Sorry to be away so long. Been a weird couple of weeks getting Spawn ready for the BIG K—Kindergarten. Uniforms and doctors and immunizations and vision/hearing tests (and yes, apparently he CAN hear, he is just ignoring us). I am still unaccustomed to so much quiet. For those who are curious, YES I was going to homeschool, but we found a super cool private school where he is in a class of TEN and he loves it. He was getting lonely and kept asking to go to school so he could be with other kids, so I figured we’d give it a shot. So far so good.

He is now Spawn, The Most Interesting Kid in the World….

Back to writing…

Today we are going to talk about a subject that I don’t think I have ever blogged about. Dialogue. Great dialogue is one of the most vital components of fiction. Dialogue is responsible for not only conveying the plot, but it also helps us understand the characters and get to know them, love them, hate them, whatever.

Dialogue is powerful for revealing character. This is as true in life as it is on the page. If people didn’t judge us based on how we speak, then business professionals would bother with Toastmasters, speaking coaches or vocabulary builders. I’d imagine few people who’d hire a brain surgeon who spoke like a rap musician and conversely, it would be tough to enjoy rap music made by an artist who spoke like the curator of an art museum.

Our word choices are reflective of WHO we are. Dialogue can not only show age and gender. It can elucidate level of education, profession, personality, ego, wounds, insecurity, and on and on and on.

In fact dialogue is so powerful that one way we know we have done our job as a writer is when we can remove all dialogue tags and the reader still knows which character is talking. This said, there are a LOT of newbie errors I see when it comes to writing dialogue and that’s what we are going to talk about today.

#1 Punctuate Properly

When it comes to dialogue, we need to make sure we are punctuating properly. This might seem like a picky matter, but improper dialogue punctuation is a quick way to end up in a slush pile. If a writer doesn’t yet know how to punctuate dialogue correctly, then most agents (or even readers) simply aren’t going to commit any more time. Also, if you are paying good money for an editor, they have a hard time getting to the MEAT of your story if they are spending all their time fixing disastrous punctuation.

When I get samples from new writers, I see a lot of this:

“Have a nice day” she closed the door and that was when Kristen had to spend the next few hours repairing punctuation.

“Have a nice day.” She closed the door blah blah blah….

OR

“Have a nice day,” she said. She closed the door blah blah blah…

The comma goes INSIDE the end quote mark and then we add a tag. If there is NO tag word (said, asked) then we insert a PERIOD.

DO NOT use actions as tags. Why? Because actions are actions…not tags.

“Have a nice day,” she closed the door said.

For all the neat ways dialogue is punctuated, refer to a handy dandy Strunk & White ,

#2 No Weird Dialogue Tags

This goes with the “no action tags” idea.

“I have no idea what you mean,” Kinsey snarled.

“You know exactly what I mean,” Jake laughed.

NO.

Characters can say things or ask things but they can’t smirk, snarl or laugh things. Again, when agents, editors, or even savvy readers see these strange tags, it is a red flag the author is green.

#3 Stick to Unassuming Tags

When using tags, keep it simple— said, asked, replied (maybe). Why? Well, I hate proffering rules without explanation so here goes.

Simply? When we add those creative tags on the end, we are coaching the reader. Our dialogue should be strong enough alone to convey the tone we want. When we coach the reader, we are being redundant and more than a tad insulting to the reader.

“You have some nerve showing your face,” she spat.

See what I mean? By adding the “she spat” I am essentially telling you that I worry you aren’t sharp enough to know this character is upset.

But, I am betting the dialogue alone—“You have some nerve showing your face”—was plenty for you guys to give the appropriate tone of voice in your head. I really didn’t need to add the “she spat.”

I know that keeping to simple tags seems harsh, but if we have done our job writing dialogue, the tags will disappear in the reader’s mind. The dialogue will simply flow.

Additionally, if we write using Deep POV, we don’t even need/use tags.

