Tag: The Art of Writing

How Not to Write Dialogue

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I didn’t know this morning whether to write about Ebola, illegal aliens, or the vice president saying China is part of North America. I mean, the whole confounded thing is going belly-up…

Ah, skip it. How about a little coaching for those of you out there who would like to write some fiction, one of these days, and hopefully see it published? I was going to say, “Well, if you want to do that, learn how to write good dialogue.” But in a number of books I’ve had to read lately, good dialogue seemed to be the last thing on the writer’s mind.

A good rule of thumb for creating good dialogue is to avoid anything that sounds like it might have come out of the screenplay for The Poseidon Adventure. It is amazing that Gene Hackman’s acting career survived the lines written for his character to speak.

My own rule is always to try to “hear” my dialogue as if it were lines spoken in a movie. If it sounds right, it’ll read right. But what do I know?

In a series of novels about Merlin published by Zondervan, the author butchers his own work by injecting an endless series of Americanisms into his dialogue. He wants you to imagine you’re in Britain circa 470 A.D.–and then he hits you with lines like this (and I’m not kidding!): “Yeah, that guy sure is a crook. It sure looks like it to me. Ya got a problem with that?”

In a Brother Cadfael knockoff featuring a perky nun in ancient Ireland, circa 500 A.D.–she would be that stock cliche character, The Street-Smart Nun, if they had any streets–we have her beating up (!) the wicked abbot and warning him, “if you ever mess with the sisters of Brigid again, I will come back and finish this.” She also describes her own convent’s evening snack-time as “a great way to unwind.”

This literary crime was perpetrated by Pegusus Books.

Do the editors today think readers are so ignorant, so benighted, so intellectually crushed by text-messaging and video games, that they won’t be able to make any sense of plain English dialogue? Fictional characters living fifteen hundred years ago have to talk like middle school kids today?

Maybe the way to get published, these days, is to write truly horrible dialogue. Maybe that’s what editors are looking for.

So don’t “sound out” your dialogue to make sure it’ll read smoothly. Don’t stick to plain English. Don’t make sure your character’s words clearly convey the information you want the reader to receive.

Instead, make sure your historical novel is jam-packed with contemporary American slang, never write “you” for “ya,” and take pains to see that your cliche characters speak in wall-to-wall cliches. If any originality should creep into your manuscript, get rid of it.

Fantasy Tool Kit (3): Your Fantasy World

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It may take several posts to cover this issue, but that way I can always stop if no one’s reading them.

I wish to make it clear that by “fantasy world,” I don’t mean the divorces from reality and common sense routinely indulged in by our leaders and opinion-shapers, dopes and twaddlers. Nancy Pelosi can gas all she wants about an America where everybody’s on the dole and all sitting around composing symphonies and painting landscapes. This makes clear the distinction between fantasy and B.S.

A fantasy world is a world imagined by the story-teller, in which the story happens. You can also set your fantasies in what your readers would recognize as the real world. But it’s fun to make up a whole new world.

I wonder if you’ve noticed something about “other-world fantasy.” When a hobbit has to have his appendix out, what does he do? Tolkien didn’t say. The Shire, as he imagined and described it, had no hospitals, no dentists, and no taxes. Well, he did say it was fantasy, didn’t he?

These are the kind of details no one ever seems to include in a fantasy world. All right, who wants to read about having a toothache and going to the dentist? One of the reasons we read fantasy is to escape the annoyances and burdens of the real world.

Would it work, do you think, if a fantasy story did include such things?

I doubt it.

The first step in creating an other-world fantasy is to imagine a world, or setting, which you will enjoy writing about and others will enjoy reading about.

But if you’re just going to flap your jaw and not write anything, you might as well teach college.

 

When to Kill Off Your Characters

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We are supposed to grow out of sophomoric thinking. If a story is unintelligible, it’s “deep.” If it’s ugly or miserable or demoralizing, that makes it “realistic.” Goodness, beauty, and holiness are “just sentiment,” and illusions.

We don’t believe such things anymore, do we?

Nevertheless, there is a movement in fantasy–following a trend in all kinds of fiction–to establish one’s work as “serious” by making the reader feel bad. And of course the best way to do this is to impose suffering on the story’s characters, especially the ones the reader most cares about. Oh, we see this all the time! In TV, movies, novels, what-have-you. I mean, it’s so Game of Thrones.

If it makes the reader sad, it must be serious writing.

