In honor of having given up sleep last week (apparently after fifty years you’ve had all the sleep you need), I’m going to introduce you today to my grandmother, to whom I was very close and who gave me most of the instructions that now guide my life. She didn’t actually say any of these in reference to writing, but even Grandma can use an editor.
I just wish she’d given me one for curing insomnia.
If you can’t say something interesting, don’t say anything at all.
This, of course, is not what she really said, but it is the cardinal rule of fiction.
Sit down quietly and share with your sister.
This one she said all the time.
Because it’s not about me. It’s not even about you. It’s about sharing this amazing, complicated, poignant world with the reader, and if we can’t share nicely they’re not going to follow us around begging.
If you don’t learn to make your bed, no one will marry you.
This one she also said, and I’m not going to use up space here recording my many witty adolescent replies. Suffice it to say that she was mistaken, and nobody in my house now is any good with hospital corners.
However, she was correct that if we don’t learn how to shape and tidy our manuscripts no one will ever read them. They’re incredibly lumpy, uneven, and full of missing socks in their early drafts. Readers find them extremely uncomfortable and cannot relax.
This is a bad thing.
Don’t be a smart-aleck.
This is also a bad thing.
We’re all very clever and amusing people, I know, in the privacy of our own heads and usually a number of hours after it doesn’t matter anymore. I infused my own early novels with a whole plethora of snarky asides and snappy comebacks.
Turns out Grandma was right on the money with this one too, though.
Readers don’t want untutored attempts at snark. They want either real, one-of-a-kind, death-defying humor that makes them spontaneously laugh out loud or no smartypants nonsense at all.
Stop kicking the table leg.
No kidding, people. I know we all get intensely frustrated at the state of the publishing industry these days. It is indeed an intensely frustrating state, in which unknown writers become less and less likely to see publication every single time someone buys a best seller at Walmart.
But the truth is we were already complaining about the state of the industry decades ago, when it seems in retrospect that we actually had it fairly good.
We need to just stop annoying people and buckle down to the hard work.
Wipe your feet before you walk on clean floors.
Leo Buscaglia tells the story of meeting a famous Buddhist lama and walking in the garden with this gentle little man, yammering on and on and on about himself and his big, brilliant ideas and how important they all were, until the gentle little man turned suddenly and slapped him right in the face.
“Stop walking in my head with your dirty feet!” the lama exclaimed.
This is excellent advice for all of us—but especially for writers.
Keep your sticky fingers off the wallpaper.
Again, the reader has their own big, brilliant ideas, which they love far more than they are ever going to love ours. It is our job to show them their own lovely wallpaper, not muck it up getting our fingerprints all over it.
Don’t make me tell Grandpa.
You know who Grandpa is? That’s right. The reader. And Grandpa always gets the last word.
Machst gut.
Actually, it was my great-grandmother who said this, the German granddaughter of pioneers, a woman who lived to be 93 and, at the end of her life, began seeing the ghost of her husband in her room at night.
Make it good.
If you’re going to be haunted, you know, it had better be worth your while.
You can cry on me.
Grandma also said this, for which I will always love her.
There’s a lot of grief in first struggling for years to get our beautiful dreams down in words and then finding someone who wants to read them. I don’t care how brilliant or talented or experienced we are, our kindness to each other is truly the most important thing we have to give.
Come back and see us again soon, honey.
Because when you get right down to it, it’s all about dedication and long-term commitment—commitment and good-heartedness and being in this world with others. We’re able to share our wonderful fictional adventures with the reader only if they add significantly to the reader’s life.
And if we can’t develop the habit of producing great stories—not just one, but one after another, for as long as we expect others to pay attention—we must content ourselves with being readers.
We’re jumping in the Way-Back Machine today. This was the very first of my numbered-list posts—from January, 2010—and the comments are still some of my favorites!
