Word-Whores

He Said She Said I Said They All Said What Hasn't Been Said?

2013-05-18T00:30:00.000-04:00

So we've had our own little "He Said, She Said" going on this week, all about dialogue tags. Most of the time I love being the last word on a topic, so to speak, holding down the Saturday spot, but this week I got nuthin. Well, nothing much to add anyway - my colleagues have thoroughly discussed the issues in their usual brilliant and unique styles and I'm in violent agreement. Actually the first thing that always comes to my mind when I hear the phrase "He Said, She Said" is the greatly under-appreciated Kevin Bacon-Elizabeth Perkins 1991 comedy of the same title. Maybe I'll just sneak out of here early and cue up the dvd player....

Enough said!

You Say Spice, I Say Side Dish

2013-05-17T12:41:00.000-04:00

Dialog tags are for clarity. They're a spice, not a side dish. Not that you'd know that by reading *my* latest draft. But, hey. That's what revisions are for, right?

Jeffe brought up the point about voice. It's a good one. Because not only should the author have a distinct voice, so should each of the characters. If those voices are specific and unique to each major character in a story, What someone says should tell you who said it. This is over and above using action to bracket dialog.

Random example. Sam's a good ole boy getting by on charm. Sarah's a former girly girl who's had to break a few fingernails in order to go on eating.(Facts that would have been established by you in the early course of your story about this pair.)

"I loathe this town and everyone in it."
"Careful, darlin'. I'm in this town, So're you."
"You consider vermin stew to be the height of culinary art. And I'm slogging through the mud and devil's club to find the fluffy little bastards I have to murder to make it. My hate is universal. Where are you going?"
"To haul up a mess of water. Seems to me ain't nothing wrong with you that a soak in a hot bath wouldn't cure. I got to change your mind about hate me, don't I?"
"You just want me naked."
"How else am I going to turn that hate around, darlin'?"

Sure, silly, over the top stuff. But it's to prove the point that the above dialog needed no 'he said', 'she said' tags because the character spoke with different voices. Those should be identifiable anywhere in the story. Not that you won't ever tag someone's dialog. Subtle reminders of who's in a scene are always useful. Especially for me. I'm totally guilty of having several people in a scene, a couple of them start talking and I lose track of the rest of the characters - they vanish into the woodwork.

Whenever you have more than two or three people in a scene, dialog tags are unavoidable. Even if all those people have distinct voices, you'll have to tag or attach someone's dialog to their action.

If someone has something to say aloud in a scene, that someone has a stake in the scene. Otherwise, why say anything? It's easy to see in my random two person snippet above. Sarah's complaining, and maybe longing for a manicure. Her stake is a desire for change. Sam's stake maintaining the status quo - fixing it. In scenes with multiple characters - three or more - every person who speaks must be invested in whatever is going on in that scene. And when people are invested, they care. They lean in. They speak quickly. There's precious little dead air. Tags are going to speed up the verbal battle. Action, unless it's super short and adding to the conflict, will slow it down slightly.

You can control the pace of conflict. Did you ever watch any TV Sitcoms? Especially the ones with several people in the cast - once in a while, they'd gather everyone in the cast together in one scene. Usually one with ultra-high stakes (well, you know, for a sitcom). The dialog flies back and forth. There's barely time for a breath between speakers. The characters interrupt one another and rarely actually deal with whatever problem brought them together in the first place. Tags with little to no action come closest to that pace.

Break a high conflict, fast paced patch of dialog with action in response to something someone says and you can ratchet tension way up (or down - whatever your preference).

In a scene where five friends are arguing over whether Greg should marry his pregnant girlfriend, everyone's talking so fast that Greg can't get a word in edgewise.
"He has to," Larry said.
"Says who?" Marge said.
"Come on, maybe they don't want to . . ." Tony said.
"This isn't about what's best for them anymore! There's a kid," Amy said.
"Stop it!" Greg snapped. "I already asked her to get an abortion."
They froze as if waiting for someone to throw themselves on the verbal grenade Greg had lobbed into the center of the table.

How many names did you actually see when you skimmed through the dialog? No. Really. Don't go back and look. In the initial pass through, I'm betting you saw only Greg's. Because the interesting stuff was what was being said, not who said it, much less how it was said.

See, here's the ultimate secret that three years of acting conservatory and WAY too much money spent on tuition taught me.

What people say is action and conflict and emotion. Tags are directions attempting to dictate how the reader should hear or say the words.

In the end, for me, it doesn't matter whether my characters say, whine, hiss, groan, grumble or moan something. I prefer for those directions to be inherent in the words that came out of my characters' mouths. And it is still very much a work in progress.

I Scream, You Scream. Ice Cream?

2013-05-16T09:00:00.000-04:00

by Allison Pang

I'm probably the worst person to talk to about dialogue tags. (Or beats, if you want to get technical.) My first drafts are full of them. And not the basic "said" either. No...I've got mutters and murmurs and adviseds, agreeds and snorts. Most of the time it's the equivalent of verbal poo. (And completely allowable on the early drafts.)

But once I've finished a draft, I definitely make it a mission to squash a lot of the extra dialogue tags. (Though I admit I've got a passing fondness for mutter.)

Since I tend to write most of my books in 1st person, I really try to temper the "I said" thing. Many people who don't like books in 1st have mentioned it's the constant "I did x" or "I went y" that bothers them the most, so I do my best to keep that in check. There's not much point in adding to that total with additional "I said."

However, one thing I rarely do is a simple "he said" type of tag. It's almost always attached to some form of action = "Blah blah blah," he said, throwing the book onto the table.

But even that usually gets pared down later on. "Blah blah blah." He threw the book onto the table.

(Hopefully it would be more dynamic than that, but you get the point. Both work okay, but I think it makes for a cleaner manuscript if there's some variation.)

And then there's adverbs. I know it's bad manners to use adverbs for dialogue tags. It's considered telling over showing - and for the most part, I agree.

"I hate you," he said angrily.

Meh. That's actually one instance I might choose something else than said - "I hate you," he snapped. But when writing emotions with a lot of punch - anger, passion, sadness...there are so many better ways to display that than just to tell the reader how a character feels.

Crimson flooded his cheeks and he ground his teacup on the table until it shattered. "I hate you."

On the other hand, sometimes adverbs can help give a little nudge into the right mood where you don't need a huge pile of description.

"I know what you mean," he said gently. vs "I know what you mean," he said coldly. Each can work depending on the situation. But don't go overboard and describe the tone of *every* sentence either. You can also change it up a little: "I know what you mean," he said, his voice gentle. (It's probably personal preference as to what works best for you.)

Stay away from crap like:

"I love you," he said lovingly.
or
"Oh my GOD!" she screamed excitedly.

It's extremely grating to read, on several levels. Otherwise, YMMV. :)

dialogue tags

2013-05-15T06:00:00.000-04:00

by Linda Robertson

Dialogue tags.

I agree with my blogmates that a descriptive action is the best way to identify who is speaking while giving something more to the scene. The action can make the words mean more--especially if they are contrary to the words. A calm voice, reserved tone of voice, and a distracting gesture meant to hide the fact that under the table a character is reaching toward a concealed gun shows us that someone (Han Solo in the cantina with Greedo comes to mind...) is about to take action. For that moment before it happens, we tense up--

That all built the character and advanced the story, right?

But sometimes tags are necessary.

In one of my WIPs, I just had a scene where one character is in a doorway, listening unseen to a conversation three others are having. The POV character wasn't observing them, so actions were out and there were three older males talking. The three were new to the reader, but well known to the listening character. How to make them distinct? I considered an accent to make one of the speakers obvious, but theres no accent in prior use in this not-of-earth tale, so that seemed a disingenuous solution. I considered an impediment. I considered nicknames. It all boiled down to identifiying to the reader who was speaking.

In the end I did use "NAME said" a lot. There was no other way around it. It simply had to be that way.

Sometimes that's the way it is.

But its not an excuse to get lazy. It's a call to action, a challenge. How to make the means of identifying them less necessary, and make it blend in when it is used?

