those emotions and your readers will thank you. And come back for more.
If you want a challenge, here's one: Take a paragraph from something you wrote last week. Add an emotion that you felt this week, showing how that emotion affected you, via what is happening to your character.
Have you ever used your characters to work through a situation that was unresolved in your life? Were you able to show the range of your emotions, or did you get "stuck"? (It's okay for your characters to get stuck!)
About Fae:
Fae Rowen discovered the romance genre after years as a science fiction freak. Writing futuristics and medieval paranormals, she jokes that she can live anywhere but the present. As a mathematician, she knows life’s a lot more fun when you get to define your world and its rules.
Punished, oh-no, that’s published as a co-author of a math textbook, she yearns to hear personal stories about finding love from those who read her books, rather than the horrors of calculus lessons gone wrong. She is grateful for good friends who remind her to do the practical things in life like grocery shop, show up at the airport for a flight, and pay bills.
A “hard” scientist who avoided writing classes like the plague, she now shares her brain with characters who demand their stories be told. Amazing, gifted critique partners keep her on the straight and narrow. Feedback from readers keeps her fingers on the keyboard.
