When good dialogue goes bad

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 59

Picking up from where we left off, here are a few of the dialogue pitfalls I referred to earlier:

*Chock fulla clichés: You know them when you see them. They’re constantly trying to worm their way onto your pages. Be ever vigilant against the cliché. Show it no mercy. Strike it dead with your red pen or backspace key. Yes, people do use a lot of clichés in their real life conversations. But you are creating art, not just recording life, and you can do better. Beware of taking it too far in the opposite direction, though, or you might end up with...

*Terminally cute dialogue: It’s good when your characters display flashes of brilliant wit. But when every single line uttered by every single character is an impossibly clever quip, well, as Brian says, the reader can hear the keyboard clacking in the background. She's popped out of the illusion of being inside a believable story. Comedians’ acts are funny nonstop (or at least they should be), but they spend hours crafting, revising, and perfecting them. Nobody is hilarious on the spot, every time he speaks.

*Arguing as a substitute for real drama: You want your story to have conflict and drama, so you make your characters argue. All well and good, but is it a juicy argument, one that advances the plot and reveals something about your characters? Or is it like that Monty Python sketch where the customer pays to have an argument but instead only gets Yes-it-is/No-it-isn’t contradiction? Your story needs conflict, but it needs to be substantial and it needs to go deeper than petty, back-and-forth squabbling.

*The Barbara Walters interview: In an effort to dump a whole bunch of information on your reader, you have one character pose a series of questions to another. Problem is, both characters know the answers full well, and if they were actual people, would have no reason whatsoever to ask each other such questions. Find a better way to reveal information to your reader, and avoid long Q&A sessions.

*Naked dialogue: No tags, no gestures, just line after line of characters talking. Your reader loses track of who is saying which line. The image of what’s actually going on in the scene goes black and the reader is popped out of the story and reminded that she is sitting in a room alone looking at words on a page. Not the effect you want. The he-said/she-said tags may seem repetitive to you, but believe me, the scene will read faster with them than without.

Oh and I think this has been said a million times, but it bears repeating: there is nothing wrong with repeating “said,” so avoid the temptation to pull out your thesaurus and stick in a bunch of "said" synonyms like “declared,” “intoned,” “stated,” “uttered,” “announced,” etc. The “said”s will disappear into the page, but the five dollar replacement words will jar the flow of your writing and stick out awkwardly.

OK, I think that covers most of the glaring dialogue gaffes we see. As with all writing "rules," they are in no way absolute, so take them with a grain of salt and use them as you see fit.

The winning ingredients: dialogue

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 58

As promised (and in no particular order), allow me to explain a bit more about what Brian and I look for when judging contest entries.

Dialogue: such a deceptively simple part of a story. Unless all of your characters have taken vows of silence (now wouldn’t that be a fun read), you’re going to need them to talk to each other.

It seems so easy. You probably talk and listen to people all day long, possibly even chewing gum at the same time. How hard could it be to get some decent dialogue down in black and white?

In a word: very. There are so many pitfalls that can arise when your characters open their mouths and assert their First Amendment rights. Next time, I will go into detail on some of the ways dialogue can go wrong and set off our stinky-writing detectors.

But let’s start off positive. In our opinion, good dialogue is a subtle balancing act. It rings true enough to be believable. It has a quality of invisibility, in which the reader is drawn into imagining the story to the point that he almost forgets he’s reading words on a page. But it’s also more than a transcription of a real conversation. It’s interesting and compelling, and it serves to advance the plot and expose your characters’ fears and desires. A tall order to be sure, but by no means impossible.

What's genre got to do with it?

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 56

We get entries from every conceivable genre, especially when it’s Best First Chapter submission time. Sometimes people inquire whether we accept a certain genre (usually children’s or YA). We tell them we’re open to anything.

You may wonder, though, how it’s possible to compare writing across the genres, and whether we favor certain types of stories. Brian and I are both eclectic readers who appreciate a wide range of writing styles.

I will admit we each have one specific genre we aren’t wild about as a general rule, but there are exceptions, and we both enjoy high quality writing, even when it’s in a genre we don’t usually care for. Plus, Brian is a fan of my least-favorite genre and vice versa, so again it evens out, and we try very hard to be fair.