I gave each character a distinct opinion, a personal motive that could shine through in the words they chose, building their personality for the reader before they get a 'look' at them,

EXCEPRT:

{Asiel} stood in the chapel doorway, listening. It was a two-story room, and he always met with them in the oratory, a small room off from the upper chapel. Though their voices were hushed, they were not quite whispering and their words carried. He paused to listen.
   "Bad timing, this arrival of our formerly heroic king," Nestor said.
   "Indeed," Ysal agreed. His voice was muffled slightly as if he was eating something.
   "You believe it?" Chandlen sounded incredulous.
   "Of course not."
   "I don’t believe it either," Ysal chimed in. "A man simply does not grow younger. Not even a legend like him."
   "Good," Chandlen said. "At least we agree on that."
   "But I do believe," Nestor added, "that it cannot be a coincidence."
   There was silence for a heartbeat, then Chandlen said, "Go on."
   "The priests of Delea used magic until they were all struck dead. But there is a man in the dungeon that we are told is a living, breathing priest of Delea. How? Why? Why now?" He paused. "Aside from a few who can by will light a candle or chill a pitcher of wine, the only magic left in our kingdom resides in the Cenotaph, in the virgins who keep their monumental sepulcher to honor a dead goddess who mothered their revered Iarratana."
   "You’re drawing a connection to the nursemaid?" Chandlen asked.
   "There is that," Nestor said. "We have long suspected that Rivanen’s matrons want to lay claim to Edgewall to have a foothold here in the capitol. Maybe they have grown impatient. But the use of magic means there is another possibility."
"What?" Ysal asked. "Elves?"
   "Magic renews our hero-king shortly after the boy returns? It is beyond credulity."
   Chandlen pressed, "What are you saying?"
   "I’m saying we must be cautious. We already know the prince is cunning and eager to rule. The sorceress-priestesses could be about to attempt a take-over. Or the elves could be making peace simply to get closer in order to cover their plan of attack."
   "You weary me, Nestor. You see conflict to fear in every deed."
   "And you hand out your trust like a child, Chandlen. Moments ago you were relieved that we agreed this Ghelvok was a fraud."
   "Whether he is a ruse or not is irrelevant. Rumors are spreading even now. If our first king has come back to us, who will oppose him? Will you? Will the people?"
   Asiel was pleased to hear his advisors remained loyal to him, but he kept still, listening.
   Nestor spoke next. "The people will be, and should be, angry that someone tried to take the name of their hero and sully it. We should simply imprison him."
   "We should use him to give the people hope," Chandlen argued.

So, if I did my job in this draft, the dialogue itself means much more to you as a reader, and you came away with a sense of the characters of these old men, as well as having the plot advanced by what they are revealing.

I think the dialogue itself should be so interesting and revealing that the tags are /almost/ unnecessary.

They Don't See "Said," They Said

2013-05-14T08:50:00.000-04:00

Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.

Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.

Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.Said.

The word is a bit like nails on slate. For all the research about the dialogue tag "said" being ignored by the brain, I must be one of the outliers on the grid of results. Not only do I notice "said," I have stabby feelings about the overuse of the word. By "overuse," I mean more than once per chapter. Mostly because it's a cop-out by the author. If the character can't possibly do something whilst speaking that allows for the identification of the speaker, they'd better be frozen in carbonite...and then they wouldn't really be speaking, so ... ya know... again, no really good reason to use "said" more than ...rarely.

That is not to say ~~(see what I did there?)~~ I don't love dialogue tags. I do. I particularly love them when the character who is speaking is out of the line of sight of the POV character (where actions cannot be observed, don'cha know).

More than two characters hashing it out in one conversation? Label that shit. One way or another. I don't want to guess who said that to whom. If it's a botox party and expressions are not physically possible, then bring on the tagging. I'd much rather endure an army of "said" than have to re-read snappy quips trying to figure out who's the genius, who's the ijit, and who's the referee.

When will I absolutely use dialogue tags? I'm a big fan of asides while characters are in a crowd, so there's muttering, mumbling, grumbling, growling (particularly for bestial characters).

I'm such a rebel, I'm not ashamed to throw in the occasional adverb into a dialogue tag when the words being spoken are in contrast to the emotion. Sarcasm, one of the harder things to communicate without incessant eye rolls and drolls.

I admit, there are a few tags to which I have an unhealthy attachment; particularly when I cough up the first draft of a novel. In my current WiP, my protagonist snorted more than a truffle pig. There may have been a side-kick who drawled so much he ought to have seen a doctor about his lack of muscle control.

All-in-all, my go-to for speaker-identification is action amid dialogue. Second-string are the tags that convey emotion. Court of last resort ... "said."

So, dear reader, am I the only one who notices "said" or are a few of you keeping my outlying dot company?

image originally found here: http://theinspiredclassroom.blogspot.com/2011/10/no-more-said.html

You Don't Say

2013-05-13T13:37:00.001-04:00

I used the word “said” 294 times in the complete manuscript for SERENITY FALLS, all 343,843 words. 78 times in CHERRY HILL, which comes in at a light and lively 110, 931 words. That’s actually less than once every thousand words in the course of four books. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that’s probably less than the average writer. I have no proof of that, of course, and I’m certainly not going to waste my time researching it. I have writing to do. It’s not a bad word as words go, but neither is it my favorite. One writer I admire a great deal and consider a trusted friend once told me that I have an issue with the word.

I don’t think he’s wrong, per se, but I don’t completely agree with him either. I don’t like said, talked exclaimed, hollered, snarled, barked, whimpered, screamed (Okay, I DO like the word screamed, but I try not to go too crazy with it.) shrieked, bellowed, whispered or any of those other words, either. I’ll use them if I have to and if they fit, but I prefer finding different ways of indentifying the character speaking. I might have Joe pick up an ashtray and contemplate it before he speaks, because by and large once I’ve identified Joe at the start of the paragraph, the rest is easy. Joe is the center of attention, so I can use that to avoid he said and she said.

It’s a matter of preference, but as a result of the preference, I shall now recuse myself from this particular essay. I will, however, gleefully answer questions and most likely won’t feel obligated to plead the Fifth Amendment in most cases.

Now that the cat is out of the bag I will announce formally that my secret project is an ALIENS novel, one of three coming out to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the ALIEN movie. Tim Lebbon is penning the first of them. Then I write one. Then the three are finished off by Christopher Golden. The stories are related, there are very distinct connections between them, but they are not a trilogy in the truest sense. They are, instead, related stand-alone novels.

I think they're going to be a blast, but to be fair, I have a bias in this case.

I don;t have a cover as yet, but because I like pictures I now offer you the cover to SEVEN FORGES again. What can I say? I like the cover art and I'm a word-whore and therefore perfectly comfortable with pimping the bejesus out of my pending stories.

Oh, and because the series is currently on my mind, here, have an ALIEN picture.

He Said. She Said. We Snorted.

2013-05-12T11:58:00.000-04:00

Ruby releases tomorrow!

Thus I have my Pimping Party Prom dress on and am shamelessly cross-posting this at the Here Be Magic blog as well.

And, to complete the pimpage, here are a couple of reviews posted to today for it here and here. One is also in French, should you care to stretch those neurons you haven't used since high school.

So, this week's topic is "Dialogue Tags: He Said, She Asked, They Exclaimed ... when to use what."

I'm a really bad person to kick off this topic because, if there's one thing my Carina editor, Deb Nemeth, consistently hammers me for, it's dialogue tags. If she and I were married, this would be the one thing she'd say she'd change about me. She'd say it to the marriage counselor with a deep and heartfelt sigh, while I sat on the other corner of the couch, arms folded defensively.

Because I don't WANT to change. I feel like she should love me for who I am.

See, this comment comes directly from my most recent round of edits with her:

Most of the line edits are to correct punctuation surrounding dialogue. You have a habit of punctuating tags as beats and vice-versa. This technical aspect to craft is something I’d appreciate you paying closer attention to when you self-edit book three before sending it in to me, not only because it’s rather time-consuming to make these corrections, but because I’m always afraid the copyeditor and I won’t catch them all. Use the comma + lower case only for bona fide tags, a period + initial cap for beats. Note that laugh, snort, told, said it (as opposed to plain said) are beats, not tags. Let me know if this isn’t clear.

How she hurts me.

Really, I think she'd be happy if I just used "said" a lot more. The thing about "said" as in:

"I hate when you harp on my dialogue tags," she said.

is that our readerly eyes go right over it. It's nearly invisible. Studies have actually shown this. Our brains process what the character expressed and register the "she said" part like punctuation. But you guys know me - I'm just not that sweet and obedient. My characters don't just SAY things - they snort them! They laugh out words and sometimes they hiss them!

(This is another of my editorial world pet-peeves - there's this "rule" that you can't have someone hiss what they're saying unless there are sibilants in the word. So you can have

"Sheer bliss," she hissed.

but not

"Get out," she hissed.

I don't know about you people, but I can totally hiss "get out." I may or may not walk around the house hissing words that my editor inSISTS can't be hissed.

Not that I'm bitter.

Amusingly, one of my publishers - Ellora's Cave - officially reversed their policy on the hissing thing. So my EC characters can hiss anything they damn well want to while my Carina ones can only hiss with sibilants in the words. I don't know where Kensington will weigh in yet.

The upshot for me is, even though my editor - who really does love me in every other way - calls this a craft issue, I view it as an editorial one. Some editors care passionately about dialogue tags, others do not. I had one editor who really disliked parenthetical asides. (You can just imagine how well we got along.)

For me, it's voice, which I'm going to stick to as much as I can. I'll bow to editorial decisions and house style, which is part of being a professional writer, but if I can get away with a bit of dialogue snorting, I'm going to do it every time.

After all, she knew it when she married me.

