Pretty good little article on what makes good dialogue.
“Anyone can write a bunch of talking, but talking isn’t dialogue. Like every other word in your novel, dialogue is there to do a job — a number of jobs, in fact. It needs to move the story forward, to give information, to intensify characterisation. Ideally, it should do all three at once.”
One or two nuggets of interest in this little Happiness Project interview with Larry Smith, editor of SMITH Magazine.
“Write drunk, edit sober.” Not that you should actually be drunk (the inebriated writer is a silly, antiquated idea, among other things), but that you should just get the words down whether you’re writing a letter, a report for work, or the story of your life, in six words or 60,000. Put the words down, don’t obsess over them, just effusively spill them down onto the page. Then step away—for an hour, a day, a week, whatever you need. And then edit. Edit like crazy. Be hard on words and yourself and make it better. And when you think you’re finished, edit it one more time.
“Write Drunk, Edit Sober; Drink Coffee While Reading the Paper; Watch the Cat.”
Clay Moore posts a quick little description of a way to approach writing your fiction.
What i am proposing is not that you throw out the Chapter system at all. Rather I want you to think of your story as a collection of scenes, as if you were playing out the movie of your story in your head. Each scene can then be completely mapped out. You know who are in the scene, and the goal is for each character in that scene. You get all the pre-think done, and then do the writing. I find that my characters are better behaved.
This scene technique has worked wonders with my own writing. When I have a complicated plot, this technique helps with keeping the plots straight.
Another benefit to this scene based system is that I can see where I am lacking in the book. A character may suddenly appear and I need a scene to introduce that character.
This approach is very similar to how I write my comics.
John August is one of the latest to bring up the Bechdel test in his screenwriting blog.
Screenwriters: Think back over the scripts you’ve written, and ask yourself three questions about each one:
- Are there two or more female characters with names?
- Do they talk to each other?
- If they talk to each other, do they talk about something other than a man?
In my own recent stuff, Q-Burger fails, but I think The Winchcombe passes. Barely.
A master gives a classroom lecture on story.
I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here—great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively].
This is the B-E axis. B for beginning, E for entropy. Okay. Not every story has that very simple, very pretty shape that even a computer can understand [draws horizontal line extending from middle of G-I axis].
Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis]. You will see this story over and over again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted. The story is “Man in Hole,” but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It’s: somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again [draws line A]. It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.