So… Wow, here’s a character the readers really like! If I kill off this character, the reader will be upset. And everyone will think, “Now that’s a serious writer for you.”

True, over the course of my Bell Mountain series, I have killed off some of my characters. I don’t do it lightly. Those characters were fun to write about. I did it because the story demanded it.

Yesterday my wife warned me, in no uncertain terms, not to knock off a particular villain who has risen to prominence in The Temple (Book 8, still under construction). “You’ll answer to me if you do,” she said darkly.

“I didn’t know you cared,” I answered.

“I am his fan  base,” she explained.

My editor thought I’d killed off Chief Uduqu in The Glass Bridge (Book 7, still needs cover art). “I was set to come up there and scalp you,” she said.

To all and sundry whom it may concern:

Message received!

My Fantasy Tool Kit (3)

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If you’ve populated your fantastic tale with characters that the reader can believe in, and find interesting, and care about, you’ve already won half the battle. But you still have to decide on a setting for your story.

You could, of course, set your fantasy in the real world, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Many writers have done this most effectively. Frank Belknap Long had fairies living in a New York City brownstone. And if you’re thinking of vacationing in H.P. Lovecraft’s picturesque seashore town of Kingsport, Massachusetts, don’t even think about climbing the Rock and trying to peek into the windows of The Strange High House in the Mist; and if you know what’s good for you, steer clear of The Terrible Old Man. These real world settings, in the hands of a skilled writer, help the reader to believe in the fantasy.

Or you could set your tale in the real world of the past, another time, another place. This isn’t done so often, because a historical novel is already a kind of escape for the reader. It’s a kind of time-travel, and fantastic in its own right. Among the few good examples of this that I can think of, L. Sprague DeCamp’s The Dragon at the Ishtar Gate, stands out. If you want to try this technique, good luck.

My own fantasies are of the “imaginary world” variety, for which J.R.R. Tolkien and his tales of Middle-Earth stand tall in a very numerous crowd. Here, you invent a world to house your story.

Another time, I’ll discuss how to go about doing this. It’s complicated. But the reasons for adopting this approach are simple; and the main reason is, it’s fun! Fun for the writer, fun for the reader. Unless you do it very badly: few things are quite as bad as a badly-done imaginary world.

I think the only thing more fun than reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels of John Carter of Mars would be to write them in the first place. If you can study these, and Tolkien’s works, and come to understand how they did it–well, kimosabe, you’re in business. If you can learn from the great fantasy writers, then you’re ready to write fantasy.

My Fantasy Tool Kit (2)

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I read a lot of unpublished fantasy novels. People send them to me, hoping I can help. Most of the time, I can’t.

Believe it or not, most unreadable fantasies are bad because they’re unoriginal. That’s not something any editor can fix, so it’s best not to write an unoriginal novel in the first place.

(Yes, I know there are terrible, unoriginal fantasies that do get published. If you wish to imitate them, be my guest.)

It’s not easy to come up with something new and fresh and different. But you can start by avoiding stuff that’s already been done to death by everybody else–stock characters (like the incredibly clever thief, his brawny barbarian sidekick, and the invincible warrior woman) and stock situations in particular.

In fact, this is very difficult. Almost anything in imaginative fiction has already been imagined, and written about, by someone else.

Which brings us back to characters.

What makes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea a classic and a favorite? The character of Captain Nemo! What makes The Chronicles of Narnia a continual delight? A whole cast of characters who are fun to read about, and so convincingly drawn by C.S Lewis that they can carry the most outlandish story without dropping it.

If your characters are right, the whole story will be right. Usually.

But we’re writing fantasy, and so everything has to be different from the reader’s everyday world. The kind of fantasy I like offers a fun mix of characters–some are like people you already know; some will be beyond your personal experience, like kings or cardinals, but still similar to persons you’ve heard of; and some are just way out there.

That’s what I’ve tried to do in my Bell Mountain books. The protagonists, Jack and Ellayne, are like a lot of kids you used to know. Villains, like Lord Reesh and Merffin Mord, will remind you of individuals you’ve seen in the news or read about in history. And then there are a few–Wytt the Omah, Helki the Rod (truly a wild man), or Ysbott the Snake–who are just plain off the scale.

Why do I do this? Two reasons.

It’s fun to write and fun to read.

Also, the down-to-earth characters anchor the reader in the story and help him to believe, while the weird characters give the story wings.

I could also talk about fantasy settings and other items in my tool kit; but again, it’s only a blog post, not a seminar–and I can always come back to it later, if you’re interested.