Eavesdropping

2013-05-11T00:30:00.000-04:00

"Any place is good for eavesdropping, if you know how to eavesdrop." Tom Waits

"There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head." Thornton Wilder

True confession time - I can't recall any instance EVER where something I overheard made it into one of my novels. I love to people watch when I'm out and about and certainly I must have heard any number of clever, funny or OMG-worthy dialog from the real people of the world but...it just doesn't occur to me to jot down notes or even try to remember the bons mot. (Hmm, maybe I need to hang out in a different environment LOL?)

What I do is immediately drift off into imagining people's back story, or what's going to happen to them next, or how things would play out in a novel, so I'm not paying much attention to what they're saying. (If we ever encounter each other at a conference and you sense me crafting an epic novel around you, feel free to recall me to the reality of our actual conversation, ok?)

I do have one novel waiting to be written that's based on actual events and might possibly contain some quotes of things people truly said in the moment. The problem I'm having with writing this, I realized after some fits and starts, is that when I'm writing from reality, my day job brain kicks in and tries to stick too close to the entire reality. The little auditor in my head gets all huffy with my Creative Muse and refuses to let creative license or creative anything take over the narrative. "She didn't actually say that at this point in the week," snarls the auditor. "He went to the emergency room after the vision of the little boy and the dog, not before," he nags. "The Angel of Death didn't actually utter any words when you saw him..."

But if I'm ever going to tell this story, it has to be fictionalized and romance has to occur for the heroine (because trust me, in the real life story this would be based on, there was nothing close to romance). A few things need to be heightened for suspense and others probably need to be toned down. So I need more distance and time from the events, clearly. I wonder if that would happen to me if I tried hanging out in more eavesdropping-friendly spots for a while and then went to write the scenes? Would the inner auditor/critic get all huffy and stifle the creativity, as it has with my one and only based-on-real-events story?

Fortunately I mostly write Ancient Egyptian paranormals (and you can't use modern chitchat there or your editor and your Readers go whaaat did he just say????) or science fiction romance (where I guess I could use juicy things I overheard if I could remember them)...well, so my brain apparently is not wired to use overheard snippets so feel free to talk when I'm in the vicinity! (Which autocorrect tried to make "virginity" but that would be a whole other post.)

Overheard

2013-05-10T12:09:00.003-04:00

I swear I wasn't raised in a barn, that period between 5 and 8 wherein I thought getting up at 5am to help Grandpa milk was cool notwithstanding. Eavesdropping is wrong. I get that, morally. It's never one of those things you mean to do. I'm hoping there a moral difference between intentionally listening in on something you're not meant to hear and overhearing someone's conversation because you're at the next table in the tiny café. If only because it might keep me out of some 'failed to mind her own beeswax' purgatory.

So let's not call it 'eavesdropping' and instead go with the more innocuous 'couldn't help but overhear'.

Now, I started this post Thursday night, like a good blogger should, so I could schedule it to post for you first thing this morning. A little voice (besides the one saying 'go to bed') told me to wait - to finish this post on Friday AM. Now I know why.

I freely admit that the tea shop is where I do most of my - er - overhearing. Yesterday, it was a pair of women writing plays next to me.
     "Is Madeline Island too obscure a reference?" one of the gals asked the other.
     "What? What is it?" her friend returned.
     "It's an island!"
     "Never heard of it. Where is it?"
     "I'll take that as a 'yes'. It's an island in Wisconsin."
     Her friend howled with laughter, choking out something akin to, "Wisconsin? ALL of Wisconsin is too fucking obscure!"
      "Okay. Okay."

This morning, I arrived at the tea shop before it opened. As I locked up my bike, a worker started up a leaf-blower to clean up the sidewalk in front of the restaurant next door. A window above the tea shop opened, not that I noticed until a bare-chested guy stuck half his body out of the window and began bellowing obscenities and threats at the workers.

I don't think I can legally quote the shouting match that resulted. In this case, it wasn't the really colorful words that mattered to me. The workers were, naturally, doing what they'd been paid to do, so they were defensive and inclined to ignore the guy hanging out of the second story window.

He wasn't about to be ignored. He bellowed, full-throated, no holds barred. Rage, yes. But the ragged edge of a heavy metal singer in his voice made it clear he was in extremity. When he slammed the casement shut, I thought that was the end of it.

Wasn't.

He'd put on a pair of jeans before he came storming out of the apartment building door to threaten to call the cops. It didn't stop the leaf-blower. As he turned to go back into the building, he had to pass me. I saw no anger in his face. Just weariness.
     "Do you live here, now, too?" he asked me.
     "No," I said. "I come here to work at the tea shop."
     "What time do they open?"
     "Eight," I said.
     "Those assholes," he muttered, tossing a glare over his shoulder at the workers. "Tried to tell me they started at 8. They started at 7:40."
     I showed him my cell phone. "It's not 8, but I know that outside the city limits, noisy stuff can start at 7 on weekdays. I don't know about inside the city."
     He slumped, nodded and said, "I'm just so tired of not getting a full night's sleep."

Not earth shattering conflict, or anything, but you know I'm already sitting here trying to work out what this guy does that means he's so distraught by being awakened before 8AM. Sure, sure, he could work in a night shift somewhere, but just from having witnessed his anger and despair, I'm thinking serial killer up until 2AM dismembering a victim. Or maybe a spy of some kind who has to catch his rest between missions to save humanity.

Only rarely is it WHAT someone is saying that catches my ear - though I have a list of things I've overheard. I keep those close. They're story prompts. Most of the time, it's tone that catches my attention. Conflict is compelling and when I hear it, I get sucked into actually listening - not because I want into someone else's business. Necessarily. It can be a glimpse into the life of a character, but more than that, I'm interested in what creates conflict between people. What do real people argue about? How do they express themselves? How can I use not the specific conflict, but the tone, the way someone comes at an argument?

The moral of the story seems to be, don't sit next to me at the tea shop. Cause your conversation may be the black hole from which my attention simply cannot escape. You will end up in a book.

From the Mouths of Babes

2013-05-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

by Allison Pang

I'm actually going to be terribly lazy for this particular post. Not because I don't eavesdrop...but because I do.

Every single day.

Now, I don't know how many of you have written child-characters...but if you ever need something to work with, I offer you my daughter's twitter account: Lucy Is Tweeting.

I started it when she was about 3 - and she's 6 now. (Though to be honest, I haven't updated it in quite a while. The follower count has dropped off some as a result, but she used to have a little following.)

It's basically random tweets of things I've overheard her say. And while she has the usual childlike fixation on farts and potty humor, sometimes I'm really pretty boggled.

Honestly, I'm not sure you could actually use these as dialogue and have anyone believe they were real, but hey - here's a few to get you started:

She comes by it honestly, though. >_<

EAVESDROPPING for DIALOGUE!

2013-05-08T06:00:00.000-04:00

by Linda Robertson

{NOTE: Read this post in the voice of favorite announcer. It's better that way...}

Attention Authors!

Have you ever taken your laptop or netbook to a public area to write? If so, YOU could be a contestant on a new game show called: EAVESDROPPING for DIALOGUE!
{This ad/post is complete and utter fiction.}

{Insert canned applause here anyway.}

TURBOLIFT

We send you out into the world, onto crowded elevators (turbolifts), to local coffee shops, to middle-of-nowhere travel plazas, to airports and train stations, even on day trips via bus! We guarantee you’ll get an ear full! By studying the speech patterns and mannerisms of the people around you, you’ll gain ideas for characterization. AND! By giving consideration to clothing style and dialect/accent, you will begin to see past stereotypes.

The trick is going out there alone. You work in a public area, you look busy and you blend into the background. People ignore you as if you aren't even there! They talk while they are in line, either to friends with them, or, even more fun…on the phone to someone elsewhere. You get only one side of the conversation, and get to makeup the rest!

The best incorporation of some quote heard during the show {read “show” as “writing exercise”} gets to remain in the manuscript and becomes a fun little anecdote to tell at conventions.

ACTUAL EXAMPLE: I was standing in line at my local Panera one day, on my phone, talking to a pal who had read a few of my books and was inquiring about Johnny. I suppose the way I was talking about Johnny the people in line around me (who could not resist the temptation to listen/pay attention to my convo because I’m not a particularly loud individual) would assume he was a real live person. “He thinks he’s a rock star, and really for his local area I guess he is, so he’s justified in playing the part.” “Well his tattoos are intimidating. I mean, yes he’s gorgeous and his phone voice is low and sexy and awesome, but the tats make him look fierce being all around his eyes, yanno?” “Yeah, he’s a dirty-minded wit; he always has some innuendo answer.” And at that point she asks about his wolf form, i.e. : Is he sized like a real wolf? The next thing I say is, “No, no. He’s the size of a pony.” At which point the ladies in line around me turned and stared at me.

I have seriously considered a scene with Persephone on the phone somewhere and a similar conversation happening…

And gues who's excited about the upcoming release of

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS???