We use the same scorecard regardless of genre, because different types of fiction share some common denominators—theme, plot, characterization, protagonist, dialogue, presentation. We take into account what is appropriate for the genre the author is working under. For example, a literary piece in which very little happens doesn’t necessarily get marked down on plot, whereas an action-less murder mystery does. The finalists are entries that display excellence in whatever genre we think the author is aiming for.

Where are they now?

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 51

E.E. King, our very first contest winner, passed along some exciting news to Brian the other day. Her short story, “Dirk Snigby’s Guide to the Afterlife” has been anthologized in Next Stop Hollywood (St. Martins, 2007), a collection of 15 previously unpublished stories deemed suitable for film adaptation. Her story was chosen from over 600 entries.

She will be having a book party/reading on July 6th at 7:00 p.m. at Dutton’s in Brentwood, CA. Now you have a chance to read Evie’s work and see just how deserving she is of being our inaugural short-short story winner. The book’s a bargain at less than twelve bucks on Amazon and would make a nice Father’s Day gift (wait, I’m probably the only super-slacker out there who STILL hasn’t mailed out her Father’s Day package…but I bet you know someone who has a birthday coming up or something).

Evie actually submitted “Dirk Snigby,” so I can personally attest to what a delightful, original story it is. When we chose “The Tragedy of Dewy C. McCray” as our winner, we had to disqualify her other entry to comply with our two-year rule. After all, we don’t want any dynasties or to be accused of favoritism.

Here's a picture we didn't get to use on our winner's page but was still lurking around on my computer. A lovely shot of E. E. King with a weimaraner.

Our sincere congrats to Evie!

Short (attention span) stories

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 51

Of the two InnermoonLit contests, the Best First Chapter is definitely more popular than the Short-Short Story. We receive many more entries for it, which I assume is because short stories just aren’t as marketable as novels, especially very short stories.

I personally love reading these little self-contained gems. In fact, I find them easier to judge than the first chapter submissions, which, when they’re good, leave me hanging, wishing I could flip over to chapter two. As a novelist himself, I think Brian prefers judging the chapters, because he is so good at seeing whether the foundation for a good novel is there. So it balances out. He is super focused; I have a short attention span.

If our 500-word limit on this contest seems extreme…well, I guess it is. In addition to my puny attention span, we are governed by practical concerns. When we were developing the contest guidelines, we were concerned that we’d get stuck printing out thousands of entries. So far that hasn’t happened, and we still seem to be a fairly well-kept secret, with a manageable volume of submissions and reasonable paper and toner expenses.

But I have to wonder why there isn’t a bigger market for flash fiction. Most people don’t spend a whole lot of time reading, and the idea of getting a complete, satisfying narrative read in a few minute’s time seems like it would be appealing to a pretty wide audience. Super-short stories are also well-suited for reading online, where eye strain is a serious limiting factor. I don’t see why the market for short-short stories doesn’t expand, particularly among electronic publications, and I really hope it will.

Who are you?

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 49

OK, I’m going to make a nagging suggestion today: writers and aspiring writers should have a current head shot and biography at their fingertips. I know, bios are a supreme pain to write and if you’re like me, you probably feel like a jerk writing about your accomplishments and how wonderful you are—and we all hate getting our picture taken.

I got to thinking about this because my dean (she’s ‘mine’ because I’m her assistant, see) has recently begun asking all faculty members to update their vitas each year when they complete their annual reports. Partly, it’s a requirement for the accreditors, but it’s also important for faculty to have current c.v.s when they go up for tenure, promotion, or post-tenure review, apply for grants, appear as speakers or experts, are nominated for awards, and, of course, if they should happen to need or want to go back out on the job market. The point being, it never hurts to have something like this at the ready.

If you’re new to writing, take some time to come up with a bio, even if it’s short. There’s also the old exercise where you fake it and write up your dream resume, which can be a very helpful way of spelling out your goals and figuring out concrete ways to move toward those dreams. Just don’t try to pass off your dream bio as your true bio. :p

If you’re more seasoned, it’s tempting to write your bio once and forget about it, but give it a read at least once a year, making sure to add all your latest accomplishments. You never know when a success will fall into your lap, and this way you won’t have to put something together under pressure but can just relax and fully enjoy the victory.