You’re not going to get rich. You’re probably not even going to be able to pay your bills. In fact, money is going to turn out to be the last reason to do this. I know—you guys hate it like blazes that I keep telling you this. (Huffington Post). But keep reading (or skip ahead) to 7, anyway.
Your friends and family will LOVE IT. They’ll start following you everywhere, waiting for famous people to accost you so they can be the shy, self-deprecating second person, blushing and elbowing you and saying, “I’m just the sister. Really—we always knew they [pointing] were a genius.” Humorous, eye-rolling, palms-up shrug. This will be fun for awhile and then become intensely annoying, especially when the famous people never materialize. Your grandparents will keep your book on their coffee table until the day they die (when you will inherit it back).
Your book will have a really strange reaction to publication. It’s going to open itself up in the middle of the night the night before your publication date and rearrange all the words to make you look like an idiot. It will choose one obscure paragraph in one chapter to arrange exactly the opposite—so beautifully and profoundly and perfectly that, as god is your witness, you know for a fact you did not write that. The rest of it. . .yeah, it kind of sounds like you.
You will spend at least a week in an alternate universe in which your entire head is bigger than your body and your hair is actually bigger than your head. You will have eyes like a fly, facing in all directions at once. Your neck will be a thin string tied rather inexpertly to the base of your head. Although the view from up there will be extraordinary, the bobbing up & down will be so disorienting that it will affect your ability to speak clearly.
You will come back from this alternate universe a humbler and better person.
You will suddenly hate your book, hate everything about your book, hate everybody else’s books, too, and lock yourself in your attic with your dreams and your words and your vision and begin the real task of writing what you know you can write, what you’ve had inside you all along. You just needed the self-confidence of getting published to bring it out.
Your boss will call you up at home and tell you to get back to work or you’re fired. And you’ll go—but you’ll still be thinking all the time about what’s going on in your attic. Eventually it will occur to you that this is also how you were living before you were published. And that’s the reason to do this. . .because this is a wonderful way to live.
100. I don’t know a hundred other things about being a published author. A commenter said readers like really big numbers, and I thought I’d roll with that. But even if I did know a hundred other things, you guys would never read them all, much less remember them. And how helpful is that?
Guess what I spent the Thanksgiving holiday doing? That’s right—giving myself repetitive stress injury writing my annual 45,000-word children’s book for my son. I didn’t start until halfway through November this year, so it got pretty darn busy toward the end there. Now I have a completed book (hurrah!), but I also have a gimpy elbow, which means today’s post is going to be more a checklist than a regular tirade. (Sorry about that.) We’ve been on the subject of first drafts all month: Running into the Jaws of NaNoWriMo , 3 Essential Guidelines for starting a novel, 3 Vital Steps to creating an excellent, story-worthy protagonist, and 3 Crucial Aspects of Writing Scenes.
So let’s sit down together now and ask all those hard, necessary questions a writer must ask themself when they finish a first draft of a novel:
Is your protagonist the same character at the end as the beginning?
Is the catastrophe your characters are heading toward at the Hook the same one they wind up with at the Climax?
Does your protagonist matter more than anyone else in the story?
Does your Climax matter more than anything else that happens?
Can you clearly state your protagonist’s two mutually-exclusive needs, which drive them relentlessly forward throughout their story?
Can you account for every single scene in relation to one or both of those needs?
Can you justify basing an entire novel on those needs when you ask yourself why a reader would care?
Can you identify exactly how your Climax forces your protagonist to choose between their two needs?
Can you link every single scene in an inevitable chain of cause-&-effect toward that Climax?
Can you pin-point the tension in every single scene that’s so powerful it makes the reader turn the next page?
Have you made your protagonist interesting, entertaining, smart, human, and unique enough to hold a reader’s attention for 50,000 words?
Have you shown your protagonist’s world in significant, telling details that simply couldn’t describe anybody else’s fictional world?
Have you stuck to only essential dialog?
Have you choreographed your action scenes for tightly-paced action?
Have you skipped all urges to repeat yourself?
