Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 82
Just back from vacation to find an inbox full of submissions. :) Only one month left for this year’s short-short story contest, so don’t tarry.
I brought two novels on the trip, but sadly they were both so bad I couldn’t get past the first 10 pages. There was a time I could slog my way through just about anything, but I just don’t have the patience for reading bad fiction anymore. Makes my skin crawl and my blood pressure go up and puts me in a distinctly unvacationy state of mind.
So we fell back on the ultimate vacation luxury in the evenings: cable TV (we have rabbit ears at home). That was exciting for the first hour, till we realized this particular hotel’s cable package basically consisted of three channels of Showtime, three ESPNs, three CNNs, and the Discovery Channel (which now seems to focus primarily on blowing things up and building things—I didn’t get to see a single cute fuzzy critter). To Brian’s dismay, none of the ESPNs seem to actually show sports anymore but consist of nonstop talking head shows which recycle their content every 30 minutes or so, CNN-style.
We did get to watch baseball on TBS. I don’t follow baseball but found it disconcerting that for four consecutive nights we watched the Giants play the Braves. I felt like we were in a time warp. Barry Bonds didn’t hit a single homer either.
We acted literary just long enough to pay our respects to Thomas Wolfe and William Sydney Porter (better known by his pen name, O. Henry) in the lovely Riverside Cemetery. They both died young, but I found myself even more saddened wondering how their careers would play out if they were writing today.
Most of Porter’s short story markets have dried up, gone under, or no longer pay enough to sustain even someone as prolific as himself. Maybe he would’ve had a career as a TV writer. But c’mon, there’s no way Wolfe’s dense literary prose would be published today. In the immortal words of some anonymous agent with a now-defunct blog, ‘Max Perkins, he dead.’ Hard to find editors willing to take chances now that all the major houses are owned by like four corporations and they don't think twice about firing anyone who doesn't bring in lots of bucks.
Ah well. We’re doing our tiny part to reward excellence in writing and maybe someday the pendulum will swing from the merely marketable back toward art’s favor.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Friday, July 20, 2007
Dachshund digression
Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 69
I’m going to take a break from thinking about writing today and instead offer you a glimpse of two of the biggest characters in our lives: Brodsky and Kasay.
They provide us with a never-ending supply of amusing antics. Like all the best animal characters (Snoopy, Garfield, John Grogan's Marley), we can’t help but love them even more because of their wide naughty streaks and well-developed sense of rebellion.
Kasay’s weakness is his constant need of attention. And his obsessive chewing. Just a year ago, before the Great Dachshund Adoption of 2006, I used to read in bed most nights. Since I don’t want my brain turning to mush, I’ve tried to reinstitute this simple habit. Now that there’s a dachshund and a half on the bed, it’s trickier than you might think.
Brodsky, an veteran of unknown age (but definitely older than Kasay) who’s spent time in the pound and God only knows how many non-forever homes, is a warrior. He can sleep even in the most unforgiving of environments and would let you read till dawn.
But as long as there’s a light shining in his general direction, Kasay thinks it’s showtime. Maybe he thinks the clamp-on lamp on the headboard is a spotlight and we expect him to put on a song and dance routine. He makes weird Scooby Doo-esque yelp/whine noises, he jumps from one side of the bed to the other, he twists around on his back like a break dancer.
Last night I thought he was tired enough to give me a few minutes to read. Just when I got engrossed, arguing in my head with Rilke’s advice in his Letters to a Young Poet, I see the text shift ever so slowly to the left. I look over to discover that Kasay has crept up and gripped the corner of the book in his mouth, tugging gingerly, as if as long as he’s verrrrry quiet and sneaky, I won’t notice.
Kasay’s weakness is his constant need of attention. And his obsessive chewing. Just a year ago, before the Great Dachshund Adoption of 2006, I used to read in bed most nights. Since I don’t want my brain turning to mush, I’ve tried to reinstitute this simple habit. Now that there’s a dachshund and a half on the bed, it’s trickier than you might think.
Brodsky, an veteran of unknown age (but definitely older than Kasay) who’s spent time in the pound and God only knows how many non-forever homes, is a warrior. He can sleep even in the most unforgiving of environments and would let you read till dawn.
