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.

The Right Word for the Job

So before I left London I made a point of seeing Les Miserables...twice. I may have developed a slight obsession/burning love for it over the past year or so, and I didn't want to waste my best chance to see it. Needless to say, I had a great time both times I saw it.

But the second time the cast seemed a bit off. They made mistakes in a few places, which weren't huge, but were noticeable if you know the whole play by heart (Did I mention the obsession part?). What I learned from them was that changing a single word can change an entire song, scene, act, or, potentially, play.

This was most noticeable for me in the scene in which we're introduced to Fantine. There's a line in the song in that scene which is supposed to run "Cossette needs a doctor, there's no time to lose." The chorus member singing it screwed up and sang "Your child needs a doctor, there's no time to lose."

This may not seem like a big change, but a few scenes later when we run into a child named Cossette, without any further mention of her, that single mention of her name becomes pretty key to understanding why we should care about her, and why the scene is even happening at all.

Just an example of how simple mistakes can effect a narrative pretty drastically.

Epiphany!

I just finished having about an hour-long phone call with a woman I met playing Warcraft who also happens to be a writer, in which she critiqued the current draft of my novel. Interestingly enough, given my blog post of a couple days ago, she really didn't like my dialogue style--so it looks like I need to take a much harder look at how I'm doing that (and for that matter, ask some of my other readers whether it annoyed them as well). But more importantly, towards the end of the conversation she told me that she just didn't care about the world or the characters in it.

Bad press perhaps, to be posting that someone felt that way on the blog, but it led me to a very important realization about why books do and don't work for certain people. I think it's a fairly well-accepted truth that readers have to like at least one character in a work of fiction, to root for them, to identify with them etc. Even in the best stories, full of great characters, everyone finds one in particular that is their favorite--whose story moved them more than that of the others.

I realized that for my friend, that never happened. Character after character was introduced and none of them spoke to her. None of them grabbed her like they grabbed other people I've had read the book, and without that grip there was nothing to keep her reading.

To be honest, I'm not sure what to do with that knowledge now that I've got it, other than to go back with a more critical eye and make sure that my characters become sympathetic as quickly as possible, but I think it's a very important realization, and one that I'm sure will bear dividends in the future.

Fanfic...Oy.

One of the things I've struggled with is how to get any of my work published before I start shopping my novel around. There doesn't seem to be much of a market for fantasy short stories. And for that matter, I'm still trying to figure out what makes a good one tick, as I haven't read that many. That hamstrings me a bit, as it makes it pretty difficult to get any publishing credits to throw on the old resume.

The only opportunities I've seen, as a matter of fact, are for fanfic. In particular, the developers of MMORPGs seem to enjoy putting their players' fanfic out there. I discovered last night that Blizzard is taking submissions for World of Warcraft fanfic, which would be a great thing to have on my resume, and for that matter, really would get my name out there to a few hundred thousand people or so--nothing to sneeze at.

The only problem is that, well, it's fanfic, and while I don't have anything against fanfic, I've kind of moved on from it. I got my start writing Star Wars fanfic, and while I will always cherish my time working in that universe, adding bits and pieces to someone else's story just doesn't energize me the same way that creating my own does.

I suppose that's a bit snobby, and the professional in me is certainly strong enough to say "Too bad. Write it, and write it damn well, because this could be a huge break for you", but I can't help but be the littlest bit sad that the opportunities for fantasy short stories seem to be centered around writing fanfic.

Developing a Style

So I ended my last post by saying, "that's how I write, and I'm pretty happy with it." That got me thinking it might be a good idea to discuss my thoughts on developing one's own personal style.

I think there are upsides and downsides to it. The upside, obviously, is that it means there's something that differentiates your writing from the other writing out there. For me, it means telling a lot of my story through dialogue (an idea lovingly ripped from the RPGs that have influenced me so heavily), and choreographing my scenes pretty intensely. My characters don't "say" anything. Ever. I don't think you'll find a "xxx said" once in my entire body of work. And when I do put speech tags on (I think I've used "groaned" and "whispered" and such-like words) I rarely use adverbs.

Instead I try to get their emotions across by describing their actions. If they're confused, their face shows it. I'm probably guilty of over-using the phrases "pursed his/her lips" and "knit his/her eyebrows together" to this effect. This is probably lovingly ripped off from the fact that so many movies do so much storytelling simply with body language, and it's something I wanted to try myself.

The downside of trying to develop a style is that if it doesn't work you can get stuck. The preceding two tricks are things that I think work pretty well for me. I haven't gotten many bad comments about them in workshop or from other readers (except one woman who told me that my characters smile too much--but hey, that's a flaw in execution, not in theory ;-p), but I can see that it would be hard at this point to switch tacks if they weren't working and take a speechtag/adverb approach to writing dialogue.

At any rate, for me I think the upside outweighs the downside. I like being able to say that I'm doing something different, and it's fun for me to figure out ways to work in the various storytelling techniques I've picked up in places that aren't books---it's part of why I write. I'd love to hear comments from others on their own styles and how they came about.