I Ain't Been Droppin' No Eaves, Sir!

2013-05-07T10:38:00.000-04:00

Ah, dear Samwise Gamgee, I always think of him (and Tolkien) whenever someone mentions eavesdropping. Last week I wrote about accents, slang, and stereotypes. This week, through the magic dropping some eaves, I've examples from the annals of "Oh my god, did you hear that?"

"Can I get me some Tabascee and May-o-naise? This fish ain't got no taste."

Shouted by the immaculately dressed silver-haired lady dining behind me at a foo-foo resort in the Schwartzwald.

"Ma'man, Ma'man, look, zebras."

The toddler boy doing the belly-crawl beneath the occupied stalls in the ladies' room at the movie theater.

"Psht, playa', please. God gave me this ass to balance out my air bags."

Retort to a pick-up line at the ice-cream shop.

"Only an ijit welds a door shut. You dw'ian' to leave your ass in the crack you tried to slide through a goddamn window."

Gear-heads inspecting yet another '69 Charger painted to look like the General Lee.

"TTI!"

Three letters, eight syllables as hissed by a southern Ma'ma to her teenage daughter at the mall. (For those of you not raised by a Belle, "TTI" = "Tuck Your Tail In" aka "Stop walking like a whore.")

There you have my examples of accents, slang, and stereotypes as overheard in my everyday life. What fragments or phrases have you overheard, dear reader, that perfectly paint an image of the speaker?

Eavesdropping into a story

2013-05-05T23:49:00.001-04:00

It’s interesting sometimes, hearing what people say when they don’t realize they have an audience. Mind you, it’s almost as interesting when they DO know they have an audience, but for entirely different reasons.

I absolutely love listening to people. I also tend to think it’s part of the job. I write fiction, and as I’ve said before, I think characters are very likely the most important aspect of that. If a plot is a little crazy, if the situations the characters get into are demented or nearly impossible to get out of, that almost comes with the territory, especially when dealing with the fantastic. But if they characters feel false, the rest of the story is likely to fall on its face. And just as likely to break something in the fall, I might add.

Think about it: that truck driver with the drinking problem who barely graduated high school and hasn’t read anything stronger than a copy of the National Enquirer in years? If he starts talking like a valedictorian from the Harvard School of Law without a damned good reason, it’s going to likely knock the reader right out of the story. As I have said before and likely will again, that is one of the biggest sins for me. Make the characters breathe and live and the rest will at least seem a bit easier, both for the writer and the reader.

I have pointed out before and will again a situation I ran across once. I was proofreading another writer’s work and enjoying the story. The action was good, the plot was solid and the characters were interesting enough. But as I was enjoying a tale of two wizards duking it out in a mystical battle, one of the two magic users who is supposed to be engaged in a battle of life and death proportions pauses long enough to say something along the lines of “Ah, I see you’ve decided to cast a Sphere of Doom” or the equivalent there of.

Seriously. Have you ever been in a fight? If you’re sparring with someone in a light contact match or you’re teaching someone how to throw a punch, you MIGHT consider pausing to comment on their choice of attacks. In a real life and death situation, it’s not going to happen. It’s just not. The odds are good you aren’t going to be admiring the style of the spell someone is casting if that someone is trying to blow your head off your shoulders. That’s the equivalent of looking at the handgun your enemy is aiming at your face and saying, “Damn, that’s a mighty fine .357 you have there. Good job on keeping it polished. Say, are those hollow points you’re firing at me? Or are those glazer rounds?” Sorry, too busy not getting dead to offer praise.

In his defense the writer in question had never been in a serious fight. We discussed the matter. I believe the writer agreed with me and took out the line. Believability required a change in the dialogue. I have no doubt I’ve made similar errors over time and been schooled on them. It’s easy to get too caught up in what might sound good at the moment. When I’m in doubt, I read the lines out loud to see if they ring true. If they fail, I change them.

That said, let’s consider a few things I’ve heard. Some of which, for the record, might well end up in a book if they haven’t already. One of my personal favorites was second hand: man I know quite well (and that I know is capable of handling himself in a serious fight) took a look at a complete stranger parking in a handicapped parking spot. The gent who was parking was not handicapped and did not have any reason to use that spot except that it was convenient. When he exited the car the capable fighter looked at him and asked, “Excuse me, are you handicapped?”

The fellow he was speaking to looked around and shook his head.

And the capable fighter smiled and asked, “Would you like to be?” A moment later the man he was speaking to parked his car in an area more appropriate to someone who is physically capable of walking without any difficulties.

Yeah. I totally stole that for a book. I made significant changes, but I stole it.

The thing I love most about conversations is that they can fire your imagination. Not just the words, but the situations that might bring those words around. Words spoken in anger and remembered later have a solid potence to them that can be haunting. I used a line once that I know I’d heard before and it took me a while to remember where I’d heard it. The line came from one of my coworkers who was reciting something he’d heard when he was a kid. He had to translate it from his native tongue but it basically came down to, “You’re going to have a hard time picking up your shattered teeth with your broken fingers.” That’s just vivid. Of course I had to use it. I changed it a bit, because that’s the nature of the beast. We work with what we remember and we take dramatic license.

The dialogue we use (or misuse) ideally reflects the characters we create, at least as much as their physical descriptions and the clothes they wear. And sometimes it takes a while for that dialogue to find a place where it fits.

A snippet I heard earlier tonight while I was out. From near the front registers I heard a man in his mid-thirties say to another man behind the line, “I’d say there’s a decent chance I’m going to jail tonight.” I’d been there long enough to know first that the line was absolutely unrelated to anything they’d been saying before that, and by the tone of his voice I knew he was joking. I took a look out the drive through window and could see well enough to know that he was referring to the woman driving the car at the window. She was most likely no older than eighteen. She could have been a little younger. Oh, before you go getting offended know that he was joking and that it was meant as a compliment. But it was a delightfully subtle way of being improper in a situation where no comments would likely be heard (I’m good at eavesdropping) and without any true vulgarity. Believe me, I’ve heard substantially worse and decidedly less imaginative lines from any number of teenagers both who worked with me and who were unaware that I was paying attention. I feel confident that the line above would have gone over the heads of a lot of teenagers, which was what I found so amusing about the situation.

Will I ever have a reason to use that line in a book? I have no idea. But it’s there and I remember it and right now, if I had a character who was appreciating a woman who was far too young, I might very well steal that line. Why? Because it’s real and it’s got personality. And that’s important in my book. It could easily help define a character without having to describe the very same. One more little step in trying to convince my readers that my words are more than make believe

Conversation Snippets from #RT13

2013-05-05T10:54:00.000-04:00

I had this vague idea that I would write this blog post ahead of time - before I left for the RT Convention.

Ha.

Then, I thought, oh - I'll do it sometime during the week, when I have some down time.

Ha!

So, here I am, about to fly home and writing up this post about overheard conversation that makes it into books. Fortunately a readers and writers conference is ripe for eavesdropping. I don't have the brainpower to think about the whole "transforming it into literary dialogue" aspect, but I do have some great lines.

"I'm really more of a visual eavesdropper."

"I get drunk and pitch other people's books - what is WRONG with me??"

"But does the little boy *have* to be deaf?"

"What's my book about? Fighting, fucking and fireballs." (This last from Kailynn Jones, who got six manuscript requests after we told her she should absolutely use this "joke" line when pitching.)

"Every time I read about people having sex on the beach, I'm just imagining all those intimate places and getting sand out - know what I mean?"

"Do you have a card?"
"A credit card?"
"No! A business card."
"Oh, I thought you wanted me to pay for your drink!"

"Hey! That champagne bottle is to be shared with the WHOLE table!" (Accompanied by seizure of said bottle and placement of it next to her plate.)

"There are not enough gifs in the world to express the state my inner 13 year-old fan girl was in."

"I just met [insert any number of names here] - I was so excited I may have squirted."

Yeah....it is that kind of conference.

See you all on the flip side!

Can I give you my slang with no accent and avoid stereotypes?

2013-05-04T00:30:00.000-04:00

I started life with a New York accent but lost that so long ago, I couldn’t recapture it today if I tried. We moved to Alabama when I was starting seventh grade and I’m sure the teenage desire to fit in had something to do with how fast I embraced the Southern accent. Now I have a California accent (or so my Maine cousins and my Alabama friends tell me LOL)…whatever that may be. But when I fly back to Alabama, my joke is that I reacquire my twang in-between exiting the airplane and reclaiming my baggage. And I speak Russian with a Czechoslovakian accent, when I can remember any of it from long ago college days. (The prof was from guess where?) For a brief time I had a distinct Valley Girl thing going on because my assistant was a bona fide ValGal and we spent hours every week together in a small office. Totally gag me with a spoon - bitchin! My Boss and also my Husband requested I STOP.

