Dialogue Tags

It is a rite of passage for all writers, that stage of writing where a character can’t say anything unless they say it vehemently, boisterously, or hesitantly. Some writers never break out of this habit, and they are the ones who put up web pages titled “500 alternatives for the word ‘said’”. They think ‘said’ is boring, worn out from overuse, and that writers should spice up their writing with some exciting news ways of speaking. Why say something when you can exclaim it? Or voice it?

Well, as it turns out, there are good reasons why characters shouldn’t voice or exclaim things. First of all, adverbs and active tags make dialogue much harder to read, because the reader has to spend more time trying to understand how the writer wants their dialogue to be heard, than on what the characters are actually saying.

Dialogue

I know quite a few writers who hate dialogue so much that they try to avoid using it wherever they can. However, it’s not really something worth being afraid of, because it’s something we do every day. Well, that’s a bit of a lie. What we do every day is talk to each other. We don’t usually dialogue with one another. Is there a difference? Yes, but not as much of one as you may think.

First, why use dialogue in the first place? Mostly, it’s because a story where no one talks to anyone else is not a very fun story to read. Second, it’s because stories like that aren’t true to life. Humans are social creatures, so we expect our characters to be social as well. The question is how to make them social without making your characters sound like a sociopath. Here are two general things to think about when writing dialogue.

Schedule Shift

I’m going to be shifting from a daily schedule to updating three or four days a week, because I need more time to manage the rest of the site, and put up posts that  have a bit more substance and thought put into them. I will probably put up new posts Monday, Wednesday and Friday at midnight PST. There might be the occasional post on the weekend sometimes as well.  I also need time to keep the glossary and exercise pages updated, so I don’t get too heavy of a back log like I do now. You can expect the next post on Monday. I might also try to focus each week on a different topic, but we’ll see how that goes. Next week, I’ll be covering dialogue and voice.

 

Scene Endings

What happens through the bulk of a scene is not really something which can be easily taught, because, as I mentioned earlier, the bulk of a scene relies heavily on other aspects of writing. However, there is one aspect of a scene which belongs in its own category, which is how the scene ends. You might think that how a scene ends is just as difficult to generalize as what happens in the scene, but in fact there are only four possible ways for a scene to end, all in relation to a character’s goals in the scene. The four results are: “Yes”, “Yes, but…”, “No”, and “No, and furthermore…”.

Essentially, there four possibilities depend on two aspects of the scene. The first is whether or not the characters achieve their goals. Obviously, if they do, then the scene ends in a “Yes” or “Yes, but…”, and if the don’t, then the scene ends with a “No”, or “No, and furthermore…”. However, there is another difference between these endings, depending on whether or not the characters actions have resulted in some other consequence which they must now react to. If the characters are not forced to react, then the answer is a straight “Yes” or “No”, and if something occurs which the characters must respond to, the scene ending is a “Yes, but…” or “No, and furthermore…”.

Style

Style is an elusive topic, mostly because there isn’t really a good way to define it, or good ways to develop it. Put simply, a writer’s style is just the way she writes. But that doesn’t really tell us much. In fact, I think style can be broken down a little more, into two broad categories.

The first category is content. Some authors are just famous or well known because of what they write about. In this category I would place authors such as Kurt Vonnegut and J.R.R Tolkien. I mention this first because often it is underappreciated. However, many authors are known more for what they write about that how the write, and this isn’t something which can be tossed by the way side. I will be covering this side of style in more detail as I continue discussing different genres of writing.

The second category is voice. There are many writers who are famous for their voice, and two that come to mind right now are James Joyce and Ernest Hemmingway, though their voices, in some ways, couldn’t be more different. This is often the category which most people think of when they think of style, and for the most part, this is what I will discuss when I talk about style.

There is no easy way to find a voice. That said, there are two tools that can help refine a voice, and improve it. The first is to practice literary devices. Often, famous voices are famous because of how they use imagery, foreshadowing, magical realism, and the like, and so understanding how those devices work is crucial for developing a voice of your own.

The second tool is the pastiche, a literary exercise which I believe is incredibly helpful, but which few writers use. The essential objective is to take an excerpt written by an author whose voice you enjoy, and try to mimic it as best you can. This often takes three steps. First, you must select a passage and do a close reading of it, identifying what aspects make the author’s voice notable. Second, try to recreate the writer’s style in a story of your own. Finally, go back and compare the two, figure out what you liked about that style and what you didn’t, and then try to incorporate the things you enjoyed into your own writing.

 

Exercise: Every once in a while, I will give my opinion on a famous style in a post, and provide a passage for a pastiche exercise. For now, try writing a pastiche in the style of your favorite author, following the process I outlined above.