“I have no idea what you mean.” Kinsey refused to look at him and polished the wine glass so hard she wondered if she’d bore a hole clean through.

See how the character is DOING something that tells us the tone of the dialogue. Remember that communication is about 90% is nonverbal. Body language is a big deal.

Notice we are showing and not telling. Instead of spelling out that Kinsey is irritated, we have her DOING something that shows us she is ticked and trust the reader to fill in the blanks.

#4 Do NOT Phonetically Spell Out Accents

Yes, when we dust of old volumes of literature we see that the writers (I.e. Twain) wrote out dialogue phonetically to show the accent of the character speaking.

BUT…Herman Melville also spent over a hundred pages talking about whales for the same reasons. Most people lived and died in isolation. Travel was reserved for the very rich. Photographs and paintings were rare. There was no television, radio or Internet.

Just like Melville’s readers could live an entire lifetime without seeing the ocean (let alone a whale), Twain’s audience in Europe likely would never travel to the rural American South. Thus, they would have no concept of what a Southern accent “sounded” like. Therefore, in fiction, it was perfectly acceptable to phonetically write out how someone would have talked.

These days, if we are writing a character who has an Irish brogue or a Southern drawl or a Cockney accent, we no longer need to spell it out phonetically. The reason is that there has been so much entertainment (movies, etc.) that we know what an Irish brogue should sound like and when we “spell it out” for the reader, it makes the dialogue cumbersome.

#5 DO Feel Free to Use Unique Words, Expressions or Idioms

I write a lot of characters who are Texans. It’s true I don’t need to write out the Texas accent phonetically, but I can add in some terms and expressions to keep the reader “hearing” a Texan in her head without making my dialogue weird.

“Y’all won’t believe this. Delroy got a job. A J-O-B.”

“Who’d hire him? He’s useless as ice trays in hell. ”

Feel free to use a couple of words that convey an accent—ain’t, gonna, bloody—just avoid spelling it out in entirety or risk frustrating readers.

#6 DO NOT Have Characters Constantly Calling Each Other By NAME

I see this one a lot and it is seriously weird.

“Biff, what are you doing?” Blane asked.

“Why Blane, I am making a present for Buffy. You know how Buffy is about her birthday. What are you doing Blane? Are you having lunch with Beverly?”

Okay, so I am being a bit silly here to make a point, but how often do you call the other person by name when talking? Who does this? Worse still, who does this over and over and over, especially when there is only one other person in the room? Try this in real life.

Me: Shawn, why are you home so early? I thought you’d be at work.

Hubby: I had to run an errand, Kristen.

Me: Well, Shawn I have to run to the grocery store.

Hubby: Kristen, that is…

Okay, I am giggling too much. Y’all get the gist.

#7 Do NOT Write Dialogue in Complete Sentences

My above examples are kind of a twofer. Not only is the dialogue seriously strange with everyone using a proper name, but notice all the dialogue is in complete sentences. Most people don’t talk that way. If we do, we sound like a robot or a foreigner with a rudimentary grasp of the language.

Is it wrong to have dialogue in complete sentences? No. But usually it is ONE character who talks that way and it is an idiosyncratic trait particular to THAT character. Ie. Data from Star Trek or Sheldon from Big Bang Theory.

#8 Avoid Punctuation Props

Avoid overusing exclamation points and ellipses. Again, if our dialogue is strong enough, readers will “get” when a character is yelling or pausing. Especially avoid being redundant with the punctuation and the tags.

“Get out of my house!” she yelled.

Really? No kidding.

And remember…that…when we use…a lot….of ellipses…we are being annoying….not…….dramatic.

(And ellipses are only THREE dots and in some cases four  . Refer to Strunk & White or here is a lovely article from Grammar Girl.)

#9 NO “As You Know” Syndrome

I love David Mamet and I really love his Letter to the Writers of The Unit where he tears the writing team a new one. I love forwarding on his advice, because no one says it better and this is just as true for novels as it is for screenplays. I’ve included the best lines about dialogue:

Look at your log-lines. Any log line reading, “BOB AND SUE DISCUSS…” is NOT describing a dramatic scene.