I don’t however, enjoy reading books laden with accents or dialect. I never knew why until I read James’s post on Monday – yup, he’s right, it takes me right out of the story and I just get annoyed. I’m sure over the years I’ve missed out on countless wonderful adventures and much romance set in Scotland because after about one “Aye, lassie” I was DONE. My loss, I’m sure! And no offense intended to those who write and read those wonderful books!

Another stumbling block for me is any book where I first must plow through a tutorial on all the carefully-thought-out, intense world building the author has done which requires me to learn an entire new language in 30 pages, so I’ll “get” the slang and know that a fxlpgh outranks a wndlr and rides a gsilvbn. Sorry, my bad, can’t hack that either. I willing peruse books with extensive footnotes and glossary only when I’m researching. I do love the books where the novels and the world-specific details are organically presented as the story rolls along, and you can infer the meaning from the context. I thrive on Anne McCaffrey's Pern and Robin D. Owens Celta, for example.

I think when it’s been really well done the invented slang actually becomes part of the day to day language, among the fans of that fictional world anyway. “Fracking” and “frell” are still used in my house to this day (thank you “Battlestar Galactica” and “Farscape”!) A recent Den of Geek interview with Liam McIntyre, star of “Spartacus: War of the Damned” touched on this:

DoG: The show’s idiosyncratic language is one of the things that makes it great – have you found yourself saying things like “gratitude” when off set?

LM: Little words do creep in, so yes, I don’t say thank you so much as I say gratitude any more, and you start saying apologies because you’re late for something instead of sorry. And then you notice other people are saying it too, and it’s like a little club, and anyone who doesn’t understand you just doesn’t get it.

I write in two wildly varying time frames – ancient and far future. In both eras people do say “fuck” because I figure that’s kind of an eternal word for human beings. I didn’t develop too much snazzy slang for the science fiction universe, although there is some. For the Ancient Egyptian, I’ve got tomes and tomes of books on the poems, songs and fragments of papyri that have been translated. While interesting and beautiful, the scholarly work doesn’t really convey the slang of the everyday person, so I’ve invented a few that seem reasonable to me – “Set’s teeth” is one my warriors seem to utter fairly often.

And to finish out the week’s topic, here are a few quotes I liked about the evils of stereotyping:

“Normally you read a screenplay – and I read a lot of them – and the characters don’t feel like people. They feel like plot devices or clichés or stereotypes.” Joseph Gordon-Levitt

“Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.”

Margaret Mead

“People are much deeper than stereotypes. That's the first place our minds go. Then you get to know them and you hear their stories, and you say, 'I'd have never guessed.' “ Carson Kressley

Dialect Tools

2013-05-03T12:14:00.002-04:00

Early this week, Jeffe mentioned actors and the training we receive in dealing with dialects. It is extensive, immersive work. We even learned an entire alphabet to help us mark our scripts so we could learn our lines with the dialect. For acting purposes, there's a neutral dialect (the west coat of the US - theory has it this is where words are said with the least phonetic morphing of the sounds.)
From that ideal neutral, each dialect in the world changes the sounds of letters a specific way. Using the phonetic alphabet, actors can teach themselves a specific accent. Terrific, right? It brings up a couple of problems especially for writers.

Accents are meant to be heard, not read - in a play, a dialect is music. In the written word, it's nails on a chalkboard. See James's H.P. Lovecraft example if you need proof.
For actors AND for writers, the phonetic alphabet only tells you how word sounds change - think aboot rather than about. There's a whole other aspect to dialect that actors cannot actually write into their scripts unless they have music training. It's a couple of concepts called cadence and tonality.

Cadence and tonality talk about the musical aspect of a dialect. This covers inflection patterns - where speech and tone of voice rise and fall. For actors, musical marks give us a way to get at that. Authors are limited to sentence length, word choice, and word order. Those are powerful tools, too, so don't despair because there is a point in here. I promise. To capture the music of an accent, actors must listen to a native speaker (who is subsequently speaking the actor's language). Most libraries have tapes or dvds or mp3s specifically for this purpose. Yay for actors. Authors don't get to do that much, because, you know, we don't write with musical marks.

Here's the point I took so long to get to: All of us know what an accent is. All of us, unless we've been living under a rock with no internet connection, have heard all kinds of dialect. Southern, Bronx, Aussie, British, Irish, Scottish, Slavic, Asian, you name it, we've all probably heard it. As an actor, my job is to reproduce that accent so well that a native will mistake me for a fellow countryman. Your job as an author is the exact opposite.

There's a story about an interview with Lawrence Olivier wherein he said it wasn't his job as an actor to feel anything. It was his job to make YOU feel everything. Perfect description, I think, of writing dialect. An author's job isn't to dictate what she hears in her head to her readers - it's to suggest just enough dialect that the readers hear dialect for themselves.

The best tool for hearing dialect? Movies, TV and Youtube. Americans have a tremendous resource in the BBC because there you have native speakers from all over the world. You can hear the music, the word choices, how sounds change. Youtube has videos from people all over the planet and you have immediate access to hearing speech patterns from just about anywhere. Where this falls down is in historical contexts because every historical period had its own dialect. Shakespeare, obviously, but also very notably the Regency...but that's another issue entirely. If you care about that, look at plays from the period. The speech patterns are very different from what we're accustomed to.

However. This stuff is research and backstory. It needs to be done and then it needs to be nearly invisible. Hint at these speech patterns in writing - preferably with word choice, regionalisms, and intonation rather than with dropping every g or all the r's in someone's dialog. Otherwise, you aren't trusting your reader.

Slang-a-lang-a-ding-dong

2013-05-02T09:00:00.000-04:00

by Allison Pang

In the interest of NOT repeating some of the fabulous advice put forth by my fellow word-whores, I'm going to concentrate on looking at some resources that might be helpful to writers who are looking for some new words with which to flavor their writing.

That being said, I couldn't resist throwing in this little scene from the last Austin Powers movie - which is a perfect example of how not to write your slang. (Tho it depends on your audience and what you're going for - it's obviously a joke here.)

As a bit of history - writing/reading accents doesn't bother me much - though I think it sometimes depends on the book. Anyone who's read a lot of the SF/F genre is probably pretty familiar with the mega epics with their own dictionaries in the back. (Everything from Pern to Wheel of Time, yo. Though it always amuses me when it comes to swear words. "Shards!" or "Blood and bloody ashes!" While I get that it's meant to immerse us more fully in the world and make swearing more palatable for some readers, I also sometimes really think a regular old "fuck" would work just as well. )

My earliest memory of reading an accented dialogue would have been The Secret Garden - which if anyone recalls Dickon - I believe he and his sister spoke with a Yorkshire dialect. And whereas that might have been confusing to a 10-year-old, it was handled beautifully because they explained the meaning of those words and phrases to Mary, who couldn't understand them. Thus, the readers learned as she did, and it felt a little more like we were all sharing in the secret of the story.

Sometimes that approach can come off a bit contrived, though - hence the dictionaries mentioned above.

At any rate - I've got two books that I've found immensely useful for my current project - I've got a main character who's a bit of a street rat in an alternate universe, so I was looking for a way to work in some terminology that sounded authentic. (But again, as noted in previous posts - slang is a spice - use it with caution.)

The first book is Slang Down the Ages. I wrote a post about this book on my own blog a couple of years ago, but it's worth talking about here again.

There’s the usual suspects dealing with sex, male and female body parts, bodily functions and insults – but there’s also some great stuff about different types of food, speech, clothing, death and some of the more common types of jobs (including prostitution).

Now, a small word of warning – there are several chapters dealing with different ethnic groups and sexual orientations. A lot of it is offensive to the more modern day sensibilities – although I suppose that’s pretty much the point when it comes to slang. On the other hand, the author doesn’t really skip anyone, so it’s not like anyone is getting singled out for mockery.

The author is also good enough to put down what century a particular word or phrase may have originated from, which is perfect if you are doing a historical novel and you don’t want to get dinged for accuracy.

The other book I use is the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. It's set up a little differently than the slang book, simply because it *is* a dictionary.

Essentially it’s a compilation of slang used back in the day – circa 1790 to 1820. You’ll find bits of peasant cant, Romany and just the conversational words used by the average everyday Joe of the moment.

And yes, some of the words *are* vulgar, but it’s interesting to see the history of the English language and how much of it is still used today (and with the same connotations.)

You can find it over at the Gutenberg Project for a quick look through electronically, or buy one of the many versions out at Amazon. (If you click the link you’ll find it in both hard cover and paper back, and I think it’s also out for the Kindle, as well.)

Accent-tual Dialogue

2013-05-01T06:00:00.000-04:00

by Linda Robertson

Hey y'all! Happy May!

I grew up in Ohio with family from regions south. Sometimes folks ask me if I'm from West Virgina. I don't think I have much of an accent, though I know I've adopted a few words and phrases that reveal the family tree.

That said, I've always liked listening to the lilt of people's accents. I've had friends from Wisconsin who sounded similar to folks I knew in Canada at the little camp ground we visited when I was a kid. I've visited places where the accents are undeniable, South Ca-lina and Gaw-ja, I'm talking about you.