But as long as there’s a light shining in his general direction, Kasay thinks it’s showtime. Maybe he thinks the clamp-on lamp on the headboard is a spotlight and we expect him to put on a song and dance routine. He makes weird Scooby Doo-esque yelp/whine noises, he jumps from one side of the bed to the other, he twists around on his back like a break dancer.
Last night I thought he was tired enough to give me a few minutes to read. Just when I got engrossed, arguing in my head with Rilke’s advice in his Letters to a Young Poet, I see the text shift ever so slowly to the left. I look over to discover that Kasay has crept up and gripped the corner of the book in his mouth, tugging gingerly, as if as long as he’s verrrrry quiet and sneaky, I won’t notice.
As you can see, paper shredding is one of his hobbies, so I had to give up and hide the book away. Who knows--maybe someday I’ll get that train of thought back for future writing-related blog ruminations.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Character inspiration
Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 65
So where do you get your character ideas from? Sure, it's helpful to answer those character questionnaires I mentioned earlier, but how do you avoid coming up with a string of random answers that don’t gel together into a cohesive and comprehensible whole?
You might model your characters on real people you know. In fact, that probably always happens, even when it’s subconscious. Your ability to create believable characters is based on your past experience with and knowledge of real, living characters. Just be careful and try to make sure they can’t identify themselves in your work. You don't want your writing success to cost you your friends. Just ask Thomas Wolfe or Truman Capote or Pat Conroy. So be sneaky about it, for heaven’s sake! Nobody likes portraits of themselves unless the artist draws a highly idealized version of the truth.
Some other ideas for finding character types are the many and varied personality classifications out there. You may not believe in numerology, astrology, the Chinese zodiac, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Insights Discovery test, and all the rest, but they do offer detailed and mostly coherent personality sketches that might be helpful as models in the construction of your character. Read over the results pages and see if any of the types fit what you had in mind for your character.
You might model your characters on real people you know. In fact, that probably always happens, even when it’s subconscious. Your ability to create believable characters is based on your past experience with and knowledge of real, living characters. Just be careful and try to make sure they can’t identify themselves in your work. You don't want your writing success to cost you your friends. Just ask Thomas Wolfe or Truman Capote or Pat Conroy. So be sneaky about it, for heaven’s sake! Nobody likes portraits of themselves unless the artist draws a highly idealized version of the truth.
Some other ideas for finding character types are the many and varied personality classifications out there. You may not believe in numerology, astrology, the Chinese zodiac, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Insights Discovery test, and all the rest, but they do offer detailed and mostly coherent personality sketches that might be helpful as models in the construction of your character. Read over the results pages and see if any of the types fit what you had in mind for your character.
I don’t recommend going around telling your readers that your hero’s Lifepath Number is 4 or that she’s a Capricorn with Leo rising, born in the year of the Metal Dragon, is an ENFP, or that her dominant energy is earth green. But if you’ve chosen one of these types as a basic guide, it can provide you with a handy launching pad for when you’re getting started and a touchstone when you start to lose your bearings.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Notes on characterization: You are the puppet master
Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 63
Back to the likeability question for a moment…
You should have a basic idea how you want your reader to feel about each character and you should manipulate them (both the character and the reader) in order to achieve the desired reaction. Beware of unintentionally letting unlikeable traits slip into your supposedly sympathetic character and vice versa. (A little bit of intentional gray thrown into the black and white is a different matter.)
If you’re writing literary fiction, you have more room for ambiguity, but in most commercial genres, you want your reader pulling for the good guys and shaking their fists in rage at the bad guys. If your protagonist accidentally turns your reader off and your villain starts becoming the most likeable person in the story, you have a problem. Of course you can have an antihero, but the point is you need to be in control of whose side the reader is on.
This is where a trusted second reader is essential, because you need to get an objective opinion of how your characters’ actions come across. Here’s an example: I once worked with a woman who was furious because various neighborhood cats would get into her backyard and sit on her patio furniture (the horror!). She described with relish her solution to this problem: she set up baited traps on her patio and hauled her neighbors’ beloved cats off to the pound, never mentioning what she’d done when she later saw them frantically searching for their missing pets.
It was obvious that this woman was proud of her creative problem-solving skills, and were she writing about the incident, I’m sure she would paint herself as the heroine. No matter how artfully she describes what happened, though, the cat trapper is going to come across as sympathetic as Cruella De Ville. But she couldn’t see how vile her actions would look to someone else.