Visual Aids

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 46

Brian told me the other day he likes all the pictures I put up here, and I guess posting pics of address books, money orders, and gargantuan shredders is a wee bit out of the ordinary.

I’ve always needed visual aids, maybe because my parents (along with other assorted family members) are artists. This became a sort of inside joke when I held my one and only job as a supervisor.

/cue the flashback music/

It was my freshman year of college, and in the fall I worked as a production assistant on The Oberlin Review, the weekly student newspaper. I doubt this position even exists anymore, but I liked it. We laid out the paper—stories, headlines, photos, ads, and all—using wax, exacto knives, light boxes, and pretty blue non-photo-repro pens. I believe they switched to PageMaker the very next year. But we were old school.

Anyway, in spring I was promoted to production manager (actually I think nobody else wanted to do it), which meant another girl and I shared the responsibility of supervising the production workers. Now, the student who’d been my production manager the previous semester had an intimidating way of communicating her expectations to the staff.

The paper came out on Friday, and she met with us on Saturday. The meetings consisted of her scrutinizing the paper page by page, picking out every orphan, widow, crooked line of text, poorly cropped photo, misaligned column, unevenly spaced block of text, and other assorted egregious errors. Then she’d bark, “Who the $&#@ laid out this page?! It looks like %#^*!” We all sat cowed in utter terror, holding our breath while she gave us our upbraiding and told us the right way to do things. (She was scary as hell but ended up being one of my closest friends from Oberlin.)

Anyway. If you knew me, you’d know I had no chance of mimicking her leadership style. I am a huge conflict avoider. At 18, I was even meeker and wishy-washier than I am now. So when I needed to communicate to my staff the right and wrong way to lay out the paper, I relied on the ultimate go-between: the visual aid.

I made up cute little pictures and posted them all over our work area. I started to get a reputation among the ‘real’ editors in the front offices. More than one person wondered whether I was capable of expressing myself without the use of visual aids. To this day, I’m still not sure, but I’m not going to risk it and try to do without them.

Since I’m on such a tangent today anyway, I will give you a bonus visual aid that has nothing to do with anything (or maybe everything to do with everything) from Daniel Kolak’s In Search of God: The Language and Logic of Belief. Look, a visual aid depicting Pascal’s Wager. Too fun!

So you think you can write?

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 46

Maybe I’ve been watching too much reality TV, but the thought of people pursuing dreams for which they may exhibit little promise has been on my mind lately. Simon Cowell and Nigel Lithgoe might think it’s better to crush the dreams of the untalented so they can try their hands at some other pursuit, but I for one don’t want to discourage anyone from writing, and I’m thankful we don’t have to give our entrants face-to-face evaluations. If someone loves to sing or dance, what’s the harm in letting them enjoy it, even if they are terrible at it?

I feel this applies even more so to writing. When I was about 11, my grandmother told me that there are no writing prodigies. Kind of a sad thought for me at the time since I wanted to be instantly, innately great with none of that hard work and practice crap, but now I appreciate how right she was. You have to read good writing, put in lots of time writing, read bad writing, spend lots of time revising, then read, write, and revise still yet more, and on top of all of that, you have to experience life awhile to build up some material and try to figure out something worth saying about the human condition.

My point is, today’s terrible writer could be wonderful in ten years. Brian likes to paraphrase Natalie Goldberg, who said all our bad writing is fertilizer from which the good stuff later grows. Anyone who has ever written has written some stuff that's just plain no good. Besides, even if you never make a dime as a professional writer, it is a worthwhile skill to develop. Sooner or later, you are going to have to write something, be it a resume or a letter of complaint, and the more you write, the better writer you’ll be. So I say if writing is something you enjoy (or probably more accurately, something you feel compelled to do), keep doing it.

How to win the InnermoonLit Award

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 42



Ever wonder how contest entries are judged? In our case, we have a system that has evolved over the past couple years.

After the deadline passes and submissions are closed, I serve as the first reader. I separate the entries into three piles: yes, no, and maybe. Depending on how busy the rest of my world is, this can take me awhile—usually a month or two.

