Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises for Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story.

by Harper, Steven

  OTHERWORLDLY AND INHUMAN DIALOGUE

  Readers are willing to accept that characters who aren't human, or who didn't grow up speaking human languages, won't speak the way the humans do. (This is why Hogsqueal's speech patterns are funny — they're the opposite of what readers expect.) Dobby the house elf's speech patterns are outlandish and don't really pass the read-aloud test, but Rowling pulls it off because Dobby isn't human. The same goes for Thimbletack's rhyming couplets. These characters, however, can't occupy center stage for long because their strange dialogue tends to overwhelm everything else that's happening in the scene. There are ways to show odd dialogue without overwhelming the character.

  One convention to show otherworldliness is simply to avoid contractions and add a touch of formality to the dialogue. This makes it sound like the speaker's first language is something other than English and the speaker is therefore speaking carefully. Look at the difference between these two sets of dialogue:

  Dennis stared up at the centaur in awe. “But how did you get into a public park?”

  “I'm not certain,” the centaur replied. “One moment I'm grazing, the next I'm here. Didn't you see anything?”

  “Er, no.” Dennis glanced around uneasily. “Look, I'm supposed to meet my girlfriend in five minutes. Is there someone I should call? I have my cell.”

  The centaur stamped a hoof. “What's a cell? You're trying to capture me? But I've done nothing to you!”

  Here, the otherworldly centaur speaks like a modern American, despite his professed ignorance of American culture. But we can shift it a bit:

  Dennis stared up at the centaur in awe. “But how did you get into a public park?”

  “I am not certain,” the centaur replied. “One moment I was grazing, the next I was here. Did you not see anything?”

  “Er, no.” Dennis glanced around uneasily. “Look, I'm supposed to meet my girlfriend in five minutes. Is there someone I should call? I have my cell.”

  The centaur stamped a hoof. “What is a cell? You are trying to capture me? But I have done nothing to you!”

  This is serviceable enough — the lack of contractions makes his dialogue sound more formal, more careful, as if English weren't his first language. However, it still comes across as a bit stilted, so we can modify the centaur's dialogue a bit more:

  Dennis stared up at the centaur in awe. “But how did you get into a public park?”

  “I am uncertain,” the centaur replied. “One moment I was grazing, the next I was here. You saw nothing?”

  “Er, no.” Dennis glanced around uneasily. “Look, I'm supposed to meet my girlfriend in five minutes. Is there someone I should call? I have my cell.”

  The centaur stamped a hoof. “A cell? You wish to capture me?

  But I have done nothing to you!”

  The touch of formality in the third version adds yet more otherworldliness to the centaur's speech patterns. All we need is a touch, though. We don't want to go too far:

  Dennis stared up at the centaur in awe. “But how did you get into a public park?”

  “I am in doubt,” the centaur replied. “At one moment I was grazing the tender shoots, the next I stood here on this fair plain. Did you not see the event?”

  “Er, no.” Dennis glanced around uneasily. “Look, I'm supposed to meet my girlfriend in five minutes. Is there someone I should call? I have my cell.”

  The centaur stamped a hoof. “A cell? You are attempting to seize my person? And yet I have done nothing to you!”

  Too far. The near-Shakespearean language overwhelms the dialogue like too much garlic in a soup. A taste is plenty.

  Naomi Novik uses this technique with her dragons. Most of her dragons speak with a formal lilt, but Temeraire, a Chinese dragon, speaks even more formally, which accents the fact that he's an alien among dragons as we see here in Victory of Eagles:

  “Well, old fellow, I am afraid we will have to swap.”

  “Swap?” Temeraire said, puzzled, until he divined that Requiescat meant caves. “I do not want your cave,” adding hastily, “not that it is not very nice, I am sure; but I have just got this one arranged to suit me.”

  “This one is much bigger now,” Requiescat explained, or by his tone thought he was explaining, “and it is much nicer in the wet; mine,” he added regretfully, “has been full of puddles, all this week; wet clear through to the back.”

  “Then I can hardly see why I would change,” Temeraire said, still more baffled, and then he sat up, outraged … “Why, you are a damned scrub,” he said. “How dare you come here, and behave like a visitor, and all the time it is a challenge? I never saw anything so sly in my life … you may get out at once.”

  Novik is one of the few authors around who uses semicolons in dialogue, incidentally, and this small touch serves to accent the fact that we're in a different time and place. In this passage, Requiescat's dialogue has a bit of formality to it, but it's not completely so — the phrase old fellow is slangy, or it was for the time. Temeraire, however, uses much more elevated dialogue, complete with extra-complicated sentence structure, as we can see when he says, “you may get out at once” (instead of a simple “get out”) and “How dare you … behave like a visitor, and all the time it is a challenge?” (instead of “How dare you pretend to be a visitor when all the time you wanted to challenge me?”). Temeraire's careful speech doesn't fall into the ridiculous — Novik is too careful for that — but it does show us that he is neither human nor native to England.