So grill your second reader on her feelings about each character. Of course there will be differing shades of interpretation, but take note of any reactions that are way off your intended mark so that you can fix them in the rewrite.
Back to the likeability question for a moment…
You should have a basic idea how you want your reader to feel about each character and you should manipulate them (both the character and the reader) in order to achieve the desired reaction. Beware of unintentionally letting unlikeable traits slip into your supposedly sympathetic character and vice versa. (A little bit of intentional gray thrown into the black and white is a different matter.)
If you’re writing literary fiction, you have more room for ambiguity, but in most commercial genres, you want your reader pulling for the good guys and shaking their fists in rage at the bad guys. If your protagonist accidentally turns your reader off and your villain starts becoming the most likeable person in the story, you have a problem. Of course you can have an antihero, but the point is you need to be in control of whose side the reader is on.
This is where a trusted second reader is essential, because you need to get an objective opinion of how your characters’ actions come across. Here’s an example: I once worked with a woman who was furious because various neighborhood cats would get into her backyard and sit on her patio furniture (the horror!). She described with relish her solution to this problem: she set up baited traps on her patio and hauled her neighbors’ beloved cats off to the pound, never mentioning what she’d done when she later saw them frantically searching for their missing pets.
It was obvious that this woman was proud of her creative problem-solving skills, and were she writing about the incident, I’m sure she would paint herself as the heroine. No matter how artfully she describes what happened, though, the cat trapper is going to come across as sympathetic as Cruella De Ville. But she couldn’t see how vile her actions would look to someone else.
So grill your second reader on her feelings about each character. Of course there will be differing shades of interpretation, but take note of any reactions that are way off your intended mark so that you can fix them in the rewrite.
Friday, July 13, 2007
The winning ingredients: other characters
Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 62
In addition to your main character, your contest entry is judged based on its minor characters. No man is an island, right? We use this category in a broad sense, in that sometimes the setting, an animal, or even an inanimate object can serve as a sort of character.
Especially in a short-short story, you may not have the luxury of fully fleshing out all of your characters. Your peripheral characters may be loosely drawn and two-dimensional out of necessity, but they must at least serve a vital function in the story, and the more little shots of individuality you can inject into them, the better.
Beware of stereotypes. If you find yourself falling into one, try doing one small thing to turn the stereotype on its head, and the payoff will be substantial. For example, a friend of mine who’s an avid reader recently mentioned how sick she is of the obligatory gay male sidekick in chick lit novels. Why not let the heroine have a gay male rival, or a lesbian sidekick, or an elderly woman friend? The world is full of strange bedfellows and unexpected relationships, and those are infinitely more fun to explore than the same-old, same-old stereotypes.
I’m not well-read as far as chick lit goes, so for all I know the examples above may have been done to death too, which raises another point: try to stay current in your chosen genre. Reading a lot always helps your writing, and if you read what your ‘competition’ is writing, you can see what works in your particular field, what doesn’t, how your work fits in with your contemporaries’ works, and how it’s unique.
In addition to your main character, your contest entry is judged based on its minor characters. No man is an island, right? We use this category in a broad sense, in that sometimes the setting, an animal, or even an inanimate object can serve as a sort of character.
Especially in a short-short story, you may not have the luxury of fully fleshing out all of your characters. Your peripheral characters may be loosely drawn and two-dimensional out of necessity, but they must at least serve a vital function in the story, and the more little shots of individuality you can inject into them, the better.
Beware of stereotypes. If you find yourself falling into one, try doing one small thing to turn the stereotype on its head, and the payoff will be substantial. For example, a friend of mine who’s an avid reader recently mentioned how sick she is of the obligatory gay male sidekick in chick lit novels. Why not let the heroine have a gay male rival, or a lesbian sidekick, or an elderly woman friend? The world is full of strange bedfellows and unexpected relationships, and those are infinitely more fun to explore than the same-old, same-old stereotypes.
I’m not well-read as far as chick lit goes, so for all I know the examples above may have been done to death too, which raises another point: try to stay current in your chosen genre. Reading a lot always helps your writing, and if you read what your ‘competition’ is writing, you can see what works in your particular field, what doesn’t, how your work fits in with your contemporaries’ works, and how it’s unique.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Now that you’ve gotten acquainted with your hero….do you like him?
Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 62
Brian and I happen to be of the mindset that your story’s hero need not be heroic, which might sound a bit odd.
It seems that, particularly in certain genres, the powers that be tell writers that their protagonists must be likeable, someone the reader admires. You know, like the strong and sassy lady detective with the smokin bod and Holmesian abilities who flosses twice a day and never forgets to water her houseplants and whose only flaws are her driving ambition and obsessive perfectionism. OK, maybe that’s a bad example, in that likeable traits can be pushed so far that the character ends up coming across as unlikeable, but you get the general idea.
Brian and I don’t agree that the reader must admire your protagonist. To us, it’s more important that your main character come across as believable yet oddly fascinating. Think of it in terms of a dinner party full of strangers. You might be introduced to a very nice yuppie soccer mom, the kind of woman you’d invite into your home for a book club meeting or ask to babysit your children with no hesitation.
Then there’s the slightly creepy tattooed guy lurking in the corner, telling stories to a small throng of intrigued listeners. You might want to become friends with the woman, but your curiosity would likely be more piqued by the man. His twisted psyche is the one you’d want to peek into; if you had to choose, his secrets are the ones you’d want to learn. Likewise, your reader will likely be more drawn to someone whose world is a bit different than her own.
Brian and I happen to be of the mindset that your story’s hero need not be heroic, which might sound a bit odd.
It seems that, particularly in certain genres, the powers that be tell writers that their protagonists must be likeable, someone the reader admires. You know, like the strong and sassy lady detective with the smokin bod and Holmesian abilities who flosses twice a day and never forgets to water her houseplants and whose only flaws are her driving ambition and obsessive perfectionism. OK, maybe that’s a bad example, in that likeable traits can be pushed so far that the character ends up coming across as unlikeable, but you get the general idea.
Brian and I don’t agree that the reader must admire your protagonist. To us, it’s more important that your main character come across as believable yet oddly fascinating. Think of it in terms of a dinner party full of strangers. You might be introduced to a very nice yuppie soccer mom, the kind of woman you’d invite into your home for a book club meeting or ask to babysit your children with no hesitation.
Then there’s the slightly creepy tattooed guy lurking in the corner, telling stories to a small throng of intrigued listeners. You might want to become friends with the woman, but your curiosity would likely be more piqued by the man. His twisted psyche is the one you’d want to peek into; if you had to choose, his secrets are the ones you’d want to learn. Likewise, your reader will likely be more drawn to someone whose world is a bit different than her own.
Monday, July 9, 2007
The winning ingredients: hero
Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 62 – We seem to have hit some kind of midsummer standstill here…
Moving on to another element from the contest scorecard…the hero. Every story has one, whether you call her your main character, protagonist, chief sufferer, antihero, etc.
Sometimes we get contest entries in which the hero is sort of a hazy, undefined figure. I get the feeling the writer is just barely acquainted with his character and is using the actual writing as a means of learning more about his protagonist. But that should really take place during the brainstorming and note-taking phase of writing.
By the time you have a final draft ready to send out into the world, you should know your hero intimately. The better you know your character, the more she will come to life. Just one of what must be plenty of good books on this subject is Robert Peck’s Fiction is Folks: How to Create Unforgettable Characters.
A good exercise he recommends is one actors often use. They delve into their characters by asking and answering extensive lists of questions about the character. What motivates her? What is her biggest dream and most crippling fear? Where did she grow up? What was she like in high school? And so on.
The answers to these questions need not appear in the text, but if you as creator have a handle on the answers, your character will come across as a fully fleshed out, three-dimensional being to your reader, and her words and actions will be easier for you to imagine.
Moving on to another element from the contest scorecard…the hero. Every story has one, whether you call her your main character, protagonist, chief sufferer, antihero, etc.
Sometimes we get contest entries in which the hero is sort of a hazy, undefined figure. I get the feeling the writer is just barely acquainted with his character and is using the actual writing as a means of learning more about his protagonist. But that should really take place during the brainstorming and note-taking phase of writing.
By the time you have a final draft ready to send out into the world, you should know your hero intimately. The better you know your character, the more she will come to life. Just one of what must be plenty of good books on this subject is Robert Peck’s Fiction is Folks: How to Create Unforgettable Characters.
A good exercise he recommends is one actors often use. They delve into their characters by asking and answering extensive lists of questions about the character. What motivates her? What is her biggest dream and most crippling fear? Where did she grow up? What was she like in high school? And so on.