Brian devotes several weekend days to judging rather than trying to get it done on writing days. He reads my yes and maybe stacks and develops his own yes/maybe/no piles. He then scores the yeses and maybes to come up with first, second, and third place winners.

He came up with this contest report card and fills one out for each finalist.



(No, you can’t see yours, nor can I even reveal to you whether your entry was one of the finalists. That information has all been sent to the gaping maw. In fact, I’ve told you too much already. Stand back. This blog entry will self-destruct in 90 seconds.)

Brian uses a letter grade system. The entry is graded on a plus/minus scale from A to F on these elements: hero, other characterizations, plot, dialogue, theme, and presentation (I’ll take a more detailed look at each of these in future entries), then those six grades are calculated to get the entry’s overall grade. There’s no Lake Woebegone-esque grade inflation happening around here either. Average writing earns a grade of C.* An A means work that is far above average and substantially exceeds expectations, and those are few and far between.

We talk it over and so far have always come to a consensus, but basically we work like an editor or agent and his/her assistant. I cull the slush pile and Brian makes the final decision on winners.



*OMG, I thought my tongue was going to drop out of my head if I uttered that sentence to my WRIT 101 students one. more. time. last fall. Now you made me say it yet again. Shame on you. :p

Creation, destruction, regeneration: the circle of paper

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 41

I don't know about you, but Brian and I are not all that fond of reading computer screens. Those pixels give you a nasty headache after awhile. Right away we knew we’d be printing hard copies of contest entries in order to evaluate them.

The original plan was for Brian to print entries, hole-punch them, and score them as they came in, but that was cutting into his writing time and energy in a big way. It wasn’t as bad as teaching a writing class and grading papers, but it was too close for his taste. Then too, we were concerned that the order in which entries came in could’ve prejudiced the judging (we are human after all), when really that should be irrelevant.

So early on we simplified and came up with our current modus operandi. We print entries as they arrive and put them in a file. I record the email address in my brown book, keeping a running tally of the number of entries received. Then I type the address into my Word file, provided it isn’t already there from a previous submission. I used to use a distribution list, but apparently my software isn’t designed for such volume and it got very slow and clunky.

More details on the judging criteria on Monday. The point is, we do print out entries, but we never hang onto them. Soon after they are safely printed out, we delete the electronic entry. After the final judging, all paper entries are fed to this scary industrial-sized shredder. Don’t worry; they never even see the blades coming.

We do this as a safeguard against any sort of plagiarism. Rest assured, your writing isn’t floating around, vulnerable to idea thieves. Our copy gets destroyed and recycled. Who knows? Maybe some microscopic shreds of your entry will be in the next box of recycled paper you buy.

A little slush never hurt anyone

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 41

I guess it’s inevitable that our contests have slush piles: those stacks of submissions that so obviously belong in the ‘no’ pile.

I’ve heard editors and agents complain about the slush pile, and I’m sure you have too. They will do anything to avoid it and usually hire a 22-year-old with a newly minted degree in English to wade through it for them. Kind of like what I do with the InnermoonLit contests, as I serve as the first reader. Except my degree has built up quite a patina over the years.

I don’t know. I kind of like reading the worst of the worst. It takes far less effort on my part. I know it’s a ‘no’ right away without any agonizing or putting it into ‘maybe’ purgatory. Besides, there’s something refreshing about truly bad entries.

See, I am prone to Prufrockian moments of paralyzing self-doubt. I picture our entrants sending their flawed work out, and I have to admire their chutzpah. Are they so new to writing that they are in a world of blissful ignorance where there are no such things as comma splices and faulty parallelism? Or do they think to themselves, This may not be great literature, but what’s the harm in submitting it anyway?

I think most fall into the second category, and those of us who sit on our hands and tell ourselves we should just shut up and stay home because we aren’t good enough should draw inspiration from these brave souls. Like Brian’s grandmother used to tell him, “They can’t knock you down and refuse you too.” Meaning, the worst someone will do is say no, but if you don’t put yourself out there and ask, you’ll definitely never get a yes.

So I say bring on the slush. You just might be in for a surprise—you might think it’s slush, and we might see a winner.

