We’re talking about the pros and cons of the three aspects of scenes: description, action, dialog.

Now, as we all know, dialog is the mainstay of modern fiction. Raised in a world of television, radio, and telephones, we as an industrialized race are familiar with nothing if not the power of talk.

Dialog is important because:

1. Fiction is talking, and dialog is talking from the core of character

   It’s words, all words. Words in your mind, words on the page, words in your characters’ mouths. That’s what fiction is. That’s what sets it apart from the other arts.

   When you take that one step further—move from your own words to your characters’—you pull your reader that one step further into your imaginary world.

   And writing is all about pulling your reader as far as humanly possible out of their world into yours.

2. We are social animals, and we socialize through speech

   More than anything, your reader is human, and human beings need connection. When we speak to each other, we’re making connections to each other. When our characters speak to each other, they’re making connections to each other and to your reader.

   Be aware of this at all times: your reader is in the room with your characters, listening to them talk and getting to know them through their conversation. That’s your magic pill! Take full advantage of it.

3. Readers love eavesdropping

   Even better than hearing what they’re supposed to hear, readers love hearing what they’re not supposed to hear. She said that? He blurted out this? They confessed what?

   The thrill of eavesdropping through fiction—rather than real life—is that no character ever says, “Our reader’s such an idiot.” And this sometimes does happen to eavesdroppers in real life.

   It’s a win-win situation!

Dialog is not important because:

1. We say a lot more than anyone cares to hear

   Even the most stoic non-conversationalist says more than they need to. Nobody gets the chance to go back and edit their own dialog. That means all that extra crap is always there.

   Your job as a writer is to edit out the extra crap.

2. A great deal of real conversation is boring beyond boring

   By far, the majority of what we say in real life is shorthand allowing us to cooperate on the things we want to do.

   “Is it?” “No.” “Yes.” “Oh, yeah?” “Um, well.” “I guess.” “Then what?” “I, uh. . .” “Huh-uh.” “Uh-oh.” “Call me?” “See you later.” “I will.”

   Do not inflict this on your reader. They don’t even listen to it when people they like say it.

3. Talk is cheap

   What readers want is a story with legs.

   Use dialog to introduce your reader to your characters, to reveal the hidden dramas inside that complicate the characters’ worlds all out of proportion, to move your plot always, inevitably forward toward the catastrophe that is the point of using all these words and characters to illuminate something about life that your reader needs to know. . .

   . . .but don’t get bogged down in the chatter.

   Go wherever the excitement is.

You know how everyone’s always telling you “Show, Don’t Tell”? Well, that means “Write Scenes, Not Exposition.” So we’re spending three weeks covering the three aspects of scenes: description, action, dialog. Last week we did description. Next week we’ll do dialog. And this week we’re doing action.

Action is important because:

1. Fiction is about movement

   This is the fundamental purpose of fiction: to get a protagonist from point A to point B with the greatest difficulty possible.

   Don’t make it easy on them, whatever else you do. The excitement lies in the complications, the many and varied ways in which you can pull the rug out from under your characters and force them, time and again, to scramble to their feet with every ounce of strength and wit they’ve got. And the very best way to pull the rug out from under them is to give them needs and internal conflicts that make them pull it out from under themselves.

   It may be possible to write an entire novel without action, but I’ve never seen it work. Even Virginia Woolf’s alarmingly passive classic To the Lighthouse is about—what else could it be?—a trip to a lighthouse. It’s not a long trip, and it gets canceled at least once. But, yeah. She did eventually have to send them.

   And a novel packed with action is not only thrilling but gets from point A to point B. Making that journey the gist of the novel is the very stuff of great storytelling.

2. Readers are fascinated by characters in motion

   You know how interesting people are when they never move? Uh-huh. Just about that interesting. How much time can you burn up watching your co-workers stare at their computer screens in their lonely little boring cubes?

   You just fell out of your chair, didn’t you?

   Now ask yourself why mysteries, paranormal, thrillers, romance, urban fantasy/sci-fi (contemporary Westerns) are such long-time staples of best-selling fiction. Because the characters never sit still.

   In mysteries they’re always rushing around tracking down the activities of the other characters—except Rex Stout’s canonical Nero Wolfe, who spends most of his time tending his orchids and drinking beer while his sidekick Archie does the rushing around (there’s a really good reason those stories are told from Archie’s point-of-view rather than Wolfe’s).

   In paranormal not only do the characters move, they move in really weird ways.

   In thrillers they move at top-speed in terror for their lives (and thriller is the number one best-selling genre after romance).

   In romance, of course, the ways they move tend to do things to the readers’ gonads.