The answers to these questions need not appear in the text, but if you as creator have a handle on the answers, your character will come across as a fully fleshed out, three-dimensional being to your reader, and her words and actions will be easier for you to imagine.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Tying up a loose end about dialogue
Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 62
Brian said I need to provide concrete examples of our dialogue pet peeves. I almost included some from popular fiction originally, but I hate to point fingers and name names. So I will take the weasel’s way out and give you some examples from television. TV is easy to make fun of. And yes, I know I watch way too much of it.
So let’s get specific:
Chock fulla clichés: Turn on most any daytime soap and you will be bombarded with a wave of boring clichés. Admittedly, I haven’t watched any since high school, so to test my theory I turned one on yesterday since I had the day off. I was rewarded with this gem almost instantly:
“Your love is the only thing that’s kept me going these last few months. You have to love me. We were meant to be a couple. I can make you happy in ways you can’t even imagine. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done because I love you,” said a weirdo in a mask and strange half-and-half costume. I think it was a woman, but it’s hard to say.
“You drugged me with chloroform, stripped me naked, tied me to a chair, and threatened my life. You have a strange way of showing love,” said the kidnapped fellow, who, at least in this scene, was awake, fully clothed, and moving about freely.
I felt like I’d hit the jackpot: a two-in-one example! Not only is it full of cringe-worthy clichés, but it can also serve as an example of the…
Barbara Walters interview: OK, so technically it isn’t a Q&A session, but both of the two characters in the room know what the strange masked kidnapper did to the guy—why on earth would he list the offenses like that, except as a recap/information dump for viewers? Awkward!
This device more often crops up in sci fi or fantasy genres. The writer has made up certain rules for her fictitious world and must somehow convey these rules, so she make the characters question each other about them. But the characters would have no reason to discuss this any more than you and I might have the following conversation:
“How do you get to work every day?” you ask.
“I drive my car.”
“I see. And what is a car?”
“It’s this machine with an engine and wheels that transports you from one place to another,” I reply.
“How do you make it go?”
“I put a key into the ignition and turn it while pressing down on the gas pedal.”
“How does it know where to take you?” and so on.
So you get my point—if we had this conversation in real life, I would be wondering if you’d suffered extreme memory loss or were brought up in an impossibly cloistered Amish community, but this would not constitute a typical, casual conversation.
Terminally cute: I have two words for you: Gilmore Girls. I apologize to fans, and maybe I haven’t given this show a chance since I've only watched it once. I turned it on one night when I couldn’t find anything else, and the daughter spewed I think 5 cynically witty one-liners in the first 90 seconds. OK, so she is a smart and funny and cynical college student. I’ll go with it.
Then her mother opened her mouth and did the exact same thing. And so did the mother’s boyfriend. And the daughter’s boyfriend. And the daughter’s best friend. And the grandmother. Cute line overload! These characters all share the same brain! The illusion that these words were spoken by six distinct people with different voices and personalities was completely shattered. It was impossible to ignore the fact that these lines were written by the same person (or persons). You want your readers to hear and see your characters, not the person behind the curtain.
Arguing as a substitute for real drama: You see this a lot on cop shows. You have your major 'A' story line and your lesser B and C subplots, but then, somewhere around letter G or H, there’s a sub-sub-subplot that never amounts to anything: a scene where the supervisor yells at the protagonist about his unorthodox (albeit effective) investigative methods. My problem with this is, like I said, it never amounts to anything and in no way contributes to the story except to tack on some cheap conflict.
And the dialogue itself usually bugs me too. I’ve worked in a lot of places (never a police station, but still), and when a supervisor calls in an employee for an upbraiding, it doesn’t usually sound like a 150-decibel, profanity-laced tantrum. Usually the supervisor dreads these talks and has been up all night carefully crafting the exact way to phrase the complaint in order to avoid a lawsuit, and sometimes the employee goes postal, but usually both parties are kind of silently pissed but manage to keep up their professional decorum. They save their ranting and raving for after work hours in the safety of their homes. That may not make for good TV, but all the fists pounding on desks and empty threats and insults don’t give me an adrenaline rush, they just make me roll my eyes.