Have you avoided every paragraph, sentence, and word of exposition humanly possible?
Is any and all exposition left just so brilliant and essential that your story can’t exist without it?
Have you moved the Backstory from the beginning to its rightful spot after the Hook (or else cut it altogether)?
Have you resisted the urge to ramble in Resolution after the Climax?
Is this story truly, sincerely important to you, above and beyond its basic quality of containing a whole lot of words?
Will you love sinking ever-deeper into this story in the New Year as you launch into the revisions that are, in actuality, the real work of writing a novel?
Are you proud—not of yourself—but of your story?
Are you in love?
You are a high-dive artist who just dove into the deepest point of the entire ocean. Congratulations! You’ve got some kind of crazy-brave glitter shining in your eyes!
And when you return to this story later, after a well-earned respite over the holidays, you will begin swimming home.
We’re talking about how to approach the first draft of your novel this month, in honor of NaNoWriMo, Last week we talked about the 3 Essential Guidelines for your overall novel, and the week before that we talked about Running into the Jaws of NaNoWriMo. And today we’re going to be talking about the protagonist’s character, because that’s the core of all storytelling. (I tackled this topic last November in a post so bizarre that it famously prompted Roz Morris of Nail Your Novel to ask, “My dear, what are on you on?” 4 Post-Its to Stick Up Over Your Writing Desk. And I outlined the basic elements—which I’m going to talk about in greater depth below—back last summer in one of a series I did on how to write fiction all wrong: How to Characterize Wrong in 3 Easy Steps.)
But, honestly, you don’t have to be doing NaNo to be starting a novel. If you’ve got holidays coming up in December, you might very well be getting yourself in gear to take advantage of them in the most luxurious way a writer can imagine: by writing!
Your protagonist believes they cannot survive without this
It’s a need so core to them that if you changed it you wouldn’t be writing about a human being anymore. What is it? Writers have been using the canonical primary needs for hundreds of years without wearing them out:
survival
love
justice
Truly, these three needs have powered most of the fiction ever written. And there are still more aspects to explore in them. They’re that enormous. They’re that complex.
Some of the other things characters need are:
to protect a child
to heal a wound
to learn the truth
to have an adventure
These needs also have powered incredible numbers of stories. Remember Don Quixote? Out there scampering around the countryside on that mangy old nag with his reluctant sidekick at his stirrup? What was he up to?
He certainly wasn’t defending his life. And I don’t think he ever really had a chance with Dulcinea.
Justice. Adventure.
He needed them really badly.
Your protagonist can’t survive without this either
Because that’s what makes a story: two needs. Otherwise, it’s a bildungsroman, the story of a protagonist grappling with a whole series of internal conflicts, and modern readers don’t have the attention span to survive a bildunsroman anymore. They need explicit signposts on why they should care. (I’m sorry, Moll Flanders.)
But here’s the magic wand—you’ve already done this step. Yes, you have! Look above. How many stories are about two of those top three in conflict with each other? What if you mixed and matched two out of the seven? One of the seven with some equally-powerful but more subtle need?
to prove a point
to accomplish a lifelong goal
to protect someone elderly (or otherwise physically or intellectually vulnerable)
to escape evil
to come to grips with their own dark side
You’ll notice that, no matter how subtle a secondary need you give your protagonist, it can pretty much always be traced back to one of those three canonical primary needs. And when you choose not to root your protagonist’s character in a secondary need quite that canonical, for whatever reason, you must add motivation to that subtle need through one of the canonical ones.
Also, although experts once swore mysteries were too ‘intellectual’ to accommodate romance, pretty much any story gets better when you add thwarted love to the mix.
Your protagonist has absolutely no intention of choosing between the two
Which means any situation in which they are forced to do just that serves as a rip-roaring, roof-raising, mind-bending catastrophe for your Climax. As country singers are so fond of reminding us, “My baby left me, I lost my home, and then my dog died.”