Plot

Plot is the companion to the timeline, which I discussed here. As a brief reminder, I introduced timelines as the part of story which connects the temporal events of the story together. However, we also ran into some problems with timelines. In particular, we found that it was difficult to connect events together in ways other than direct temporal cause and effect. In addition, we found that it was difficult to create adequate suspense without introducing some element beyond events themselves. This element, is the plot.

In some ways, plot works directly against its counterpart. Whereas the timeline is attempting to put events into a temporal order, plot works to suspend that temporality, in order to connect events in other ways. A plot can generate many other types of relevance, in particular character driven cause and effect. While all types of cause and effect have to occur in a specific timeframe, there is no limit on how large that timeframe might be for those types which are dictated by plot. For example, I used as an example a timeline of the Civil War with an extra event tacked on, marking 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed. This event isn’t temporally relevant to the Civil War; however, there is no reason why it couldn’t be casually relevant within the story. Suppose that the story was tracing the path of a young black woman who had escaped from the South, and the Declaration of Independence inspired her to return in order to work for the Underground Railroad. Now the event is crucial for the plot of the story, if not the timeline.

Two Sentence Stories

This is another excellent tip that I am stealing from Jim Butcher. The essential premise, is that every story can be broken down and summarized into two sentence, even the longest, most complicated works. The basic format looks like this, with the words in brackets being replaced by parts of the story.

[When something happens],[the protagonist(s)][pursues the overarching goal of the plot]. But will he/she/they succeed when [the antagonist(s)][pursues a goal contrary to the protagonist’s goal]?

The most notable feature of this structure is that the final sentence is completed with a question mark. Why a question mark? Because it simulates the basic suspense of the timeline and plot which will keep your readers turning the pages until the very end of the story. There should always be doubt that your protagonists will overcome the antagonists in the end. In some stories the protagonists are actually defeated (Alan Moore’s Watchmen is a fine example).

Happy NaNoWriMo!

For those of you who don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it is National Novel Writing Month, also known as what writers do to torture themselves throughout the month of November. The goal? Write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days. That’s only 1,667 words a day, not too bad, right? If you want to join in, head over to nanowrimo.org to sign up. It’s free, and if you finish, you’ll get a certificate, and who knows what else. However, you won’t get your life back, but who needs it?

For those of you just getting started, but not sure what to write, this is one of the few times (perhaps the only time) I will prime your creativity. The exercise that follows is called person, place, and plot, and as far as I know, I invented it. I like it because it works. Right now, write down three numbers between one and ten, repeats are allowed. Now look at the columns below, and you will find that you have a random character, plot device, and setting. Now just find some way to fit all of those together, and start writing. I know this won’t work for all of you, but if it works for me, I bet it can work for you too. If you don’t like leaving things to chance, you can just find three things on the list that interest you. However, it’s more fun if the three prompts have some distance between one another.

As a final note, all of these are “mainstream” figures, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be creative and move them into a fantasy world. In fact, I would love to see someone write about a construction worker in a castle. Maybe its magical, or haunted? Maybe his daughter’s missing, I don’t know. (3,4,7)

Emotional Reactions

The emotional reaction is the first part of the sequel, which I introduced here. I want to go over some good questions to ask yourself about this part as you are revising. I would suggest that you avoid thinking about these questions until you start revising, because there are few ways of derailing your writing faster than getting ahead of yourself and allowing your critic to come out too soon.

How emotionally invested was the main character in the previous scene? – The answer to this question affects not only the type of emotion your character feels, but also how long you will spend on their emotions in general. It is possible to skip over a character’s emotional reaction entirely, but beware: if you ignore your character’s emotions without good reason, you risk readers believing that your character is a heartless bastard. Most characters will feel something, even those not directly involved in a scene. Just a mention of exhaustion of some kind is often enough. However, what doesn’t make sense is for a character with little at risk in a scene to then respond with some incredibly powerful emotion, like grief or fury. If you want to get your character that worked up, you have to invest them emotionally in the outcome.

Pressure

When I discussed motivation here, I brought up the idea of pressure. I wanted to take a moment and expand on that, and in particular, what it means in terms of character development. There are two kinds of pressure. The first is internal pressure, and the second is external. This distinction is probably fairly obvious, but I’ll elaborate on it a little. Internal pressure arises from the character’s own desires. When a character wants something, and because of that want is motivated to pursue a goal, then they are feeling internal pressure, and are internally motivated. When a character is forced to take action because of outside forces, then they are feeling external pressure, and are externally motivated. The line that divides these is pretty clear, but that isn’t to say that a character can’t be motivated by both pressures at the same time. However, there isn’t really an example of pressure which is both internal and external in and of itself.

What, then, does this have to do with characters? Most of you have probably heard of active and passive characters before, with active characters being motivated actors, and passive characters being acted upon. A better way to define this distinction is to be aware that active characters always have internal motivation, while passive characters always have external motivation. This avoids some of the negativity that has been unfairly heaped on passive characters in the past, because passive characters are just as necessary in a good story as active characters.