  You can also add elements from another language that you're familiar with. Play with grammar and word order to give sentences an exotic feel. Perhaps your dwarves have a Germanic bent and their sentences reflect Germanic influence. “Come you in. It will soon give rain” is German translated straight into English, for example, and could sound very much like a dwarf with a Germanic background.

  EXERCISE

  Pick a nonhuman character such as a dragon, unicorn, winged horse, elf from the fairy realm, or whatever you like, and pair it with a modern-day human. Write a dialogue in which the nonhuman speaks with the same speech patterns as the human. Then rewrite the dialogue so the nonhuman speaks markedly differently from the human in a way that also shows the character isn't human.

  THEY SAID BEAUTIFULLY

  There are a number of ways to indicate who said what, and since fiction writers spend a lot of time with dialogue, few mechanical aspects of writing generate more heated discussions. Let's take a little look at what's going on.

  The little bits like “he howled” and “she murmured” that writers sneak into dialogue are called speech tags. The most common one of these is “said,” as in “Close the door before the werewolf gets through,” Norman said. There are a bunch of others: growled, murmured, yelled, whispered, roared, and so on.

  For some reason, the speech tag said is much maligned. I once attended a writing seminar in which the instructor told the attendees that good writers never, ever use said. “It's boring, it's pedestrian, and it shows lack of imagination,” he said.

  Oops. Did I just use said?

  And did you notice? Probably not. There's really nothing wrong with using said as a speech tag. It's quiet, it's innocuous, and it doesn't call attention to itself. There are really only two rules about using said in dialogue.

  First, you don't want to overuse it. If you use said for every single speech tag, you'll call attention to it by accident. Use it twice, maybe three times if you're stuck, and then avoid it for a bit before going back to it.

  Second, you want to avoid modifying it, especially with an -ly adverb. Tags like he said softly are weak, and you're better off replacing it with something more specific such as he murmured or he whispered. Besides, -ly speech tags are prone to Tom Swifties. Tom Swift was a science fiction hero of the pulp era, and the books were written quickly, with little editing. It became a joke among readers to spot such lines as “Cut the rope!” Tom said sharply, which were unintentionally funny and became known as
Tom Swifties. So avoid saidly speech tags, but feel free to use said by itself in moderation (he said authoritatively).

  Another way to indicate who's speaking is to use blocking within the same paragraph. Rules of grammar require a new paragraph every time you get a new speaker, so the identity of the speaker is easy to discern: Tanya slammed the door and leaned against it. “I think we're fine.” We know Tanya is the speaker, since the dialogue comes in the same paragraph as her action. However, you have to be careful that only one person acts in the paragraph. Otherwise you can get confusion. Norman pressed an ear to the wood. Tanya joined him. “What do you hear?” In this case, either Norman or Tanya could be speaking, and you want to avoid such problems.

  A third way is to let the dialogue run its course without any speech tags once you've established the back-and-forth pattern of the speakers. If the reader will know who the speaker is, there's no need for the author to interrupt for a reminder:

  “I can't hear a thing,” Norman whispered.

  Tanya bit her lip. “Is that a good sign?”

  “Probably. We burned the stupid book and scattered its ashes over —”

  “Shh! What was that?”

  “I don't know,” Norman said. “The stupid door's too thick.”

  “What are we listening to?” whispered the werewolf.

  Just make sure there are enough cues that we don't lose track of who's speaking. Drop in a speech tag every now and then to remind us, as the above example does.

  USING CURRENT SLANG: OKAY OR GAG ME WITH A SPOON?

  Paranormal novels that use a modern setting with modern characters naturally lean toward modern language. YA authors especially want to use up-to-the-moment words and phrases so they can identify characters with their audiences. The big question is: How far should you go?

  When it comes to recent slang, you have to know what you're doing. If you aren't a member of the group who uses the slang, you need to sound like you are. Teenage readers especially will spot fake slang users faster than Holden Caulfield can finger a phony, and you'll instantly lose all credibility with your audience if you make a mistake. So if you don't have an absolutely sure hand with current slang, avoid it.

  Another problem with current slang is that it dates your novel. You might be good with the idea that your book is firmly set in a particular year or decade, especially if you're writing an historical novel, or your story surrounds a famous event, such as a particular presidential election or the start of the Gulf War.

  However, if your book is set in a timeless present (as most modernday books try to be), you want to avoid anything that could date your book, including current slang.

  Some slang has become eternal, and you can definitely use it without worry. Words like yeah, okay, and cool have been part of the American scene for so long, many people have forgotten they're slang.

  REALLY FOREIGN LANGUAGES

  Ranadar the elf drops into our world from his own. He's never visited this world before, and his culture has never crossed our own. How does he communicate?