   And although Westerns have faded—to be replaced by urban fantasy/sci-fi, the new Wild West—it’s all about action. Westerns were riveting to generations of men who’d been raised to be intensely active boys and then wound up working rather less-active jobs in their adult lives. Urban fantasy/sci-fi readers can’t get enough of an industrial landscape much like the cities and even modern rural environments where children these days learn what adult activity is all about. . .sadly enough for those who grow up to while away their days among endless five-foot carpeted walls.

3. Action creates that essential visceral response

   Of course, the whole purpose behind the purpose of fiction is visceral response.

   Readers read for experiences. They want to suffer your characters’ traumas and learn through that suffering how to survive. They want to learn how it feels to survive.

   That means viscerally. In their bodies. In their guts. In their hearts.

   Have you ever read an action scene that made the hair stand thrillingly up on your head? That visceral response is the entire point of action scenes.

   And if you can create that in your reader, you have earned the right to call yourself a writer.

Action is not important because:

1. Action is easy to screw up

   And. . .that’s why not everyone who wants to become a best-selling thriller author does. Because action must be meticulously choreographed, tightly worded, designed and polished exactly right for maximum impact.

   Aspiring writers screw up high-tension action scenes all the time, writing them long, writing them disorganized, writing them without even realizing they need to shape them perfectly, which means cutting every single word possible.

   It is far easier to learn to shape scenes around simpler internal conflict—a conversation in which the characters misunderstand each other, or an exchange of information, or a moment of regaining balance—than around external conflict or action that requires perfect timing.

   I spend a lot of my time teaching clients how to shape action scenes exactly right. It’s not easy. But it is essential if you want to use them.

2. Action is not plot

   You can write all the action scenes you like, and if they don’t move your plot forward they’re still just churning mud. An endless number of perfectly-shaped fight scenes will eventually lose all but the most die-hard fight fans. And even those guys are probably already at the movies.

   Every word you put into a story must be essential to getting the protagonist from point A to point B. If an action scene doesn’t do that. . .throw it out.

3. Action without meaning is just a windmill

   Because, in the final analysis, we don’t read simply to learn how to act. We read to move alongside characters through their worlds toward and through their worst nightmares. It is the movement through the nightmare that has meaning. Everything else is set-up for that.

   That meaningful action teaches your reader how to live.

This topic came from @__Deb, and it’s such a good idea I’m going to extrapolate from it for two more weeks, covering all three aspects of scene: description, action, dialog.

“Show, Don’t Tell.” Write scenes, not exposition.

Description is important because:

1. Details create the life on the page

   If there is one key to the difference between amateur and professional writing, this is it.

   Do you know why agents toss certain manuscripts aside without even pausing to roll their eyes? Not because they’re imps of Satan. But because they can often tell from a single page whether or not the writer has any experience at all with what they’re describing. And that authenticity is essential.

   Do you know why Grisham sells? Not because he’s Dickens. But because he fills his novels with the telling details of his characters’ worlds. Those details make his shenanigans ring true—as though he’s chronicling the real adventures of real people.

   Readers want that. Even when they’re freaking terrifying adventures.

2. Readers read for new experiences and new angles on old experiences

   We all know how to live our own lives. I don’t need some faceless writer out there to tell me what it’s like to be me (although if they could tell me where my toothbrush has gone, that would be fab).

   A great deal of incredibly poor storytelling gets bought and gobbled up every single day solely for the sake of the experiences described. Best sellers routinely set their stories in celebrity fat farms, tourist destinations (the Louvre!), cruise ships (the Titanic!), pretty much anywhere in New York City. Readers want to believe they are also celebrities, tourists, on a world cruise. (And some of the powers of the publishing world, apparently, want to believe everyone’s as interested in their hometown as they are.)

   Give your reader an experience they couldn’t get without you.

3. Writing is about using your senses to recreate the world

   Flannery O’Connor taught me this in her canonical work on writing, Mystery and Manners, decades ago, and it was an epiphany I’ve never gotten over. Five senses. All the words in your language. Put them together: a believable fictional world.

Description is not important because:

1. Setting is static, and character is dynamic

   However, the reason stories aren’t entirely description is that readers don’t read only for the visual (or audio or olfactory or tactile). They can get that from a painting—and in less than a thousand words, too.

   Readers read for character. They want to know how that charismatic rascal is going to pull yet another Houdini to extricate themself from whatever dreadful predicament they’ve gotten themself into. They want it to feel real, sure. But they really want it to move.

2. Readers want room to project themselves into your scenes

   You’ll hear teachers, editors, and other mentors pussyfooting around this one—”Use enough detail, but not too much.”

   How much is too much?

   “You’ll just know.”

   No, you won’t.

   Too much is more than the absolutely bare-bones essential bits it takes to sketch this one scene with only those details the characters need in order to get through their story to the epiphany at the end. O’Connor used the general rule three telling strokes to sketch a character or scene.