My Fantasy Tool Kit (1)

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The hardest thing about writing fantasy is getting the reader to believe in the fantastic things that you’ve made up. The reader wants to believe in something far-out. Otherwise he wouldn’t be reading fantasy.

But still, how do you do it? How do you get someone to feel like he’s really been to Narnia, or heard the Ringwraiths howl as they were hunting him, or ridden with the green Tharks over the dead sea-bottoms of Mars?

It ain’t as easy as it looks.

Not that my work can be compared with any of the above: but according to most of my readers, I have done this successfully.

How?

You could write whole books on this subject, teach whole courses, and this is only a blog post. It’d take a lot of posts to answer the question. So let me just show you one item from my toolbox, which I think is the most important one:

Make your characters real.

If they’re people, even if they’re kings or heroes, make them so the reader can easily imagine interacting with them–and please lay off the stereotypes! Tolkien’s Aragorn, aka “Strider,” is both a hero and a king; but he also displays a full range of emotions like the rest of us. He gets tired, he gets lonely, happy, sad, or angry. Sometimes he makes a wrong decision. He’s everything he ought to be, but doesn’t come off like a plaster saint. As the story goes on, I root for him but sometimes worry about him, too: sometimes I fear he’s not going to make it.

Which is all to say, make your human characters human.

But what about characters who aren’t human? Well, that’s what makes it fantasy.

How do I write Wytt, the fierce little Omah in my Bell Mountain books? Readers tell me they not only believe in him, but love him. How do I do that?

Very carefully!

Wytt works because he conforms to a standard, purely imaginary but a standard nevertheless, of what an Omah is, what he will do or won’t do, how he will think or feel or react differently from any human being. Readers enjoy Wytt because he’s different–not like some of those “elves” or “dwarfs” you meet in a really bad fantasy novel that might as well be greeters at Wal-Mart, because there’s nothing on the inside that really makes them elves or dwarfs.

I know I need to say more on this subject, but I’m running out of space. I’ll come back to it later, if you’re interested.

So How Do Bad Books Get Published?

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Anyone who has struggled and suffered, trying to get published, has lain awake nights banging his forehead against the brick wall of that question: How do bad books wind up getting published?

You can find a number of websites that address this question; but I haven’t found the answers convincing. Here is their argument, in a nutshell.

1. It’s all in the eye of the beholder, so, really, there’s no such thing as a really bad book. There are only books that some readers like and some readers don’t.

2. Editors, agents, and publishers are professionals and they know what they’re doing. After all, they don’t want to publish books that lose money.

3. If a book sells, that means a lot of people thought it was good and therefore it can’t be bad.

And now let’s have some honesty.

1. Of course there are absolutely bad books! And it’s not editors or readers who decide which books are bad. History decides, That’s why we still have Pilgrim’s Progress, but whatever was the equivalent, in those days, of Fifty Shades of Grey, has vanished without a trace. Check out the best-seller list from 100 years ago: you’ll see. It’s cold comfort to the struggling writer that the bad books that offend him will also offend history, and won’t prevail. But I guess it’s better than no comfort at all.

2. I beg to differ! Many agents, editors, and publishers have no taste at all and not the foggiest idea of what they’re doing. There are people who are editors only because they’ll work cheap. I have been told this by agents, editors, and publishers. Bad books are published by incompetent editors and publishers.

3. If mere sales were any criterion of intrinsic worth, then The Kardashians would be great dramatic art and people a thousand years from now will be studying Twilight instead of Shakespeare. You can always sell slop to people who like slop. Given the state of our educational system, what else would you expect?

Bad books are published because a) the people who publish them don’t know any better, b) and the people who buy them don’t know any better. And to b) we must add this:

How many times have you bought a book, fully expecting to enjoy it, only to wind up kicking it across the room and wishing you had your money back? But you’re out of luck, and it still counts as a sale.

Writing a Novel is Like…

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As cover artist Kirk DouPonce and I bat around ideas for cover art for The Glass Bridge (Bell Mountain Series No. 7), flashes of The Temple (No. 8) are coming to me almost too fast to be written down.

I tried to explain it to my editor: “It’s like a model kit. God gives me the pieces, and I have to put them together. With a model battleship you get pieces that are obviously big guns and little guns, and other pieces that are not so obvious. The trick is to put them all together.”