I like trying to talk in different accents. And while yes this includes the distinctive tones of Sarcasm and Pirate, I am mostly refering to actual location-specific tones. My handsome fella lived in Italy for a few years and had acquaintances from Ireland. He can mimic those accents quite convincingly. My son does a pretty good rendition of Cockney and he and I spent a whole day being 'British' on our vacation. At least we did until the younger son decided to out us on the boardwalk by shouting, "Will you two STOP that? WE. ARE. AMERICANS!"

I say all that to say this: I love accents. And yes, I use them in my books. Here are two examples:

EXCERPT from WICKED CIRCLE
(#5 Persephone Alcmedi series)

     A tall woman appeared in the doorway. She had short, spiky black hair and a beautiful oval face that didn’t have a brush of makeup on it. Because Zhan usually wore business casual, I had expected similar of the new sentinel. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
     Ivanka wore a khaki green T-shirt and military fatigues. Add combat boots and a handgun on each hip, and the zero-percent-body-fat military bodyguard ensemble was complete. Her muscular shoulders and bulging arms dominated her appearance. She had a single backpack and a stuffed GNC bag.
     It was shitty of me, but I couldn’t help wondering if she’d ever been part of some Russian super-soldier experiment.
     “Erus Veneficus Persephone Alcmedi, this is Ivanka Chernov. Ivanka, this is your E.V.”
     Ivanka sat her bags on the floor, lowered herself to one knee and bowed her head. Then she stood and mimed shooting a gun. “I have ninety-eight-point-four percent accuracy with revolver.” Her accent was thick. “I have black belt and run mile in three minutes, forty-two seconds.”
     “That’s all very impressive, Ivanka.”
     She pointed at the nutrition store bag. “I fix own meals, and clean up. I sleep little, talk less. All I ask is three personal hours every day for strength training. This work for you?”
     “Yes. You’ll do just fine.”

EXCERPT from SHATTERED CIRCLE (#6 Persephone Alcmedi series)
     "What are you doing here?” Johnny asked Jacques Lippencot Plympton.
     In the meager light from a slightly opened curtain, the diviza’s wrinkles deepened as he squinted. “Because I’ve heard me a rumor.”
     “What rumor?”
     “That our dear Aurelia has joined the ranks of the dead.”
     Johnny didn’t answer. He didn’t even move.
     Plympton sat forward and rubbed his hands together.
     “Betcha you’re a-wonderin’ who told me.”
     The moment wore on in silence, then Plympton laughed.
     “Well, c’mon in, m’boy. We have oodles to discuss...and besides, you’re a-lettin’ the draft in. I’m not fond of your northern November weather.”
     Johnny reached for the light switch.
     Plympton made a sound, one decidedly disapproving note, that stopped him. “Better to leave the lights off.”
     “Why?”
     “You’ll have been seen a-entering the hotel. If these lights come on, that’ll only confirm that you’ve a-come to her room while she’s out.”
     Johnny let the door shut behind him but he stayed near it. “Who’s watching this room?” As he spoke he sensed around the room. No one else was here. His eyes had already adjusted to the darkness.
     “Maybe several people.” Plympton shrugged. “Maybe
no one.”
     “Why would anyone watch her room?”
     As the diviza sat back in his chair, he was again in the slightly brighter portion of the room. It made his hair seem like a ghostly halo about his head. “Some like to watch lovely women. Some keep an eye on their friends. Some monitor their enemies. Others enjoy a-studying the ways of shit-stirrers like her.”

Now I think the key to using accents, in written form, is to keep it natural, simple and clear. You're telling a story and you don't want your reader to stop their continuous scan to try and decipher just what it is the character is saying. An accent is a layer of a character, something that helps define them like an accessory. Use it enough for the reader to understand this is a part of who the character is, but use it sparingly enough that it doesn't overwhelm the reader or override the character. If the reader gets the gist of what you're giving them, they will hear the accent in their head when that character speaks. If that's the case, you've done your job.

Y'All Come Back, Nawh, Ya Wee Lassies, Aiiight?

2013-04-30T09:05:00.001-04:00

Accents, Slang, & Stereotypes -- Yes? No? Who Cares? And Where's The Lynching Rope?

1. Accents
Writing with accents is kind of like cooking with essential oils. A little bit goes a very long way. One drop of cinnamon oil is enough to give a standard pot of icing a recognizable flavor. Three drops and your guests will demand a glass of milk to wash away the burn. Six drops and you'll be sent to GTMO for chemical terrorism.

Yesterday, James showed spectacular instances of how to do them right and how they've been done so very, very wrong. Go read them.

2. Slang
Today's slang is tomorrow's shame. Do you remember when "Shawty" and "Hot Mess" were the ~~coolest~~ hippest things to say? If you have tweenagers then you know merely uttering "dawg," "bling," or "that's so yesterday," will earn you at least an eye-roll if not a room-evacuation. The only good time to use slang in a novel is if you are writing a historical and using historically-accurate colloquialisms. Even though the era of near-instant publishing allows you to ride the wakes of today's popular slang, why hard-code an expiration date into your novel?

3. Stereotypes
Here's a topic for which I am likely to be keelhauled. I could write a tome about stereotypes, the culture wars, and the impact on art. The short version is this: the backlash against novelists using stereotypes in their work is less about challenging authors to break moulds and more about the reader searching for reasons to pan -- not the book -- but author for not yielding to reader's real-world social concerns. If all authors heeded the hue and cry, there would never be another smart Asian, gay designer, or fat white villain shaped by words on a page. That would be a pity, because every person has many relationships with all sorts of stereotypes -- good, bad, or gloriously tumultuous. Authors count on those relationships -- on those instant and visceral emotional bonds -- to hook the reader. Naturally, a writer can develop a character beyond the stereotype if it suits the plot or they can belabor the stereotype because the character development is happening in the surrounding cast as a result of the lack of change. Still with me? All right, I said I'd let this be the short version. Super short version is that stereotypes are functional and should not be feared.

And so, dear readers, there you have my opinions on transgressions real and over-hyped. Agree? Disagree? Out hunting for the perfect hangin' tree?

Short Cuts: Stereotypes, Accents and Slang.

2013-04-29T00:17:00.000-04:00

That’s a fairly broad subject we have this time, but that’s okay. They happen to be moderately related and to a certain extent are things I’m passionate about. Actually, as a general rule I’m passionate about writing. That’s sort of the main reason I chose it as a career.

I’m going to break this down rather simply. Rather, because it’s not exactly a simple topic, is it?

Still, we must try.

So, to begin with, what do all three of these things have in common? My answer (You’ll find the answer varies as much as fingerprints, I suspect) is simply this: They’re great cheats for moving a story forward.

What do I mean? Well, I mean that all three are methods that a storyteller can use (or MISuse) in order to progress the story without resorting directly to narrative voice. Jeffe basically said the same thing, but she said it more eloquently. I’m not notoriously eloquent. I tend to use the sledgehammer across the shin method of getting my point across. You’ve probably already noticed that.

We’ll start with accents. I rather like accents. One of my favorite sayings when I was growing up came from my mother who often said, “You should never make fun of a person with a foreign accent. They know at least one more language than you do.” There’s a certain element of truth to that. To be fair, if you’re living in Atlanta and the person talking to you speaks with a British accent, they actually know the same language, but likely know at least one more dialect. Her point was not lost of me, however. The fact of the matter is that MOST foreign accents indicate a knowledge of at least one more language and most of the people who would be making fun of said foreign accent would not know more than one language because if they did they’d know how damned challenging it is to learn the second, third or fourth new one. So her point is still a valid one.

Accents are wonderful. They can indicate a lot. Want to know who does a great job with accents by and large? Stephen King. Why? Because he doesn’t beat you over the head with the differences. Instead he gives a few examples and moves on. One of my favorites was pointing out the depth of a Maine accent by describing how a character in PET SEMETARY tended towards saying “ayuh,” instead of “yes.” It was direct and short and sweet.

Want to see one of the worst examples that I, personally, have ever seen of going too damned far with an accent? Well, here it comes. Because I want to be mostly kind, I will italicize the entire affair so you can skip it if it starts hurting your eyes and brain.

Here we go:

"Thar's whar it all begun - that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep water starts. Gate o' hell - sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin'-line kin tech. Ol' Cap'n Obed done it - him that faound aout more'n was good fer him in the Saouth Sea islands.

"Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin' off, mills losin' business - even the new ones - an' the best of our menfolks kilt aprivateerin' in the War of 1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an' the Ranger scow - both on 'em Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat - brigantine Columby, brig Hefty, an' barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as kep' on with the East-Injy an' Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's barkentine Malay Bride made a venter as late as twenty-eight.