   If your scene has towering philodendrons and leafy maidenhair and fat succulents and towering ficas and leafy swordfern and fat nasturtiums and towering bamboo and leafy begonias and fat little lemon trees, and the characters need a sturdy flower, a lacey screen, and a long stick. . .pick what you need and leave the rest to the reader’s imagination.

3. Writing is about going beyond the senses into the very meaning of life

   Which means even Emil Zola had a heck of a time creating great fiction out of purely Naturalistic description. He (and Dashiell Hammett, too) needed both action and dialog to flesh it out.

Fortunately, you actually can get beyond the senses through just the nuts & bolts of detail. That’s part of the magic of fiction. In fact, if you’ve crafted your story properly they can be pretty simple nuts & bolts.

One of my favorite endings ever is Raymond Chandler’s beautiful, “It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way—but not as far as Velma had gone.”

Even if he’d left off the exposition about Velma he’d have made his point, putting the reader into that simple final experience after the long, rich, complex experience of his novel—letting them understand for themself what the whole thing means.

This one, again, is thanks to @__Deb, who gave me my blog topics for the month of May. That girl’s just chock full of good ideas. (All wrapped up in hand-knitted sweaters.) I know you hear a lot of advice about making your protagonist heroic. Internally-conflicted. Easy for the reader to identify with. Bigger than life. At the same time, you’re always being exhorted to ‘write what you know!’

And you’re sitting there scratching your head thinking, “Yeah, but I’m kind of a weenie.”

So you wind up with a certain number of protagonists who all share the same dreadful qualities:

1. Too positive

   “Perky, good-natured, well-loved Pollyanna Pritchard stepped off her porch steps in sunny Boringsdale on a lovely spring day. She turned her head appreciatively toward the sound of birds singing cheerfully among the flowers. Wasn’t she glad to be alive!”

   Don’t be a Pollyanna. Nobody wants to spend a whole novel being surreptitiously exhorted to Keep on the Sunny Side of Life. We all know how to be happy. We don’t need instructions.

2. Too negative

   “Gus stared out the window, dragging slowly on his cigarette. He probably had lung cancer. No one would cry at his funeral, and he was glad. What losers everyone else was.”

   On the other hand, don’t mistake ‘powerful writing’ for ‘nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms.’ We all also know how to be depressed. That’s why we need fiction.

3. Too smart

   “Mandy skipped into the gutter, narrowly missed by the Baby Grand that Ed dropped from the crane overhead, and back onto the sidewalk again. He’d have to try again when he got a brain or something.”

   It’s good to have a proactive protagonist, someone willing to pit their smarts and skills against pianos falling out of the sky. But if your protagonist is smarter than your plot, then you have no story. You’ve got to let them screw up, or you’ll be back in two-dimensional Boringsdale with Pollyanna.

4. Too stupid

   “Ed peered down short-sightedly, his finger up his nose. He couldn’t believe Mandy hadn’t slipped on that banana peel like he’d planned. ”

   Then again, if they can’t tie their own shoelaces, how are they going to figure out who keeps dropping all those pianos? If your protagonist is stupider than your reader, you might have all kinds of story, but nobody’s going to care. They’ll be off reading some other novel that actually challenges them.

5. Too powerful

   “When Pollyanna arrived at the office, Ed rushed to place the reports on her desk like she’d ordered. She snapped her fingers, and Mandy lunged across the office with a cup of steaming coffee, two tubs of creemer and one and a half sugarcubes, just how she liked it. ‘Ed! Reports! My office! Stat!’ Mandy scurried away again.”

   Sure, this might be a nice person to have handling your blog and kicking the butts of everyone who lifts your blog posts without permission, particularly your competitors. But they’re not all that interesting to follow through a story. Who can identify? When I snap my fingers, nobody lunges across the room with coffee for me.

6. Too victimized

   “Gus stubbed out his twelfth cigarette in the graveyard of all the others glued to his windowsill. Far below on the mean city streets, he heard the wail of sirens and screams of abused children. Life was so hard on him.”

   So Gus is as big a loser as everyone else in his ugly little world. How sad.

   Nobody caaaaaaaares.

7. Too self-Involved

   “‘I’m tired of being walked all over! You people don’t understand me!’ Mandy snatched back the plate of cookies she’d just removed from the oven. ‘Take, take, take. Why don’t you ever think about me for a change?’”

   I know—you love this protagonist, and it irritates all blue blazes out of you how they’re forced to suffer for the sake of your plot, which you had to design that way to intrigue that selfish, pesky reader. But your reader doesn’t feel that love. They look at the character you worship with all your heart and soul and still ask themself, “What’s it matter to me?”

   Any time you force your reader to choose between sympathizing with your protagonist and sympathizing with themself. . .guess what.