Say you have a protagonist who needs:
survival
love
Whomever they love, it puts them in danger. In danger of losing their job? In danger of losing their home? In danger of losing their sanity?
When Jane Eyre had to choose, she lost all three. Well, she wasn’t totally plugged in to begin with, but I really don’t think that night on the moor could have helped much.
Pit your protagonist against themself by giving them the two most fundamental needs in the human animal. It doesn’t have to be romantic love, either. It could be love of a friend, love of a place, love of a cause.
Romantic love has the added attraction of sex, of course, which always gets the attention of the hormonally-bullied. (You know who you are.) Just keep in mind—and this is really important—you must address sexual issues through their grip on the personality rather than through simple textbook instructions. Your reader doesn’t need to learn how to do it. They need to learn how to handle the consequences when they indulge in something they know how to do all too well.
Or say your protagonist needs:
justice
survival
Their pursuit of justice does nothing but put their life in danger. You know what that is?
Every thriller ever written.
This is why thriller works so well as series genre. Because you can pit your protagonist against themself through their need for justice—and the evil perpetrators’ efforts to kill them—over and over and over again until Doomesday and never run out of excitement.
Be aware that thrillers get their layering through complicated technical subjects, so the authors of thrillers do a great deal of research into specific industries: law, politics, banking, history, international espionage, high-tech weaponry, et cetera, plus very often exotic locales. That all needs to be professionally-researched and very adroitly handled. For advice on how to use your research properly, read Roz Morris’ Nail Your Novel, in which she explains exactly how she used her research for eleven ghostwritten books, eight of which were best sellers.
Or maybe your protagonist needs:
love
justice
What would force a person to choose between what they want and what they know is right? Well, almost everything. Anne of Green Gables tells us all about it as she works her way through her daily life—the endless, excruciating decision-making process that never leaves us alone. It’s when she has to choose between the things she loves and the things she knows are right that she becomes important to the reader, someone they will carry with them internally for the rest of their life.
Because such stories don’t have death hanging over anybody’s head, they tend to be more mild-mannered. That allows them to go deeply and profoundly into the human experience. Remember that your reader is reading not only to be reassured that life is worth living, but to learn something they don’t already know. If you choose to pit your protagonist against themself through these two very human (but not dastardly) needs, you’ll have to know something about those needs that the reader can’t figure out for themself. Just reiterating an experience identical to the reader’s own without adding anything original won’t hold their attention.
You can see how this simple pyramidal design gives you a protagonist your reader passionately wants to see succeed, even as you back that protagonist into worse and worse corners until you’ve backed them right against a wall.
Then your protagonist must always, in the Climax, choose. That choice is the secret ingredient that makes your story work.
This, my friends, is what we call sympathetic character.
NOTE: If you’d like to introduce your protagonist below, I’ll help you identify their conflicting needs.
So let’s review quickly how to make that dive a swan dive and not a cannonball:
Know why this story matters
Somewhere, somehow, at that one moment when they can least afford it, your protagonist is going to come up against themself in a spiritual dark alley. And it’s going to be bad.
They have always, all their life, sincerely and desperately believed they could not handle this confrontation. Chaos, madness, mayhem, yes. But not this.
And that heart-stopping confrontation is why you’re writing this story. Handling the impossible matters to readers—it’s possibly the only thing that does.
The bulk of a novel is just for fun, thrill, excitement, unending adventures that leap from one peak to another as though in Seven-League Boots. Your reader’s grappling with one drama! Aaagh! They’re grappling with another! No! They’re back to grappling with the first drama again! Eeee! There’s a new drama they didn’t see coming!
Back and forth, round and round, in and out of the complexities of your plot they run full-tilt, flapping the pages of your book as they go. They can’t stop!
Don’t get too attached to the first scenes that it occurs to you to write. Those are your warm-up scenes, and chances are almost certain they’re Backstory, not Hook.
