Read Online The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack M Bickham - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jack M Bickham
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary Criticism, Reference, Authorship, Language Arts & Disciplines, Writing Skills, Composition & Creative Writing, Creative Writing, Fiction - Technique, Technique
Ads: Link
avoid the impulse to drag dialogue out endlessly, beating the subject to death, too. If the characters stick to the point—and one of them must insist on doing so—then the conversation not only can't wander too far away; it can't extend past the point of decision on the point at issue .
In this regard, it's vital to make sure both characters are listening. If Character A wants to talk about who stole the money, but Character B simply won't pay any attention, and keeps mumbling about his golf score last weekend, all is lost... nothing will make sense or progress. You need to make your dialogue participants listen, then respond directly.
If you fill your story with people who don't want anything, of course, all is lost anyway because there can be no focus, and therefore no linear development.
Sometimes, vaguely realizing that their dialogue is failing, novice writers get cute, witty or classic. They have their characters start mouthing trochaic hexameters, or spewing mouthfuls of classical allusions, or talking in formal riddles or paradigms. You have perhaps seen some of this dreadful stuff in an occasional published story or even book. (Every so often a miracle occurs, and such nonsense gets purchased, but not often enough that you can count on it.) Nobody talks like these characters. Maybe Tennyson did, but he was surely the last one. Vast, poetic oceans of verbiage surge and roll, their compound-complex breakers crashing over the gerunds and participles littering the story beach. Terrified of short, simple, direct dialogue that somebody will understand and possibly even like, these overambitious fictioneers ruin their story dialogue.
Simplicity... directness... goal orientation... brevity. These are the hallmarks of modern story dialogue. Nothing else will suffice.
Check the dialogue in your own copy. One of the simplest tests may be visual, and can warn of a possible problem. Look at several pages of your story that contain dialogue. Is the right-hand margin grossly irregular, many of the character statements going only halfway across the page, and others filling only perhaps a line and a hall? In newspaper terms, do your dialogue pages show a lot of white space?
If they do, good. If they don't, it may mean that your characters are being too long-winded.
Look, too, for clearly stated goals in the dialogue between your characters. If one or both characters have a goal in mind, they won't tend to wander so far from the point... and make speeches. See if you have small mob scenes that you could simplify by setting up one on ones as we just discussed.
Make sure you're following the rules of stimulus and response as outlined in Chapter Eleven.
Now, it may be that you will occasionally allow a character to ramble briefly in order to make the dialogue appear more realistic; you may even let one character briefly lose the thread of the conversation, and need a repeat of something just mentioned. These are fine little tricks. But they are not the norm. Modern dialogue tends to be brief, punchy, single-issue oriented. Impatient readers demand no less.
In writing a draft of a dialogue scene, you may find yourself with ten points in your mind all at once—aspects or questions or comments that you as the writer know must be in the scene somewhere. Sometimes, in your creative anxiety, you may catch yourself letting a character blurt out long diatribes, listing point after point you had in mind. At the stage of first draft, that may be okay; after all, part of what you're doing is just getting the thoughts down so you can start fixing them.
On revision, however, those multipoint speeches will have to be broken down into much smaller components. More exchanges will have to be devised. A page of gray speech in first draft may become five pages of lively dialogue, half of each right-hand page blank, in the revision. That will be good.
17. Don't Mangle Characters' Speech
There was a time, not so long ago, when fiction writers
In this regard, it's vital to make sure both characters are listening. If Character A wants to talk about who stole the money, but Character B simply won't pay any attention, and keeps mumbling about his golf score last weekend, all is lost... nothing will make sense or progress. You need to make your dialogue participants listen, then respond directly.
If you fill your story with people who don't want anything, of course, all is lost anyway because there can be no focus, and therefore no linear development.
Sometimes, vaguely realizing that their dialogue is failing, novice writers get cute, witty or classic. They have their characters start mouthing trochaic hexameters, or spewing mouthfuls of classical allusions, or talking in formal riddles or paradigms. You have perhaps seen some of this dreadful stuff in an occasional published story or even book. (Every so often a miracle occurs, and such nonsense gets purchased, but not often enough that you can count on it.) Nobody talks like these characters. Maybe Tennyson did, but he was surely the last one. Vast, poetic oceans of verbiage surge and roll, their compound-complex breakers crashing over the gerunds and participles littering the story beach. Terrified of short, simple, direct dialogue that somebody will understand and possibly even like, these overambitious fictioneers ruin their story dialogue.
Simplicity... directness... goal orientation... brevity. These are the hallmarks of modern story dialogue. Nothing else will suffice.
Check the dialogue in your own copy. One of the simplest tests may be visual, and can warn of a possible problem. Look at several pages of your story that contain dialogue. Is the right-hand margin grossly irregular, many of the character statements going only halfway across the page, and others filling only perhaps a line and a hall? In newspaper terms, do your dialogue pages show a lot of white space?
If they do, good. If they don't, it may mean that your characters are being too long-winded.
Look, too, for clearly stated goals in the dialogue between your characters. If one or both characters have a goal in mind, they won't tend to wander so far from the point... and make speeches. See if you have small mob scenes that you could simplify by setting up one on ones as we just discussed.
Make sure you're following the rules of stimulus and response as outlined in Chapter Eleven.
Now, it may be that you will occasionally allow a character to ramble briefly in order to make the dialogue appear more realistic; you may even let one character briefly lose the thread of the conversation, and need a repeat of something just mentioned. These are fine little tricks. But they are not the norm. Modern dialogue tends to be brief, punchy, single-issue oriented. Impatient readers demand no less.
In writing a draft of a dialogue scene, you may find yourself with ten points in your mind all at once—aspects or questions or comments that you as the writer know must be in the scene somewhere. Sometimes, in your creative anxiety, you may catch yourself letting a character blurt out long diatribes, listing point after point you had in mind. At the stage of first draft, that may be okay; after all, part of what you're doing is just getting the thoughts down so you can start fixing them.
On revision, however, those multipoint speeches will have to be broken down into much smaller components. More exchanges will have to be devised. A page of gray speech in first draft may become five pages of lively dialogue, half of each right-hand page blank, in the revision. That will be good.
17. Don't Mangle Characters' Speech
There was a time, not so long ago, when fiction writers
Similar Books