8. Too oblivious

   “Gus frowned, annoyed. Where the hell had all the cookies gone? It didn’t matter. What a loser she was—making cookies.”

   And if your protagonist won’t interact with your other characters, well, your reader won’t interact with you. They’re reading to learn something, to experience something, to become a part of the grand adventure. Deny them that, and they will deny you their well-fleeced little eyeballs.

Remember way up at the top, when I mentioned ‘internal conflict‘? Well, I’m going to mention something else here (which is on my mind today because I’m right now writing about it for my next book, The Art & Craft of Story):

condensation.

What would happen if you condensed all those protagonists down into one—just squashed their different characteristics together inside one head?

Suddenly. . .you’ve got story!

Andi’s added Too Ugly, Too Beautiful, and Undefeatable Superhero. I’ll also add Too Hip (just stood in line yesterday behind a Designer Rastafarian). Any more?

Stacy’s added Too Beautiful/Too Perfect.

Simon’s added Too Drunk. And I’m going to suggest a protagonist can also be Too Sober.

This one was suggested by the writer and knitter extraordinaire, @__Deb. Actually, she gave me my post topics for the entire month of May, however you’ll have to cruise her Twitter stream to get a sneak peek at them.

Oh, but who has time to do stuff like that?

We don’t even have time to re-read! Not even our favorite novels. Not even if they’re Golden Geese just waiting to lay for us the most amazing golden eggs. . .

1. Structure

Read once for sheer pleasure. That’s the joy of every serious reader.

Then, right away, skim once more for structure.

Find the 1/2, 1/4, and 3/4 marks and jot down notes on what occurs there or in the immediate vicinity. Find the 1/3 and 2/3 marks and do the same. Then find the 1/8 and 7/8 marks—those two are the lintels holding this entire novel up.

You will be absolutely astounded to discover how concretely a well-written novel is structured. The Hook ends just about 1/8 of the way in. The ’spin’ at the end of Act I occurs around either the 1/4 or the 1/3 mark. The shift of focus from Hook to Climax occurs at the halfway mark. The ’spin’ at the end of Act II occurs around either the 2/3 or the 3/4 mark. And the beginning of the end—the build-up to the Climax—starts just about 1/8 of the way from the last page, 7/8 of the way in.

It’ll give you chills when you see just how deftly you’ve been lead.

2. Characters

Could you ever get tired of hanging out with your favorite characters? That’s why they exist—to add depth and texture to your life.

When you re-read for character, you don’t have to read chronologically. Browse for your favorite scenes. Stumble accidentally on ones you loved but forgot about. Let the novel fall open in your lap and pick up reading wherever it catches your eye.

Luxuriate in those scenes, soaking in the dozens of little, telling details with which the author has sketched these people for you. Finger them like beads. Copy out your favorite sentences.

“In vain I have struggled. It will not do. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” That line has been a part of my internal world since I was twelve years old. The marvelous, adroit encapsulation of Darcy’s dignity, pomposity, internal struggle, and genuine, simple passion are all there.

Memorize your favorite sentences in which your favorite characters come fully to life, and you will be richly rewarded later when your own sentences about your own characters roll out of you in similar detail and rhythm.

3. Layering

Nobody ever gets everything there is out of a single reading of a great novel. Read lightly for pleasure and then read the whole thing through again for the deeper meanings. . .consciously, slowly, luxuriously, paying attention to every little development as it unfolds. Follow closely the trajectory of scenes this author has created. Notice how each scene leads inevitably to the next, how they build on each other, shaping the characters and aiming them where they need to go. Notice what’s essential. Notice what the author left out.

The obvious layers of the story sink into your subconscious as the subtle layers rise to the surface.

Tom Stoppard said, “Talking to intelligent grad students about one’s own work is like getting caught in customs. ‘Yes, officer, I can see it there in my bags, but I honestly do not remember packing it.’”

Find even those layers that came out of the author without their knowledge.

4. Epiphany

And realize, with the greatest works, why they’re great: because they are packed in all directions with not just a single, high-flying, breath-taking epiphany off the end of the novel, but with hundreds of wonderful, indirect little epiphanies all the way.

Just yesterday I paused in an early chapter of Nicolas Freeling’s Criminal Conversation at the lovely, hilarious line, “‘There are times, Chief Inspector, when I should like to take a fast run of about a hundred yards at you doing up your shoelace.’”

A few chapters later, casual commentary on police interrogation technique leaped out at me as advice on great writing:

“The well-known raid technique: the amiable little domestic pleasantry and the bomb in the same breath. . .After the flash, the burn cream.”

And I laughed out loud at the 1960s London slang, “fearfully twee!”

Oh, the utter joy of fiction. You’d better believe—somewhere, sometime, somehow—somebody in one of my novels is going to one day say, “How fearfully twee!”