When I was a little boy, you could see a big difference between a model put together by me and one assembled by my father. I followed all the instructions, but my Tyrannosaurus skeleton still wound up looking like something that got all messed up while being teleported to the Enterprise. But by the time I was 15, I could do a model with the best of ’em. All it took was growth–and lots of practice.

So now I have a lot of pieces of a story, but not all of them, and I have to fit them all together just right. Unlike the picture on the box of a Ford Falcon kit, I don’t get to see what the finished product looks like until I have a finished product.

God doesn’t give me the pieces of the story in the order in which it’s to be written and read. He has left me the fun–and it is a very satisfying pastime–of figuring that out by myself. But He does give me each and every necessary piece.

I wonder what it’ll look like when it’s done.

 

How to Ruin a Fantasy

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My favorite scene in Lawrence Sterne’s classic comic novel, Tristram Shandy, occurs in the Shandys’ bedroom on the night Tristram is to be conceived. Mr. Shandy has taken great pains to choose the perfect night; and just as the begetting process is getting under way, Mrs. Shandy suddenly asks, “Have you remembered to wind the clock?” That ruined everything.

There are fantasy writers who do the same thing to their fantasies. I’m reading a book now, set in the 5th century and featuring Merlin and King Arthur, in which some of the dialogue reads like today’s text messages. Arghhh! Nothing quite breaks the spell of the story like having Merlin say something like, “Yeah, that guy sure is a crook.” (No, I’m not exaggerating. I wish I were.)

Why do writers do this? The whole point of a fantasy is to make the reader feel he’s in another place, another world. Why would you suddenly remind him that he’s stuck in this one? Why, after going to all the trouble of setting it up, does the writer shatter his own illusion? It’s like a magician letting you see him put the rabbit in the hat, so when he pulls it out again, there’s no sense of magic: it’s just some dork with a rabbit.

Lapses like this force us to ask, “What was the editor doing?” Editors are supposed to spot such gaffes and edit them out. But I think some of you would be amazed at the ignorance and laziness of certain editors.

Please! If you’re writing about King Arthur, or a non-human being in an imaginary world, do not permit him to call anybody “Dude.”

Just don’t do it. Ever.

P.S.: Happy Birthday, Paul Morphy (b. 1837)–America’s first international cultural celebrity, the greatest chess genius of all time, and my favorite player, whose recorded games continue to delight chess fans everywhere.

How Not to Write

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I was going to review this book; but because I don’t want to hurt the writer’s feelings, I will call it The Incredibly Awesome Adventures of Three Cool Teens, by X.

If only I had had this book while I was teaching Creative Writing at our local adult school! It would have made a perfect textbook for displaying everything a writer could possibly do wrong. If you want to write something worth reading, just avoid doing everything that X does.

1. Don’t use the same few adjectives over and over and over again. For instance, when the word “incredible” is used at least once in every other paragraph, it gets downright annoying. Ditto “magnificent” and “awesome.”

2. Don’t give the reader the same information over and over and over again. You wouldn’t believe how many times X describes his characters’ daily exercise routine, the gargantuan breakfasts they consume, and how lean and powerful and handsome they are. It made me want to see them all get shot.

3. Don’t rely on positively loopy coincidences. For instance, the heroes sneak around until they can overhear the two bad guys talking; and in that conversation, the bad guys–who have already carried out their nefarious scheme–recite to each other every single thing they’ve done and how they did it. Uh, don’t they already know that???

4. Don’t assume the reader is totally devoid of imagination, and burden him with useless information. We don’t need to know a character’s exact height and weight. And please! Don’t describe a character as “lovely,” “genial,” “wise,” etc. Instead, be guided by the arcane and abstruse principle, “What you say and do reveals your personality.” Always presuming the character has a personality.

5. If you have endowed a character with a distinctive little quirk or turn of phrase, don’t repeat it over and over and over again. Like, if a guy has a habit of saying, “Bless my topknot,” don’t allow him to say it every time he speaks. This gets to be infuriating.

6. Don’t set up your heroes to be heroes by pitting them against villains who would be hard put to dress themselves in the morning. Once the reader perceives that your villains are totally incompetent and ineffectual, all suspense evaporates. Where’s the fun in outwitting bad guys who couldn’t beat a six-year-old in a game of tic-tac-toe? Who’s going to worry about the bad guys swearing to murder the good guys, when they couldn’t spray Raid on an ant-hill without getting it in their eyes?

This by no means exhausts the list of literary crimes perpetrated by X. But it has exhausted me.