"Never was nobody like Cap'n Obed - old limb o' Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him a-tellin' abaout furren parts, an' callin' all the folks stupid for goin' to Christian meetin' an' bearin' their burdns meek an' lowly. Says they'd orter git better gods like some o' the folks in the Injies - gods as ud bring 'em good fishin' in return for their sacrifices, an' ud reely answer folks's prayers.

"Matt Eliot his fust mate, talked a lot too, only he was again' folks's doin' any heathen things. Told abaout an island east of Othaheite whar they was a lot o' stone ruins older'n anybody knew anying abaout, kind o' like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carven's of faces that looked like the big statues on Easter Island. Thar was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar they was other ruins with diff'rent carvin' - ruins all wore away like they'd ben under the sea onct, an' with picters of awful monsters all over 'em.

"Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives anound thar had all the fish they cud ketch, an' sported bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs made aout o' a queer kind o' gold an' covered with picters o' monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on the little island - sorter fish-like frogs or froglike fishes that was drawed in all kinds o' positions likes they was human bein's. Nobody cud get aout o' them whar they got all the stuff, an' all the other natives wondered haow they managed to find fish in plenty even when the very next island had lean pickin's. Matt he got to wonderon' too an' so did Cap'n Obed. Obed he notices, besides, that lots of the hn'some young folks ud drop aout o' sight fer good from year to year, an' that they wan't many old folks around. Also, he thinks some of the folks looked dinned queer even for Kanakys.

"It took Obed to git the truth aout o' them heathen. I dun't know haow he done it, but be begun by tradin' fer the gold-like things they wore. Ast 'em whar they come from, an' ef they cud git more, an' finally wormed the story aout o' the old chief -- Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the old yeller devil, but the Cap'n cud read folks like they was books. Heh, heh! Nobody never believes me naow when I tell 'em, an' I dun't s'pose you will, young feller - though come to look at ye, ye hev kind o' got them sharp-readin' eyes like Obed had."

The old man's whisper grew fainter, and I found myself shuddering at the terrible and sincere portentousness of his intonation, even though I knew his tale could be nothing but drunken phantasy.

"Wal, Sir, Obed he 'lart that they's things on this arth as most folks never heerd about - an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear. lt seems these Kanakys was sacrificin' heaps o' their young men an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that lived under the sea, an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return. They met the things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an' it seems them awful picters o' frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters o' these things. Mebbe they was the kind o' critters as got all the mermaid stories an' sech started.”

See? That was painful for me I get the point and it works well enough, but reading that and having to interpret what the drunken, old, New England fisherman is talking about was enough to knock me out of the story. It broke my first cardinal rule of fiction: Thou Shalt Not Break The Suspension Of Disbelief. Seriously, that’s a big one for me. I write fantastic fiction. I don’t mean the prose is fantastic, though I hope it is, I mean I write fiction about fantastical things that are never likely to actually exist in our world. I’m already begging a favor of the readers. I’m asking them to go along with my fairytale. The last thing I want to do, then, is push that even harder than I’m going to push with the narrative. For that reason I prefer the idea of a quick example. The slice I’ve put up above is from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” It’s one of my favorite stories of all time from one of my favorite writers. Yes, I know a lot of people couldn’t care for his writing, but to me he’s like cheese or wine: he’s an acquired taste. Very few people start off liking sharp cheeses or dry wines. You kind of have to work your way up to them. But I mean it. I love that story. And I loathe that narrative, because I have to strain to translate the entire thing.

Here’s the first paragraph again. This time, when it’s done, I’ll translate to see if I make my point clearly. (Yeah, I know, too late.)

And now in English:

“There’s where it all began – that cursed place of all wickedness where the deep water starts. Gate of hell – sheer drop down to a bottom no sounding-line can touch. Old Captain Obed did it – he that found out more than was good for him in the South Sea Islands.”

See? The way Lovecraft designed it the character’s accent makes a difference. But you know what? I can get that merely from the meter of the words without the endless, forced accent to slow down and stilt that conversational voice. Again, we’re talking one of my all time favorite stories here. How much do I like it? I wrote a sequel called DEEPER and I’ll soon be working on a sequel to that called FROM A LOWER DEEP. That’s how much.

To my way of thinking, however, Lovecraft broke that sacred rule of mine. I want readers to get lost in my words, to forget that they’re reading and become one with the story. I might never succeed, but I that’s what I want. For that reason, accents should be mentioned, much like seasonings should be added to what you are cooking to increase the flavor. But when you add too much salt to your beef stock, you stop tasting the beef and the vegetables and all you taste is the salt. Everything in moderation.

Slang is the same way for me.

Listen, I tend to write about regions. Most of us do. Currently I’m working on a series of books with Charles R. Rutledge that are set in the rural areas north of Atlanta. Believe me, slang is a part of it. It always will be I suspect. Some of the slang is endearing, some annoying, and all of it, if used properly, becomes as much a character in the story as the characters. When I write about fictitious towns (and mostly I do) I want the readers to feel like they could stop in at the local store and find what they’re looking for with ease. Like they would have no problem chatting away with the local sheriff. But I want it to be easy. For the exact same reason that I don’t go crazy with accents, I don’t want to bog down the story with details about the local eccentricities and quirks.

So, here’s a quick example from one of those books, CONGREGATIONS OF THE DEAD. The idea here to is to progress the story with narrative and dialogue both. Hopefully I managed. A good deal of what is here is dialogue. If I’ve done my job well enough, you’ll get a bit of the personalities from that dialogue. I didn’t go overboard with the colloquialisms and slang, but they’re there. Once again, for the sake of sanity, the section being added is in italics, the better to skip it if you so desire.

Carl saw the question on Wade’s face and was grateful for the silence. Most times he wanted advice, he asked Wade. This time, however, he already knew the answer.

Say, Wade, Tammy’s back in town and making noises like she’d like to be friends. What should I do?

Why, Carl, I think you should shoot the bitch and bury the body after the last four times she’s walked all over you and then left me to help pick up the pieces.

Okay, that wouldn’t actually be what Wade would say because despite common rumors, Wade could be very polite when he wanted. But that would be the sentiment. He knew Wade well enough that he didn’t have to ask. More importantly, he knew that Wade was right.

It was just his damned heart that kept squirming around in his chest and looking for a way to make things work out.

His phone rang. Saved by the bell.

“Carl Price. How can I help you?”

“Hey, Carl! This is Travis!” Travis Cobb was a tech down at the forensics lab. He was a nice enough kid but a little too enthusiastic when it came to talking about the morbid shit in his job. That was okay. It worked to Carl’s benefit and he was so enthusiastic that Carl remained mostly sure he wasn't actually involved in any of the dirty work himself. Mostly.

“What’s up, Travis?” he put on his happy voice.

“Got an ID for the guy you brought in this morning. You know, Broke Back Mountain?”

Sense of humor needed work. Had that comment gone out on the radio he and the boy would have had a serious talk. As it was over a phone line instead, Carl let it slide.

“So what do you have?”

“The man’s name is Vincent Fowler. He’s got a long rap sheet, mostly for trafficking in drugs and a few for prostitution. Not him. He likes to hire young girls.”

Carl nodded. He’d find out for himself but he wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Tadpole hung around with the man.

“Thanks, Travis.”

“Want to tell me what’s going on?”

No.

“Can’t do it, Travis. I don’t even know myself.”

“Well if you need someone to take notes….”

Hell would freeze over first. “I’ll keep it in mind, Travis. Thanks.”

More notes to himself. There was a nagging feeling that he was missing something and it was bothering the hell out of him. He hated feeling out of the loop, especially inside his own head.

The sky overhead was dark enough that it looked like nighttime. The clouds were gathering and festering. There would be rain soon, and that was a plus. Maybe a good storm would calm down the insane heat.

He jotted Lazarus Cotton on his pad. After that he put down the name of the dead man. The next line on the paper was photo shop. That was it. He looked at the two words and then aimed himself back toward Wellman. He needed to have a look around the studio of Corey Phillips. Keeping one eye on the road he typed the man’s name into the keyboard mounted inside the truck’s cabin and let the miracles of modern science play their games. Nothing. The man was clean. No record worth noticing.

Then he typed in Ellie Campbell’s name. She had allegedly reported the family to DFACS and he needed to know what she had reported. The records weren’t showing up in his system, and that meant he needed to talk to the woman himself.

Finding her wasn’t hard. Her full name was Eloise May Campbell.

She answered when he rang the doorbell and introduced himself. The woman who looked at him smiled warmly and looked up at him with hazel eyes. She had a very nice smile on her round face. “Well look who it is.”

Carl managed to avoid frowning. Her face clicked into his mental database, but there had been changes. He vaguely remembered a mousy little brown-haired girl in high school who went by the name Ellie May. It turned out that they were one and the same. The differences were substantial. The grown up version had filled out, had a couple of kids and was confident enough to look him in the eyes. The girl in high school had blushed when any male looked in her direction. She’d been pretty enough in high school, but now that she was older and actually had a bit of confidence, she was beautiful. It was amazing how that happened sometimes. He’d have never expected the girl he saw in the halls to become an attractive woman. Then again, to be fair, he hadn’t thought of her in years.