Write them! Have a fabulous time! But be willing to set them aside in their own little outtakes files later, when you’re far enough into this story (possibly at the end) to be able to see what originally happened to force the decision that got your protagonist into this whole impossible mess in the first place.
That’s too important of a scene to toy with by getting yourself emotionally-dependent upon it right now. Just take lots of notes as you work on your novel so it will be a truly fabulous opening scene when you do eventually write it.
And because we all live here in the twenty-first century, I know as well as you do how hard it is to squeeze NaNoWriMo into your already-packed schedule. So remember the 9 Ways to Find Time to Write.
Take a deep breath, run to the top of the highest pinnacle you can find, and start flapping your wings. Welcome to NaNoWriMo!
Last week I talked to a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile who’s writing a memoir. She told me she was having a lot of trouble with it—she can’t make herself write about a particular incident she seriously needs to write about.
She asked me if I had any advice: does she need a class? a group? a coach?
Now, I do this kind of work with writers all the time, helping them write what they need to write when they need to write it, so, yeah, I had some advice for her. And I’ll give it to you too, in case you’re ever up against a similar block.
Groups and classes can help if all you need is a little peer pressure to get yourself in gear, but they can make it worse if you’re really struggling with an emotional block and find yourself embarrassed to be unable to break through, especially in front of others. So before you invest in anything try these two tricks:
Permission
Give yourself permission to pause and write about this issue whenever it strikes you, even if it’s only a couple of lines between work projects that you can go back to and develop later.
Details
Whenever you do have a chunk of time in which you’d like to write, focus first on recording some concrete, neutral, unrelated details—what you had for lunch, the view from where you’re sitting, some conversation you had recently—to kind of grease the writing wheels so the words will come out of you more easily.
Frequently it’s the effort to make two transitions at once (the transition into writing mode plus the transition into a safe emotional space) that can cause this kind of writer’s block, and it helps to take them one at a time.
Remember: you’re writing what you write not to bind yourself ever-more tightly in your painful emotional paralysis, but to free yourself so you can live this one life you get as fully as humanly possible.
Note: I’m offline for the rest of August. That’s right—three whole weeks incognito. I’m working on my second book on writing, The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual, to be released September 30.
This is code for: “Be unwilling to revise anything but inexcusable errors and typos.” This is because you must trust, you must trust in the process (didn’t your Discount Life Coach tell you that only last week?), you must understand that those words in that order in those sentences came out of you by Divine Inspiration and cannot be tampered with without losing their ‘freshness’ and ’spark.’
‘Freshness’ and ’spark’ being code for: “Accidentally getting it right.” Because you don’t actually have a clue what you’re doing.
Experience? Practice? Education? Time-tested techniques for shaping, honing, polishing written language? What do you think you are, a buffing wheel?
Don’t waste your time on rewriting stuff you’ve already written, whatever you do. Think about how many more books you could publish if you stopped worrying about how the last one turned out and got busy on the next. You’d be a millionaire in no time!
This is why so many people are self-publishing books these days with titles like God Wants You to Write.
Look for guidance only from peers on unsupervised critique forums
Because, as we all know, money always flows toward the writer. So be sure to get everything you need to become a successful author for nothing, as a fool and their money are soon parted.
At least you hope so. After all, you’re counting on lots and lots of fools out there with lots and lots of money to buy this book you’re accidentally writing in spite of yourself.
Be correct that your peers have little to teach you
Well, it’s true.
Which is why it’s so easy to dismiss them as callow unbelievers if they actually suggest revisions. Or—heaven forbid—going back to the drawingboard.
The problem is your peers don’t know any more about this work than you do. So their opinions, no matter how well-meaning, can’t possibly be any more than amateurs’ surface reactions to a deep, complex, multifaceted craft no one has ever completely mastered before they died. Not even Stieg Larsson.
The truth is you’re probably an unrecognized genius—that’s why your critiquers misunderstand you. I mean, what expertise are they going to use to recognize you with? They’re a bunch of amateurs.