Moonlit booty

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 40


It's semiannual prize distribution day around here. I went to the post office to purchase the money orders and send out this loot earlier today.

Brian wanted to send Rita Hubbard, our third place winner, a copy of Morning Glory's Long Lost Order of Worship since it's his most recent novel, but then we realized we are fresh out of copies. We decided to send her Shadow Clock, and I think she'll get a kick out of it. It's everything you want in a summertime read: heavy on the suspense and mystery with well-placed dashes of humor and a steamy oceanfront setting.

Prizes should find their way to their rightful owners in a few days. Winners, enjoy! Everybody else, submit again.

Submissions for the short-short story contest have slowed down, so I decided to post a tally of submissions received at the start of each blog entry. Right now, you have about a 1 in 13 chance of winning! I know, the September 1 deadline seems ages away, but you know how fast summer goes by. Submit now so you don't have to remind yourself about it later.

How low-tech can you go?

Now I'll get back to assuring you that we don’t have any nefarious schemes up our sleeves here.... A lot of people enter the InnermoonLit contests, and yes, we collect their email addresses. But we have never sold nor will we ever sell our mailing list. In fact, we really only compile a mailing list so that we can send out email notifications with the contest results. We don’t bombard our contestants with spam. Need proof? Behold the InnermoonLit mailing list. (Hopefully from this angle, actual addresses are illegible.)




Don’t laugh. I’m sure there’s some way to tell Brian’s computer to automatically compile email addresses off the entry forms, but I don’t know what it is. Heck, I was amazed I was able to figure out how to create a working online form; I felt no need to press my luck and try to get fancy.

I have this fear of losing entrants’ addresses and of them never hearing anything back from us and having them feel like they’d thrown their work into a silent, bottomless abyss. So I use this snazzy book to keep a tally of entries for each contest, then I have an alphabetical list of addresses from all the contests in a Word file that gets copied and pasted into the BCC field at newsletter time.

Rest assured, if you’ve entered one of the InnermoonLit contests or plan to in the future, we will not abuse your address--or do you harm in any other way, for that matter. We are streamlining the newsletter, in fact, so from now on you will just get two brief emails from Brian a year stating that the contest results are available and providing a link to the winners’ page.

We hope you’ll click the link and spend a moment giving mental props to the winning authors (or even checking out their other work if they’re published). But of course that’s optional.

If you happened not to have won and, because of that, your hands are clenched into tight fists of fury and indignation to the point where extension of the index finger into link-clicking position is a physical impossibility, you are free to ignore or delete these biannual messages. Unsubscription is always an option, but that doesn’t involve some automated process the likes of which is used to unsubscribe from the J. Crew mailing list or perhaps the National Well Drillers’ listserv. It just means I’ll look through my big pretty book, draw a line through that addie, and delete it from my Word file. No strings, no catches, no worries.

Results day!

Well, we cut it close, but we got the contest results posted today. Next time, we really should set a self-imposed deadline two weeks prior to the results deadline so the winners don't have to do such a frantic turnaround with their bios and pictures. Many, many thanks to the winners for getting us their information on such short notice.

The funny thing about judging these contests anonymously is that it's like Eliot and Ransom's (and all the rest's) New Criticism put into practice. (C'mon, don't let your eyes glaze over. Literary theory is kinda fun if you give it a chance.) See, those fellas said literature should be evaluated solely based on what's on the page. You should read and analyze a piece of writing without needing to know a thing about the author's biography, the work's historical context, etc. It was a democratizing idea at the time: no longer were those ivory-tower experts' opinions about a piece of writing any more valid than any other readers'.

Whether you agree with this approach or not (and it has fallen out of favor in the last 40 or so years), it's exactly what we do when we read submissions. In fact, it's what all writing contest judges should be doing. Entries come in with no author-identifying information, and we have no idea who wrote them when, where, how, or why. We just go by the words on the page.

So it's always interesting to see who is behind the entries and learn a bit of their stories, as it really does add depth to our appreciation for the writing. This time, all three happen to be female and all relative newcomers to novel writing. Brian and I are thrilled to be able to provide this small bit of validation to these very talented women early on in their writing careers. We hope it helps propel their work, and we are confident that they'll go far.