Here are the danger signals. Anytime two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s&%$. Any time any character is saying to another “AS YOU KNOW” that is, telling another character what you—the writer—need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of s&%$*. ~David Mamet

No brain-holding. We are in the drama business, not the information business.

Later we will talk about ways that we can use dialogue to convey character. What are your thoughts? Questions? Who are your favorite authors regarding dialogue? I adore Sue Grafton. Every one of her characters just leaps off the page. I love great dialogue and have been known to highlight it just to keep it. What about you? Or am I the only dialogue geek?

I LOVE hearing from you!

To prove it and show my love, for the month of SEPTEMBER, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel.

Will announce August’s winner next time because I am still playing catch up.

For those who need help building a platform and keeping it SIMPLE, pick up a copy of my latest social media/branding book Rise of the Machines—Human Authors in a Digital World on AMAZON, iBooks, or Nook. 

The post 9 Ways to Improve Your Dialogue appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Original image via Flikr Creative Commons, courtesy of Peter Dutton

Kristen here, and we’ll continue our acrostic for VICTORY next post. I’m interrupting for a Writer Public Service Announcement. Great dialogue is paramount. Readers can overlook a lot of things if we have fabulous dialogue.

Dialogue can make or break a book. We can have the most brilliant story ever imagined in human history, but if the dialogue is weird, stilted, or redundant, that’s a good place for a bookmark.

As an editor, I can attest that this is one of the BIGGEST problem areas for the new writer. Dialogue can often sound stiff, like two kids playing with Barbies or fighting with action figures. Or, characters can become “talking heads” who all sound the same.

Great dialogue should give us a peek into the psyche of the character. We know we’ve done it properly when readers really don’t need tags (though use them where appropriate anyway for safe measure). When we nail dialogue, our characters can become so rich and vibrant the reader knows who’s speaking simply by the way they speak, what they say or even don’t say.

A fantastic example of this is J.E. Fishman’s latest book, “A Danger to Himself and Others.” Fishman did an astonishing job of characterization through superb dialogue. When I read this book, I always knew who was talking. This helped create characters so real and a world so rich, it drew me in and didn’t let go.

***I believe the Kindle version is free right now, so I recommend this book for a study in this area.

So, today to give you guys some quick tips on FAB dialogue, I have our WANA International instructor, Marcy Kennedy to guide you.

Take it away, Marcy!

****

In my years as a freelance editor, I’ve worked with clients all the way along the writing path—from newbies who are just starting their first book to seasoned veterans with multiple books on the market. I can now guess with a high level of accuracy where a writer is along the path based on the types of dialogue mistakes they’re making.

Newer writers tend to use creative dialogue tags or allow their characters to speak for paragraphs (or pages!) at a time without interruption. I once edited a novel where a character spoke for 63 pages solid. No joke.

But new level, new writing devil.

As writers gain experience in the craft and stop making the newbie mistakes, they run into a new dilemma. They’re told their writing still isn’t ready.

And one of these dialogue death sentences is probably playing a role in killing their chances at publication success.

Image vis Flickr Creative Commons, courtesy of Yuya Sekiguchi.

Death Sentence #1 – Redundant Dialogue

Redundancy happens when we repeat something in our dialogue that we’ve already written in either narrative or action.

He shook his head. “No.”

Unless our character needs to add extra emphasis to their denial, the action or the dialogue alone is usually enough.

Let’s look at a sneakier example of redundancy.

Rob glanced at the clock on the wall. Three at last. Time for him to go. He popped his head into Joan’s office. “It’s three. I’m heading out. Want me to lock up?”

The redundancy here isn’t as exact as in the previous example, but it still makes for boring, flabby writing. We could tighten it to read…

Rob glanced at the clock on the wall. Three at last. He popped his head into Joan’s office. “I’m heading out. Want me to lock up?”

