by Unknown
2. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that good dialogue is necessarily naturalistic. Dialogue grows out of reality, but is shaped—like everything in your book—by art. Characters can be kept distinct and individual while still staying within the range dictated by the style (sleek and cynical for Chandler; modulated, even metrical for Tolkien; lavishly purple for Anne Rice; etc.)
3. And (of course) the opposite of that, don’t forget that these are supposed to be real people even in the most outlandish piece of fiction, so you shouldn’t overstretch your reader’s suspension of disbelief in your characters. Balance is all. This can be tricky in fantasy, particularly in high fantasy where naturalism in speech can be at odds with its surroundings. Try reading it aloud, or even (if you have a thick skin) drafting it like a scene from a play and having some friends or family read it with you. It’s amazing how often what seems acceptable on the page sounds contrived, jarring, or just plain fake to the ear.
4. I read some work by a novice writer recently and was struck by how much the mood shifted in the course of a few lines. In a single page the two characters talking had taken offense at each other, fought, reconciled, lost their tempers again and made up. It was bizarre. But I remembered having a similar problem with my own stuff once and asked the author what his typing speed was like. "Miserable," he said. And there it was. If you write dialogue too slowly, you can lose track of how brief the exchange actually is, so you start overloading it with shifts, forgetting that what took you ten minutes to write will take thirty seconds to read. Idiotic though it may sound, my own dialogue improved exponentially when I became a faster typist, because I was then able to get down on paper what was going through my head in something close to real time. If that doesn’t work for you but you want the dialogue to feel quick and spontaneous, consider dictating the conversation into a recorder then transcribing it. It may come through lighter and more naturally when you aren’t fumbling around on the keyboard while trying to compose.
5. Though people sometimes advise burying exposition in dialogue, be wary of this because it’s often glaringly obvious and takes the conversation into utterly implausible directions. "Remember that time we went fishing, Jimmy?" "Down at the pond by the old barn? I sure do, Bob." "That would be five years ago now, isn’t that right, Jimmy?" "About that, Bob, yes. I’d just bought the shotgun that Old Man Whosit used to kill Mrs. Jenkins in the barn up on Whimpole Street." Please. If you need to tell us something, tell us. Don’t make your characters sound like idiots in the process.
6. Related to that (and point 4), don’t over explain how your character feels in response to every word which is said. Good dialogue should carry the mood and the impression it makes on those involved. Disrupt the conversation with too much reflection on how each bit felt to the protagonist and the whole exchange gets bogged down. Again, a degree of naturalism is usually key: most of us don’t articulate to ourselves how we feel about every beat in a conversation. We might feel things during the exchange, but we are rarely able to process precisely what those feelings are till later (which is why we always think of the perfect come-back ten minutes after a fight).
7. Similarly, good dialogue doesn’t need explanation about delivery, so while you should always be wary of adverbs in general (because they tend to over-explain), banish them entirely from the little tags that show who’s talking. A good writer should never have to write "he said sarcastically." If the sarcasm isn’t evident, there’s a problem with the utterance. If it is evident, your little pointer makes the reader feel condescended to.
There are, of course, more points I could make, but I’ll leave it at that for now. With one final bit of advice. If you suspect your dialogue needs work, force yourself to listen more deliberately to the way people talk, perhaps even transcribing conversations you’ve had from memory as a play, then cutting down to a few pithy exchanges which you might actually use, and—as always—look for good dialogue in novels and study how it works.
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Faith Hunter
Based on a book I am working on now, I’ll add a dialogue problem I see often: not enough stage direction and scene setting for characters. If a conversation is taking place in a car at night, there should be headlights and traffic lights and oncoming cars with bright lights. Not a lot, but enough to remind the reader where they are and that they are going somewhere. If they are in a restaurant, they need to interrupted once by a server, call for more drinks, and when the pithy part of the conversation ends, there needs to be a transition (for time to pass as they finish their meal) before they jump up and leave. (And BTW, I have an editor pal who says, "Find another place to meet for dialogue than in a restaurant or bar. Booooring!")
Oh No, She Didn’t!
Misty Massey
Last weekend I was talking with a good friend about a book we’d both recently finished reading. The writing was brilliant, and the first half of the book had promised glorious results. But somewhere along the way, something went wrong. The main character’s behavior changed, suddenly, and for no discernible reason. Changed so much that I didn’t like her any longer, and didn’t want to waste any more time reading about her. The character no longer felt real to me, as if the author forced the character to do the things that were not in her nature, but just to drive the story in a certain direction. At that point, it didn’t matter what nifty surprise the next chapter might have held. I had stopped believing.