Except the ones who are even more amateur than you are, of course. Those guys love you!
You are the only real authority on your own work, unlike all those OCD nitpickers who style themselves ‘experts.’ (Good thing publishers have unloaded most of them.) Publishers are a big, shiny store window. You are a customer.
Last week we learned how to plot wrong. That was fun! Now we all know how to do it so nobody will ever be interested and our stories will never get published, much less read.
So this week let’s talk about how to handle character wrong. Because this one is trickier—character is a trickier element of fiction while, at the same time, an even more essential one than plot. It’s possible to get by on pretty darn thin plot, providing your characters are fascinating. But any kind of plot with boring characters is shlock.
Don’t write that stuff.
Give your protagonist only one need
This one happens a lot. I’ve done it a lot. Everyone’s always telling you, “Your protagonist needs a goal, your protagonist needs to be fighting for something.”
They need their beloved to fall in love with them
They need to survive a deadly plague from outer space
They need to not get killed by the bad guys
Which is all well and good. . .but why can’t they get it?
So you add a lot of complications—interfering ex’s, domineering relatives, cruel bosses, nosy neighbors, malicious space aliens, fickle and faint-hearted gods of doom who victimize your characters until you find yourself weeping into your keyboard. All very poignant and meaningful to you.
But when you show it to readers, they say, “You’re a perfectly good writer. But why do I care?” And when you show it to agents, they don’t even respond.
We don’t care about victims. We care about strong people fighting against themselves. This requires more than one overwhelming need: internal conflict.
Make your protagonist’s needs weak or trivial
And this leads to the the next issue, which is giving your protagonist two conflicting needs but making them so minor the reader can’t work up any interest.
They need to clean the house and they need to get Jeb back from the barn
They need to watch the game with their pals and they need their to prove they know the most about it
They need to win the popularity contest and they need not to chip their nails
Once again, it all seems terribly powerful and gripping to you, your readers like it, and when you show it to agents they say, “You’re a good enough writer, but somehow I couldn’t get into this particular story. It just didn’t speak to me.”
You know tension is important, and you’re wondering how to ratchet the tension on basically boring stuff. So you add complexities, other people’s agendas. And once again, you get the shake of the head, more final this time, and the slightly-crisp suggestion, “Maybe you should try another story.”
We don’t care about trivial conflicts. We have plenty of those of our own, which bore even us. We want stories about scary crap that affects lives.
Never force your protagonist to choose between their conflicting needs
So you think, ‘Aha! I know what’s wrong. Those two needs don’t matter enough.’ And you’re intensely pleased with yourself, because—you know what? You’re right.
So you give your protagonist two big, overwhelming, dastardly, fabulous needs, and you make them in stark opposition to each other.
They need to save the home they inherited from their tragically-dead parents that’s all they own and they need to survive a tornado/avalanche/desert island/inner-city gang war.
They need to save their boss’s reputation for the sake of their own career and they need to get their ex back from that boss.
They need to disable a covert operation aimed at world domination before all they hold dear is violated and they need to survive the bad guys’ ruthless efforts to thwart them.
Wonderful stuff! Gripping, intriguing, conflicting. Such an exciting story to write! Even your readers are cheering you on every step of the way. “I can’t put it down! Write faster.”
But in the end it’s still—just—a—flop.
And the agent who loved the premise, loved the story, loved you for coming up with the whole thing—stops taking your calls.
Because although your protagonist has those powerful conflicting internal needs (pride and survival, career and love, integrity and life) and even though those needs are huge and easy for even the most simple-minded reader to identify with, and even though you’re a perfectly good writer. . .your protagonist never has to choose.
They get out of it the easy way: by you letting them.
Sigh.
Make your characters fight themselves, make it important and painful, make ‘em choose. There is no other formula.
Can you believe it’s June already? You’d never know it from the weather on the Northern California Coast. It’s been pouring rain for days. It’s practically the Pacific Northwest.