Redundancy can also happen big-picture. If, for example, we’re going to have a character cracking a safe, we don’t need to have them explain the whole process to another character before it happens. That makes it boring for the reader to then have to sit through the description of our character actually cracking the safe (even if something goes wrong).

We shouldn’t bore our readers to death by redundant dialogue.

Death Sentence #2 – Orphaned Dialogue

Any time we confuse the reader, it’s a bad thing because we destroy their immersion in the story. If we confuse them enough times, our book goes in the donate pile or gets deleted from their e-reader and they move on to someone else.

When it comes to writing dialogue, one of the most common crimes is to leave our dialogue orphaned, with no one to claim it.

This abandonment comes in two types.

(A)  Dialogue where we’re not sure who’s speaking.

I suspect this usually happens because, as writers, we know exactly who’s speaking. We forget the reader can read only our words, not our minds.

If we have more than three lines of unattributed dialogue in a row (dialogue without a tag like said or an action beat), we can risk the reader losing track of who’s speaking.

If we have a scene with multiple speakers, we need to be certain it’s clear who each line of dialogue belongs to. An unattributed line of dialogue could belong to anyone present.

But the sneakiest of all is when we write about two characters in the same paragraph and then tack on a line of dialogue at the end.

Ellen waved her arm above her head, and Frank sprinted towards her. “I’ve missed you.”

Who said “I’ve missed you”? It could be Frank or it could be Ellen, and the reader has no way to tell which one it really is.

(B)  Dialogue where we don’t find out until then end who’s speaking…and we probably guessed wrong about the speaker’s identity.

AVOID dialogue like this…

“We have come to witness our finest warriors compete. Scythia offers their best to us, so we offer them no less,” the queen said.

By the time the reader reaches the tag at the end, they’ll have consciously or subconsciously made an assumption about who’s speaking. If they guessed wrong, it throws them off balance.

When we have long passages of dialogue, it’s usually best to either begin with a beat, so readers know who’s talking before they start, or to place a beat or tag at the first natural pause.

“We have come to witness our finest warriors compete,” the queen said. “Scythia offers their best to us, so we offer them no less.”

Don’t leave dialogue abandoned on the side of the road. It’s just cruel.

Need More Help With Dialogue?

Check out my book How to Write Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide. In it you’ll learn how to format your dialogue, how to add variety to your dialogue so it’s not always “on the nose,” when you should use dialogue and when you shouldn’t, how to convey information through dialogue without falling prey to As-You-Know-Bob Syndrome, how to write dialogue unique to each of your characters, how to add tension to your dialogue, whether it’s ever okay to start a chapter with dialogue, ways to handle contractions (or the lack thereof) in science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction, and much more!

If you prefer live teaching, I’m running a webinar called Say What? Techniques for Making Your Dialogue Shine this Saturday, May 17th.

This 1.5 hour live webinar will…

* cover the seven most common mistakes when it comes to dialogue and how to fix them,
* explain how to ensure your dialogue makes your story stronger,
* show you how to create dialogue unique to your characters, and
* answer some of the most frustrating questions about dialogue such as how to handle dialect, should we use contractions in historical novels, science fiction, and fantasy, and is it okay to begin a book with dialogue.

As a bonus, all registrants receive an ebook copy of my book How to Write Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide.

The webinar will be recorded and made available to registrants, so even if you can’t make it at the scheduled time, you can sign up and listen later at your convenience.

Click here to sign up for Say What? Techniques for Making Your Dialogue Shine.

The post Two Dialogue Death Sentences & How to Get a Stay-of-Execution appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Image via Flikr Creative Commons, courtesy of Ben Swing.

We often hear the saying, “Write what you know,” and that advice can be seriously confusing. Since I’m assuming most of us have never been abducted by aliens, lived on other planets or turned into vampires, the story world would be a very boring place if we followed this advice literally.

