Serendipity

In case anyone was wondering about whether some things are fated, consider this:

I have been thinking a lot about my dialogue lately, as is obvious from my most recent blog posts. I'm also preparing to move out to New York City to start my summer publishing internship (I catch the red eye tonight, as a matter of fact), and part of that process was to find myself a messenger bag to take to work, as a backpack just looks goofy when you're wearing business clothes (one thing I learned in London).

The one messenger bag I own was a freebie I received when I attended the Pikes Peak Writers' Conference last year.

I thought I had emptied it out long ago, just after the conference, but when I lifted it to stuff it into my suitcase, I noticed it was actually quite heavy. I opened it up, and out poured a pile of papers and envelopes. Apparently my mother used it as a repository for junk with my name on it at some point while I wasn't home.

So I set about sifting the garbage (letters from the University of Colorado at Denver, to which I was considering transferring in Spring 2007) from the gold (notes from the conference itself) and I came across a magazine called "Writer" that must have been another freebie given at the conference.

Intrigued, I flipped to a random page...and what greeted my eyes but an article entitled "Shtick it to them: The art of dialogue includes deft stage business that adds action and detail."

Convinced that such a coincidence could only be the work of fate, I read through it and found it quite helpful. It was packed with examples of different kind of speech tags (I think the author who wrote it split them up into "dialogue", meaning "he said", "action", meaning "he scratched his head" and "thought", meaning "he wondered how long it had been since John had showered"), how they had worked for different authors, and suggestions on how to improve upon each type.

Reading the article was great for me, as it reinforced my conviction that the way I write dialogue isn't bad in and of itself (it was good to see that other, published, respected authors write the same way) but I'm not executing it as well as I could be. I use the same action tags too often and too freely, without giving much thought to them. I need to go back and take a much closer look at what each of my characters would actually do while talking--what their particular tics are, so to speak, and then implement that into the writing, so that all of my speech tags, not just some of them, accomplish something more than simply filling space and breaking up long bits of dialogue.