While working on Kestrel’s Dance (the sequel to Mad Kestrel), I discovered I’d gone three full chapters with nothing happening except talk. Different characters talking to each other, and tons of internal monologues, but no action. Don’t misunderstand—dialogue is vital. No one wants to read a story in which characters don’t talk to each other. But when you realize your characters have done nothing but yack at each other for the last three chapters, something’s wrong. Time for a little action to ramp things up, make those pages turn.
It’s not just a question of throwing something into the mix, though. The action you choose has to be reasonable to what’s happened thus far in your story. It has to make sense. If your character has spent fifteen chapters being afraid of water, she won’t suddenly decide in chapter 16 to go whitewater rafting. How many times have you watched a scary movie and wondered why on earth the victims, who are standing on the main floor of a home, run upstairs to escape the villain? Whatever you choose to do to your characters needs to have a logical progression, a flow from prior events so that readers aren’t bounced out of the story and back into the real world.
Now’s the point where new writers will shake their heads at me and say, "But people are unreasonable! They do crazy-stupid things every day, for no reason at all. Doesn’t it make sense that people don’t make sense?" Sure it does. People are nuts. But stop right there for just a second . . . when people do foolish things with clearly no forethought, think how frustrating it is. It’s confusing and a little frightening, and we don’t particularly like it. As parents, the first thing we ask a misbehaving child is "Why did you do that?" Shucks, we stand around the water cooler at work asking the same thing about stories we saw on the news the night before.
We like to understand what drives people to do what they do. We can’t control that in real life, but in fiction, we can. As writers, we must. Just because we need excitement in chapter 12 doesn’t mean it should be random and pointless.
David had an excellent suggestion—"Gee, character X is trying to do this right now; what would be the worst thing from her perspective that could happen at this very moment?" If that doesn’t work for you, or you just can’t think of what that horrible thing might be, reach out to the world around your character. What could upset the balance enough to affect the character and change things? If you’re still stuck, find a beta reader or a trusted friend, ask him to read your pages and tell you what happens next. My husband loves when I come strolling into his computer room with that look on my face. I don’t always use what he suggests, but sometimes an op
inion from outside of my own head is all I need to knock the ideas loose.
Luckily for my problem with the endless-dialogue, I had some action-events I’d held in reserve, things that would fit appropriately into an ocean-going adventure, so the change wasn’t all that complicated. And I hope that when readers get to that point, none of them will stop reading, furrow their brows, and say out loud, "What the hell?" Because the only thing I like more than people buying my book is for people to read all the way through to the end.
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David B. Coe
". . . when people do foolish things with clearly no forethought, think how frustrating it is."
Spot on, Misty.
Tom Clancy (of Hunt For Red October and Patriot Games fame) once said that the biggest difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. Think of it this way: I have lots of friends who are also named David. A couple who Nancy and I are in-credibly close with have a daughter the same age as my older daughter, and they named their girl the same thing we named ours. My brother and my best friend from college married women with the same first names and then named their first-born sons the same thing.
Stuff like that happens all the time. But not in books. You simply can’t have people with the same name in a book (unless it is a specific plot point) because of how confusing it would be. As writers we sometimes have to sacrifice on the "realistic" side in order to make the story work. Same thing with irrationality. Yes, people do strange inexplicable things every day, but our narratives have to follow a logical path in order to be readable. We’re not writing reality; we’re writing fiction, which is an artistic and imperfect mirror of reality.
Beatriz
As a reader, I find it distracting when a character suddenly does some-thing not in keeping with the character. It will yank me out of the story PDQ. Sometimes I’m left with the feeling that I’m a dummy, that I missed the foreshadowing that allowed Character X to do Y. After all, the author is All Knowing, isn’t (s)he?
I don’t enjoy feeling like a dummy. Odds are, I won’t buy an-other one of the author’s books if that’s how I feel.
Binding Character and Narrative: Point of View
David B. Coe
Let me begin by saying that I have a pet peeve when it comes to reading fiction. I find it very distracting when a story is being told from one character’s viewpoint and then suddenly shifts—without some kind of visual clue to the reader—either to another character’s POV or to omniscient voice. There are things about the Harry Potter books that I don’t like, places where I feel that J. K. Rowling has not done a great job. But one thing she does superbly is maintain a consistent voice for her books. We are almost always in Harry’s point of view, and when we’re not, she makes it absolutely clear where we are. Her POV never wanders in the middle of a chapter; she never tells her reader something that Harry can’t know. Rather, she allows us to figure things out right along with him, and that’s what makes the books work so well.