Plot and world-building are merely delivery systems for conflict and character—real “human” emotions and experiences. If we write something that’s all car chases, vampire bites and geeky technology we’ve invented, the story will be uninteresting and superficial. I see this in a lot of submissions I review. A writer gets so fascinated with dragons or terrorists or aliens that the body of the work lacks a beating human heart.

Any good story should be able to change locations or points in history and still make sense. A Thousand Acres is King Lear on an Iowa farm. Fiction probes the deep and tender places, exposes our human failures and shows us how we can rise above them. If your story is set on the planet Zoltron, we should be able to take the premise and slap it in Sanger, Texas and it still work.

Thus, when we hear “Write what you know” this alludes to, “What do we know about ourselves? What do we know about others? What do we know about society? What do we know about emotions?”

A Personal Story

Some of you might have heard me talk about this, but it bears repeating. In 1999 I planned a surprise birthday for my father. He’d always longed to become a writer, but he since he worked for minimum wage repairing bicycles, he was relegated to scribbling poems and stories in stacks of little notebooks.

I was so excited because my fiancé had purchased my dad a “top of the line” computer with a Pentium processor (supposedly several thousand dollars, which he reminded me of repeatedly). It took EVERYTHING not to give Dad his gift early (I’m notorious for that) and to keep this gift a secret.

Finally, my father would have the tool to become a novelist.

My best friend and I had ordered Dad this silly A Bug’s Life cake because, like me, my father was a perpetual kid with a great sense of humor. He laughed all the time and was like hanging out with a standup comedian. She was busy decorating her home with A Bug’s Life plates and streamers as if the party were for a six-year-old (instead of someone turning 50). It was going to be SO MUCH FUN.

Image via Flikr Creative Commons, courtesy of Will Clayton

Yeah.

So I’d arranged to take him out to dinner as a ruse to spring this party on him. All day, I’d tried to reach him and no answer. I really became worried when I called his work and they told me he’d called in sick. All my life, my father NEVER called in sick. Finally, after calling and paging him a zillion times, I got a call.

He sounded terrible and his voice was strange—high and thin. Of course, he was still joking as I was playing remote-triage-nurse concerned that maybe his flu might be meningitis. As I am asking him symptoms, I’m panicking because this birthday party is waiting to go and it’s looking more and more like I need to get him to an ER instead.

As he spoke his last words to me, the phone dropped to the floor.

Nothing.

In my head, I thought He’s dead, which was weird because my father rode a bike to work. He rollerbladed, mountain-biked, hiked and was more physically fit that someone half his age.

I kept trying to call back and nothing. My then-fiance came in the door and, stunned, I said, “I was just on the phone with Dad…and I think he died.”

Of course, Evil-Ex just proceeded to call me an idiot and a lot of other choice names. Thus, instead of calling an ambulance, I gave in that I was an overreacting dolt and called my grandparents who lived nearby (I was 40 miles away and they were 3 miles away). I begged them to go check on him and drag him to an ER and I’d take care of the bill.

I sent my grandparents to discover their son on the floor deceased. To this day, I’ve never gotten over the guilt. The last phone call haunts me.

Numb, we went to my grandparents’ home to console them and make funeral preparations. All I wanted was my mom, whom I hadn’t seen in years because she lived in Florida. Evil-Ex “benevolently” made plane reservations for her to come to Texas and, when we returned home, he asked where the flight number was. I told him I thought it was in the car.

He spent the next hour yelling at me for being an idiot (and the flight number turned out to be in the car, just where I said it was.)

At my father’s funeral, I chose to sit next to my grandmother who was falling apart, and of course she was. She was the one who’d found my dad’s corpse (apparently there wasn’t a single part of his body that didn’t have cancer). Evil-Ex screamed at me the entire way home because I didn’t sit next to him instead.

Every time I would start to cry, he’d yell at me for being weak. Then, in the weeks that passed, when we’d be in the car, he’d deliberately play the songs played at my father’s funeral, and, if I started to tear up, he’d fly off the handle and berate me for being idiotic.