Too much profanity: Hmmm. We don’t have cable, so I will have to take an example from the movies for this one. As much as I enjoyed The Big Lebowski, I seem to recall that just about every line contained the F word. I remember Brian saying that if you added up all the times that word and its variants were uttered in the movie, it would amount to about 5 minutes’ worth of screen time. We speculated that the screenwriter had a 115-page script and wanted to get to that magic number 120, so he went back in and injected hundreds of four-letter words for the sake of padding. I just don’t know many adults who go around talking this way, so I never find it believable.
Naked dialogue: The next two cannot apply to TV since you pretty much always know who’s talking and what they’re doing at the same time and you can hear accents, so I will be bold and name literary names. I seem to recall Hemingway doing this an awful lot. One of the many reasons he is not a favorite of mine… I don't want to have to read a page two or three times to figure out who's saying which line.
Phonetic dialogue: I hated Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper when I was a teenager just because of their phonetic spellings in dialogue. I later decided that Twain was worth slogging through and forgiving. Not so Cooper.
This blog entry is like three times longer than the two general entries on dialogue put together, which illustrates a bonus writing tip: when you get specific, you will have lots of material and much more text.
Brian said I need to provide concrete examples of our dialogue pet peeves. I almost included some from popular fiction originally, but I hate to point fingers and name names. So I will take the weasel’s way out and give you some examples from television. TV is easy to make fun of. And yes, I know I watch way too much of it.
So let’s get specific:
Chock fulla clichés: Turn on most any daytime soap and you will be bombarded with a wave of boring clichés. Admittedly, I haven’t watched any since high school, so to test my theory I turned one on yesterday since I had the day off. I was rewarded with this gem almost instantly:
“Your love is the only thing that’s kept me going these last few months. You have to love me. We were meant to be a couple. I can make you happy in ways you can’t even imagine. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done because I love you,” said a weirdo in a mask and strange half-and-half costume. I think it was a woman, but it’s hard to say.
“You drugged me with chloroform, stripped me naked, tied me to a chair, and threatened my life. You have a strange way of showing love,” said the kidnapped fellow, who, at least in this scene, was awake, fully clothed, and moving about freely.
I felt like I’d hit the jackpot: a two-in-one example! Not only is it full of cringe-worthy clichés, but it can also serve as an example of the…
Barbara Walters interview: OK, so technically it isn’t a Q&A session, but both of the two characters in the room know what the strange masked kidnapper did to the guy—why on earth would he list the offenses like that, except as a recap/information dump for viewers? Awkward!
This device more often crops up in sci fi or fantasy genres. The writer has made up certain rules for her fictitious world and must somehow convey these rules, so she make the characters question each other about them. But the characters would have no reason to discuss this any more than you and I might have the following conversation:
“How do you get to work every day?” you ask.
“I drive my car.”
“I see. And what is a car?”
“It’s this machine with an engine and wheels that transports you from one place to another,” I reply.
“How do you make it go?”
“I put a key into the ignition and turn it while pressing down on the gas pedal.”
“How does it know where to take you?” and so on.
So you get my point—if we had this conversation in real life, I would be wondering if you’d suffered extreme memory loss or were brought up in an impossibly cloistered Amish community, but this would not constitute a typical, casual conversation.
Terminally cute: I have two words for you: Gilmore Girls. I apologize to fans, and maybe I haven’t given this show a chance since I've only watched it once. I turned it on one night when I couldn’t find anything else, and the daughter spewed I think 5 cynically witty one-liners in the first 90 seconds. OK, so she is a smart and funny and cynical college student. I’ll go with it.
Then her mother opened her mouth and did the exact same thing. And so did the mother’s boyfriend. And the daughter’s boyfriend. And the daughter’s best friend. And the grandmother. Cute line overload! These characters all share the same brain! The illusion that these words were spoken by six distinct people with different voices and personalities was completely shattered. It was impossible to ignore the fact that these lines were written by the same person (or persons). You want your readers to hear and see your characters, not the person behind the curtain.
Arguing as a substitute for real drama: You see this a lot on cop shows. You have your major 'A' story line and your lesser B and C subplots, but then, somewhere around letter G or H, there’s a sub-sub-subplot that never amounts to anything: a scene where the supervisor yells at the protagonist about his unorthodox (albeit effective) investigative methods. My problem with this is, like I said, it never amounts to anything and in no way contributes to the story except to tack on some cheap conflict.