So I’m going to spend the month of June talking about how to do everything backward. And I’m going to need your help with this. I’ve spent the bulk of my life learning everything about fiction the hard way, so I’m pretty conversant with that part, but there’s nothing like doing it wrong to bring out the unique creativity of the individual.
This conversation won’t realize its full potential without your creativity added to the mix.
Let’s start with plot, because that’s the simplest thing to learn and therefore the simplest thing to screw up:
Hook at the wrong place
Most aspiring writers have no idea what they’re going to write about in their novels—they just sit down and dive into something that seems interesting. And that’s a lot of fun! Whee, doggies. Who are these characters? What are they doing here? What are they up against? Why don’t they know it?
And this last bit is what bites them in the butt—Why don’t they know it? Because the writer doesn’t know it, that’s why. But the characters should know. They should be completely and shockingly clear on what they’re up against in the Hook. And they should be absolutely desperate to get it resolved.
When you launch into a story this way—expecting to keep this Hook in the final draft—all you do is share with your reader your own fogginess and indecision about your story. And they don’t want your fogginess and indecision. They have plenty of their own.
Unfortunately, your characters can’t possibly know, in all its depth and import, something you don’t know. You need to know why you’re starting where you start. That Hook casts its shadow forward over your entire novel.
Develop in the wrong way
And because these aspiring writers don’t know what their novels are about when they start writing them, they have no idea where to take them. They just keep writing scene after scene, bumbling along, feeling around in the dark, wondering what on earth is going on.
Again—all kinds of fun and excitement. For the writer. Beyond boring for the reader. The reader needs you to have already figured out what on earth is going on. Otherwise, they’ll go find a writer who has.
You would not believe how much of my time I spend kindly separating the wheat from the chaff for aspiring writers. “This scene is fabulous and gripping and carries your story forward exactly right,” I’m telling them. “These other ten scenes must have been great fun to write, I know. But they’re your background notes. They belong on your desk, not in your novel.”
If you could figure out just how much of my time that takes. . .you’d know just how much money you could save by doing that part for yourself.
Climax at the wrong place
And when these aspiring writers finally burn themselves out on all this random fantasizing, they tend to throw up their hands and end on the real point of all this for them: a long, detailed description of how happy all the characters are when they’re no longer struggling anymore. This can go on for a really long time. This can go on for chapters.
Which just caps off this exercise in writing for the sake of the writer. Unfortunately, this is vastly different from writing for the sake of the reader.
Even John Gardner was told to cut 1/3 of his 1970s magnum opus, The Sunlight Dialogues. (He did.)
Because this is the crux of the matter: you can write your first draft solely and entirely for your own sake if you like. Everyone knows how thrilling that is, what a pleasure to the writerly soul. We all wallow in it, to some extent or another. Otherwise, why would we be doing this work?
But if you want to sell that novel, that final draft must be plotted with unerring care and precision for the sake of your readers.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Do not inflict this on your reader. They don’t even listen to it when people they like say it.
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. . .
Short story author Scott Warrender is a Mentoring Program client. I have done full Copy, Line, & Developmental Editing on a number of short stories for him, the first of which was his poignant fictional memoir of Africa, ''The Boy With the Newsprint Kite,'' now published in the Foundling Review.
Clients’ Books
Bhaichand Patel is the author of two nonfiction books: Chasing the Good Life (Penguin Books India, October, 2006), and Happy Hours (Penguin Books India, October, 2009). I edited Patel's debut novel, When the Streets Were Cold and Dark.
I've edited a number of nonfictionessays for my friend Lucia Orth. (Many years ago, my contribution to Baby Jesus Pawn Shop was simply a peer critique and participation in a standing ovation.)
The poet Chris Ryan is the author of The Bible of Animal Feet (Farfalla Press, 2007). He has recent stories in Pank, Anemone Sidecar, and A Cappella Zoo. I edited Ryan's novel The Ishmael Blade and worked with him on his debut novel Heliophobia and WIP Pogue.