  This is kind of tricky. Realistically, Ranadar shouldn't be able to speak or understand English. Even gestures are culturally based. In America, we ask if someone wants to eat by miming a plate with one hand and scooping a handful of invisible food toward our mouths with the other. But in China, people mime a bowl with one hand and over it they waggle two fingers from the other hand — chopsticks. Would Ranadar, who grew up on another world entirely, understand either one? There's also the mirror image of this — the character from our world who goes to another world. The language should be nothing like English, or whatever the character speaks.

  This causes major story problems. Your character will have to spend enormous amounts of time just learning to communicate in order to get the story going. Unless your book is about exactly this problem, you probably don't want to deal with it. Fortunately, you have a number of solutions available to you. One is simple, long-standing tradition. Authors since Homer have ignored differences in language and just got on with the story. (It doesn't seem likely that citizens of Troy, situated on the western coast of what's now Turkey, spoke the exact same language as the Spartans in the middle of mainland Greece, but that doesn't stop Paris from falling in love with Helen, and Homer didn't bother to stick in a translator.)

  You can also slip in a magical solution. A spell or magical object might allow for instant translation or understanding. Or the transition from one world to the next might create an automatic understanding of the new language. You are allowed to do a little hand-waving here — most readers want the story and characters to move along.

  Some authors like to create bits of language — or even the entire thing. The gold standard for this, of course, is J.R.R. Tolkien, who created over a dozen languages for his books. Richard Adams created a language for rabbits for Watership Down (which has definite supernatural elements) so successfully that when Bigwig faces down General Woundwort and snarls, “Silflay hraka, u embleer rah” at the climax, the reader has no trouble understanding him.

  If you don't want to go quite that far for your werewolves or pixies, you can create pieces of a language — words or phrases that the character can use now and then to remind the reader that the speaker thinks in a language other than English. Again, you'll want to look to other languages for inspiration. If you just throw together some vowels and consonants and substitute them for English word-for-word, it'll come across as stilted and silly. Different languages have different word order and rules for grammar, which should show up in a language you create.

  On the other hand, you don't want to create eye-twisting, impossible words for your readers, either. Some African languages use a sort of clicking sound that English speakers can't re-create, not even to write — the official western character for it is an exclamation mark. Creating a language with words like tqigl!maf might be fun for the author, but it turns readers away. Balance creativity with the reader's ability to keep up.

  CHAPTER 12: Paranormal Polish

  You've crafted the characterization, developed the dialogue, and worried about the world building. You've spent hours, days, weeks, and months at the keyboard, and now you have a first draft. Hooray!

  Now the revisions begin.

  The revision process ranges from painful slog to fascinating revisit, depending on the writer — and the novel. Revision is an enormous topic, one that could fill an entire book of its own. But paranormal novels have specific challenges, and we'll examine a few here.

  GENERAL TIPS

  Some ideas apply to novels of all stripes when you're going back over your stuff. This list isn't comprehensive, but it touches on some ideas that may not have occurred to you.

  LET IT SIMMER

  You may feel a terrible temptation to start revisions the moment you've finished the first draft. Don't give in. The material is too fresh, too green. You need to forget what you've written — at least partially — to give yourself a new perspective for revisions. Set the work aside for a few weeks. Don't look at any part of your book, not even your favorite bits. The mistakes will stand out better once time has allowed you step back and look at the material from a distance.

  REREAD OLD NOTES

  Very few people can keep everything in their heads, and most authors scribble notes to themselves about their characters, worlds, and plotlines. But as the book progresses and you get to know everyone and everything more intimately, you probably stopped checking your notes. Here's the thing: A hundred thousand words later, you've probably modified a few things on the fly or dropped some old ideas. Check your original concepts and see if there's anything you intended to do that fell by the wayside — or that could be worked into a sequel.

  KEEP IT

  Smart authors keep everything. You never know when an old version of a story will turn out to be useful — or might unexpectedly become your only surviving backup. When you start revising, take a moment to save your first draft in another computer folder. If you remo
ve a scene or cut a character or slice out a subplot, keep that material in a separate file, too. Paranormal novels oft en spawn sequels, and cut material is great fodder for future story ideas.

  WHEN IN DOUBT, CUT

  I've already mentioned why shorter is better, yet new writers tend to write long. It's not a bad idea to cut, especially during the final polish. If a scene doesn't need to be there, cut it. Where you used ten words, use nine. The technical word for this is tightening, and it makes your book a much better read.

  HOW MANY DRAFTS?

  There's no magic number for drafts. Hell, in the age of computers, it's hard to know what a draft is. You finished chapter six, then changed a few sentences in it before going on to chapter seven. Is that a new draft ?

  The answer: Who cares? The only draft that matters is the final one, the one that you show to an editor or agent.

  However, at some point, you do have to say, “I'm done.” You can't spend your time with endless rewriting and polishing. If you've gone over it six or seven times, ask yourself if you're really rewriting, or putting off sending it out for fear of being rejected.

  PARANORMAL TIPS

  Some rewriting challenges are specific to paranormal books. Let's take some time to examine a few.