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!