That’s how point of view should work. We should see the story through the eyes of a character and know only as much as he or she can know at any particular time. If you want to use multiple POVs—if you want to tell the story from the perspective of several characters in order to weave together plot lines—great. But make certain that your reader knows exactly when you are shifting from one character to the other.
Why? Because point of view at its best should be the nexus of character and narrative. Point of view is more than a way to tell a story. It is how we imbue our storytelling with emotion. Harry Potter’s voice works because he’s not just telling us the story; he’s sharing his fears, his desires, his teen angst, his loneliness. His voice gives the story its dramatic impact. That’s what point of view is about.
Maintaining a consistent point of view is not just a matter of keeping your storytelling clear (though that is important); constantly shifting POV without warning can confuse and frustrate readers. Good use of POV is about remem-bering whose story you’re telling. Sure, Rowling could have shifted from Harry’s POV to Voldemort’s during one of their confrontations in order to tell us what Voldemort was thinking at that moment, or what he knew about what was going to happen. But we weren’t reading Tom Riddle’s story. We were reading Harry’s. The meat of the story is in Harry’s head and heart. That’s where the focus needed to be, and that’s exactly where Rowling left it.
Point of view is what binds character development to plot development; it’s what allows a story and its main character to grow and change and resolve together. When that bond is broken, even briefly, character and narrative both suffer. The storytelling becomes confused; the reader’s identification with your lead character is compromised.
I don’t mean this to sound quite so dogmatic—I know that the Magical Words mantra is "There’s no single right way to do any of this." But I would suggest that you think about point of view not as a rule, but rather as a tool. Used consistently and carefully, it can make storytelling easier, more effective. Used haphazardly and it can undermine much of the good work you’ve done in other aspects of your writing.
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L. Jagi Lamplighter
Interesting that you posted this just the day after I saw an editor on another website list "head hopping" as first among the reasons why he rejects manuscripts.
Do you think it is more common to make mistakes in this area than it used to be? I don’t remember ever having a problem with this as a child, but nowadays, I read books where it shifts point of view without a line of white space, and I can’t figure out who is who.
David B. Coe
That is interesting, Jagi. I hadn’t seen the article, but it doesn’t surprise me that an editor would find this annoying. To answer your question, I think it’s not that the mistake has become more common, but rather that omniscient voice has become less accepted. It’s a trend, like the falling out of favor of said-bookisms, which were much more accepted three or four decades ago. One of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors is filled with instances of head-hopping (love that term, by the way), but the book was written twenty years ago, and it probably didn’t raise any eyebrows at the time. I think it would today.
Point of View: Single vs. Multiple
David B. Coe
Those of you who have read any of my books know that I like to tell a story from the perspective of several different point of view characters. A point of view—POV—character is simply the character whose head we’re inside as we write or read a book. For the Harry Potter books the POV character is always Harry. For a book like Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay, or with my Winds of the Forelands books, the POV shifts from character to character, with each new chapter or chapter section. The alternative to writing with POV characters is writing with an omniscient narrative voice, which I just hate. Why? Because I find, as a reader, that it distances me from the characters, and it’s just not as interesting. I read—and write—because I like to get inside people’s minds, to see what makes them tick. An omniscient voice doesn’t really allow that.
Writing in multiple points of view has many advantages. It allows an author to piece together a complex story without requiring a single character to know and see everything. It makes it possible to give more information to your reader than you’ve given to your main character, which in turn makes it possible to ratchet up the tension and the sense that your beloved protagonist is in danger. And finally, as my comments about omniscient voice imply, it helps with character development, by putting your reader inside the thoughts and emotions of several characters.
And yet, with my new project I’ve chosen to limit myself to a single POV, and I’m finding it challenging. Why would I do this? After all the things I just said about how much I like writing in multiple POV, why would I choose to write from the viewpoint of a single character? Well, because this has certain advantages, too. With a single POV character, readers tend to grow quite attached to that character, and since this new proj
ect revolves around this one character, this is a good thing. Also, this new series has a strong mystery component, and by writing from a single POV, and keeping that character in the dark about certain things, I heighten the sense of mystery and perhaps make the implied but unseen threats faced by my character seem that much more frightening. So again, my POV choice is designed to increase the narrative tension.
The challenges I’m encountering relate back to the benefits of multiple POV. From the standpoint of narrative, giving my readers necessary information is complicated by the fact that I’m writing from the viewpoint of only the one character. I don’t want him to know too much, because I need to preserve certain aspects of the mystery. And logistically I simply can’t have him everywhere my readers might need him to be. So I have to keep my readers in the dark about certain things. I have to balance the need to maintain the sense of mystery with my desire not to tick readers off by telling them too little.