I stopped crying.

In fact, I never cried and now, fourteen years later, I still haven’t (his birth-death-day is tomorrow). I suppose this is why the only dreams I have of my father are ones where we find out he really is still alive, and then, when I “find” him, he’s dying all over again.

Before my father passed, I knew I’d inadvertently agreed to marry a sadist, and I’d already planned to leave him. This is why I am very compassionate to those who end up in abusive relationships. Evil people rarely show true colors until their victim is trapped (and evil people do a lot of things to ensnare their victims—finances, alienation from family and friends, emotional abuse, gas-lighting, etc.).

Anyway, not long after Dad died, I tried to use this top-of-the-line computer, only to find out it was a bargain-basement piece of junk that didn’t even work. All I could think was, What kind of person DOES that? Who gifts something they KNOW won’t work?

It took another year of planning and plotting to break free, but I did and never looked back.

Yes, my father died, but my uncle who lived in Colorado with his family returned to Texas. My little brother and his new wife and baby moved here from Florida and so did my mom. We are now a united and very close family.

Though my father’s death, I found the courage to leave Evil-Ex and then become a writer no matter the sacrifice. I also NEVER allowed anyone to treat me the way Evil-Ex did. I learned the early warning signs and ran from anyone who exhibited the traits I’d so foolishly ignored in my youth. And now I have the world’s best husband :D.

This story isn’t to depress you, though I probably have. Sorry.

It’s to show you that we can look on these tragedies and harvest them for story. I KNOW pain. I KNOW suffering. I KNOW evil. I understand the changes in character that must occur to break free, because I LIVED IT.

I believe one of the reasons I write military and law enforcement characters well, is I understand emotional compartmentalization; tucking away the pain to keep pressing on living. I know the long-term effects of failing to grieve, how hard that can be when you’ve tamped down an emotion so long you’ve forgotten where you put it, yet it gnaws at you from some unseen place.

Been here. Sigh. (Image via the movie “28 Days”)

Likely, so do a lot of you. Use it.

Great antagonists—villains especially—don’t wear black hats and twirl mustaches. They can resemble people who claim they love us. They’re often very ordinary and that’s what makes them terrifying. Serial killers don’t wear signs and foam at the mouth. They look like the polite neighbor (Dahmer) or the elder at church (BTK).

We can all look back to events in our lives—the triumphs and the tragedies—and tap into those feelings and emotions and THAT is what is meant by “Write what you know.” When did you experience great loss, injustice, abuse, evil, helplessness, heartbreak, or illness? When did you experience freedom, joy, love, passion or elation? What did the journey in between feel like?

I like to say that all gold is guarded by dragons. Often fiction falls flat because we’re afraid to battle the dragons to reach the good stuff, but fearful writing is flat writing.

These primal experiences/emotions are the gold, the beating heart of our story that transforms combinations of 26 letter on a page into something REAL, that transfigures them into stories that move people, changes them and makes our work unforgettable.

It’s hard, but nothing worth doing is easy ;).

And, for the record, I’ve given Spawn a love for Star Wars, Star Trek, I, Robot and zombies, and last week taught him to say, “This is my BOOM STICK!” Dad would be proud :D.

Taking after Grandaddy Lamb?

What are your thoughts? Have you ever tapped into a personal tragedy to give depth to story? Or, do you find yourself holding back? Afraid to dive into the abyss?

I LOVE hearing from you!

To prove it and show my love, for the month of October, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

Announcements: There are a handful of people waiting on their 5-Page revisions. My goal is to have those finished today. Between a stomach flu and WANACon, I am running behind and I didn’t have enough brain power to do your pages justice. I’d rather be a little late than return junk. I want to give your work 1000%. I am also FRIED from working all weekend, so I will announce September’s contest winner TOMORROW. Yes, Kristen IS human.

The post "Write What You Know" and What That Means appeared first on Kristen Lamb.