And the dialogue itself usually bugs me too. I’ve worked in a lot of places (never a police station, but still), and when a supervisor calls in an employee for an upbraiding, it doesn’t usually sound like a 150-decibel, profanity-laced tantrum. Usually the supervisor dreads these talks and has been up all night carefully crafting the exact way to phrase the complaint in order to avoid a lawsuit, and sometimes the employee goes postal, but usually both parties are kind of silently pissed but manage to keep up their professional decorum. They save their ranting and raving for after work hours in the safety of their homes. That may not make for good TV, but all the fists pounding on desks and empty threats and insults don’t give me an adrenaline rush, they just make me roll my eyes.
Too much profanity: Hmmm. We don’t have cable, so I will have to take an example from the movies for this one. As much as I enjoyed The Big Lebowski, I seem to recall that just about every line contained the F word. I remember Brian saying that if you added up all the times that word and its variants were uttered in the movie, it would amount to about 5 minutes’ worth of screen time. We speculated that the screenwriter had a 115-page script and wanted to get to that magic number 120, so he went back in and injected hundreds of four-letter words for the sake of padding. I just don’t know many adults who go around talking this way, so I never find it believable.
Naked dialogue: The next two cannot apply to TV since you pretty much always know who’s talking and what they’re doing at the same time and you can hear accents, so I will be bold and name literary names. I seem to recall Hemingway doing this an awful lot. One of the many reasons he is not a favorite of mine… I don't want to have to read a page two or three times to figure out who's saying which line.
Phonetic dialogue: I hated Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper when I was a teenager just because of their phonetic spellings in dialogue. I later decided that Twain was worth slogging through and forgiving. Not so Cooper.
This blog entry is like three times longer than the two general entries on dialogue put together, which illustrates a bonus writing tip: when you get specific, you will have lots of material and much more text.
Monday, July 2, 2007
I can't seem to shut up about dialogue
Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 62
A couple more dialogue pet peeves I thought of...
Phonetic spelling: Regional differences in language are fascinating, and it is a good idea to incorporate them into your writing to give it a sense of place and to make your characters’ voices authentic and distinctive. But please, please, resist the urge to use a bunch of phonetic spellings in dialogue to convey an accent.
It’s just too much work for your poor reader, who will most likely be forced to mouth the lines aloud in order to decipher their meaning. So listen closely to the dialect your characters speak and capture its rhythms, idioms, and quirky grammatical constructions. But I would suggest avoiding doing anything that makes your reader feel like he has to translate your work from a foreign language. A frustrated reader usually = an abandoned book or story.
Too much profanity: OK, before you think I’m a hopeless prude, let me explain. There’s nothing wrong with using a little well-placed profanity in your dialogue. Sometimes the situation demands it. But when you let your characters drop the F bomb every other line, it loses its punch. Honestly, one bad word after another is no longer shocking—in fact, it makes for a boring, unoriginal read. I’ve spent time amongst teenaged boys—possibly the foulest-mouthed creatures on the planet. Their language tends to be much more vilely inventive than mere chains of 4-letter words. If you use bad language with a light touch, it will be much more effective.
A couple more dialogue pet peeves I thought of...
Phonetic spelling: Regional differences in language are fascinating, and it is a good idea to incorporate them into your writing to give it a sense of place and to make your characters’ voices authentic and distinctive. But please, please, resist the urge to use a bunch of phonetic spellings in dialogue to convey an accent.
It’s just too much work for your poor reader, who will most likely be forced to mouth the lines aloud in order to decipher their meaning. So listen closely to the dialect your characters speak and capture its rhythms, idioms, and quirky grammatical constructions. But I would suggest avoiding doing anything that makes your reader feel like he has to translate your work from a foreign language. A frustrated reader usually = an abandoned book or story.
Too much profanity: OK, before you think I’m a hopeless prude, let me explain. There’s nothing wrong with using a little well-placed profanity in your dialogue. Sometimes the situation demands it. But when you let your characters drop the F bomb every other line, it loses its punch. Honestly, one bad word after another is no longer shocking—in fact, it makes for a boring, unoriginal read. I’ve spent time amongst teenaged boys—possibly the foulest-mouthed creatures on the planet. Their language tends to be much more vilely inventive than mere chains of 4-letter words. If you use bad language with a light touch, it will be much more effective.
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