“Been an awfully long time, Ellie.”

“Longer than I want to remember.” She chuckled. She had a nice, relaxed laugh. “What can I do for the sheriff today? You trolling for votes already?”

He caught himself blushing. “No, still got a while before I do the door to door stuff for that. I’m actually here about a complaint you filed a while ago. He lowered his voice just in case anyone might be listening. “You reported a couple of people to DFACS?”

Ellie shook her head and gestured for him to come inside, but she didn’t seem the least bit worried. “You’re gonna have to do better than that, Carl. I report a lot of folks to DFACS. It’s part of my job.”

He nodded his head and stepped inside. There were several pictures on the hallway walls of Ellie and a man who was likely her husband, and a couple of kids who progressed through infancy to preteen years in the span of the dozen or so pictures. The man was nice enough looking, but bland. The kids were kids. All kids were cute in photos. Long as they weren’t doing something deeply stupid or illegal, that is.

“Well, the couple I’m talking about is Corey and Sarah Phillips. They have a little girl named Amber?”

All the pretty faded from Ellie’s face and she got a nasty expression that made him reassess her completely for the second time in as many minutes. “Oh, I know the ones you mean.”

“Listen, can you tell me what that was about? I couldn’t find any information except that there had been a report once upon a time.”

“That’s because there were threats of lawsuits.”

Carl frowned. “Lawsuits? For what?”

“Slander.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head even as she walked into the kitchen and came back a moment later with a very, very large glass of iced tea. She didn’t ask if he wanted it, but instead just handed it to him. On the table was a matching glass, which she reached for as soon as he’d taken his. He nodded his gratitude and took a sip of the overly sweetened fluids. Southern iced tea was always overwhelmingly sweet, as if to compensate for the insane heat outside.

“Slander? What did you say about them?”

“Only what their little girl had told me.” She had a scowl on her pretty face. She pushed it aside. “She told me that her daddy liked to take pictures of her in the nude. Playing with things that no little girl should play with.”

“Child pornography?” He felt his skin tighten.

“That was the accusation. There was no evidence to be found and the Phllipses had a really good lawyer.”

“Yeah?”

She nodded her head and took a sip of her own tea. “Oh yeah, on retainer. Expensive fella, too. Has some serious clients.”

“Yeah? Like who?”

“You ever hear of Peter Blankenship?” She lowered her voice automatically.

“I am the sheriff.”

“Well then you have your answer.”

“Same lawyer huh?”

“Same lawyer. On retainer.”

“Well, looks like I might have to look into matters a little more closely.”

“What sort of matters?” She looked at him and then looked away as if realizing what she was asking and of whom.

“Their daughter, Amber, was taken from their home a couple of nights ago. I’m trying to find out who took her.”

Ellie’s face softened, the anger fading behind an immediate sorrow. “Well, damn, but if anything’s happened and they’re responsible I’m gonna feel like Hell about it.”

He put a hand over hers and patted it. “Don’t. You can only do so much.”

“I could have pushed harder.”

Carl nodded his head. “Without proof you would have lost your job. I’m not saying you aren’t right, but I am saying there’s some things you can’t control no matter how much you might want to. I’ve been down that path a few times.”

“I’m a teacher. I’m supposed to look out for the kids I deal with.”

“Yes you are. I’m the Wellman County Sheriff. I’m supposed to look out for everyone in this county. And I do, but there are limits to how much you can do and how much I can do. Those limits are put there to make sure everyone gets a fair shake.”

“Well that’s stupid.”

“Sometimes I agree. Right now, if that girl’s parents have anything to do with what she’s going through, I couldn’t agree more.” He sipped his tea while he tried to find the right words. “But there are processes. You can make reports and I can make arrests but if they aren’t with good reason, we get slapped down for being too enthusiastic.” He shrugged. “They have to be there, even when we hate them. Or we get another McCarthy era. Or we get witch-hunts. Or we get cops kicking down our doors for reading the wrong books. Checks and balances. I hate them, but I understand why they’re in place.”

Ellie stood up. “I just hate them. That poor girl.”

“Well, I’m gonna look into matters a bit deeper now. There are a few files I can look into, the sort of stuff I don’t want to look into.” Carl shook his head. There were a lot of files, actually, images and movies that he now had to look through that involved young children as yet unidentified, files that had been seized from different pedophiles and perverts throughout the county over the last few years. He could feel the muscles in his jaws and temples locking at the very notion. It was very possible that the face of Amber Phillips sent off warning bells because he had seen her before, but not in the context of a family photo or two.

“Any chance you can keep me posted about what you find, Carl?”

“Officially? Probably not. Unofficially? You might have to hear about something to help prevent any possible lawsuits in the future. We’ll see.”

The woman reached out and gave him a warm hug. He was tempted to seize up and back away. Carl didn’t much like unexpected displays of affection. Just the same, she was doing him a favor and she was a nice, slightly familiar face. He put an arm around her shoulders and hugged back a bit awkwardly.

A few moments later he was on his way, hating that he was now thinking about Amber Phillips stuck in situations no child should ever be stuck in.

The drive back to the office was annoying. It grew worse when he saw Tammy in the reception area. She was as pretty as ever. That was the part that bothered the Hell out of him. She was older, she should have been less appealing. Her body was not in as defined a shape and she had crow’s feet around her eyes and damned if she wasn't still attractive to the point of distraction.

No. She was just damned beautiful and he hated her a bit for that.

Tammy stood up as he entered the building, a look of worry on her face.

“Carl?”

“What can I do for you, Tammy?” He did his best to leave everything as formal as he could and if his voice sounded distant enough that the three coworkers who saw him every day were looking at him as if he’d just vomited fire all over the floor, well, sometimes you couldn’t quite hide your feelings.

“I was hoping we could talk?”

“What about?” Here it was, the part where his stomach twisted into a painful knot.

“About everything? About…” She looked around and stepped closer to him. He didn’t quite look away from her. He could see her in his periphery vision. “About us?”

“I have work right now. I’m at work right now. Call me later. Maybe we can talk then.”

She wanted to say more. He didn’t give her the chance.

Given a choice between looking over criminal evidence of the nature that made him want to commit violence on the offenders and spending an hour or so of his life talking to Tammy about “us” and “everything” he wasn't sure which idea had less appeal.

No, that wasn't true. He did know. He was heading for the evidence lockers, after all.

The files were locked away and filed properly. He had Thelma McPherson and Nora Evans look into the files with him. He wanted company while he did it, and he wanted the sort of company that both helped him stay calm and simultaneously got just as pissed off as he did.

Unfortunately, he found what he was looking for. There were easily a dozen pictures that could be the same girl as the one in the photo Amber Phillips’s parents had provided.

He had the two women with him verify his findings and then he gave the pictures over to Nora with express and concise orders about getting computer matches using the facial recognition software. She knew the drill, but he wanted it done by the book.

While Nora was working on getting matches confirmed, Carl called DFACS again and talked to Susan Ortega. Then it was time to get a few search warrants handled. Two phone calls later and he was working out the details in his head. He was almost done with the paperwork for the search warrants when he decided on a whim to see about getting Wade’s church thrown into the equation. Different girl, similar problem near as he could tell. Either way, he figured it couldn’t hurt to at least start the process.

Tammy called him twice. He ignored both calls. His stomach tried to burn a hole through itself at the very thought.

Was it love? He had no idea. Felt more like a junkie trying for a fix if he was right in what junkies went through. He had never been addicted to a drug, not even tobacco, so he couldn’t really tell. He could just guess.

Whatever the case, Tammy felt a lot like withdrawal. And he hated her a bit for that.

The warrants were being worked on. He couldn’t rush Judge Harrelson and knew better than to try. Carl thought about the little girl in the pictures again and felt his hands clench. Christ, he wanted a drink. Quick math (Booze plus Bad Crimes multiplied by Tammy in Town times Sleep Deprivation equals Carl Kicks The Shit out of a few people who maybe don’t deserve it.) had him shaking that idea away.

When Tammy called again he answered. “Yeah?”

“Hi, Carl. Can we talk?”

“Talk to me.”

“I meant in person, Carl.”

“No. No, Tammy. We can’t.” His head felt like it was going to explode.

“What?” A long pause while she considered his words. He never said no. Not ever. That was one of the things that had maybe been wrong with the relationship from day one. “Why not?”

“There’s nothing to say, Tammy. You fucked me over. You dumped me. You walked away. Sorry your dad’s sick. Sorry you’re going through that, but I can’t be here for you.” He shook his head and tried to breathe. It wasn’t easy. “You can’t be here for me, and I can’t be here for you anymore. That’s all there is to say. Don’t call me again.”

He killed the call and shoved his phone into his pocket.

Time to leave. Time to go home and maybe even manage a little sleep. If that was possible. He had doubts.

He barely acknowledged anyone as he left the building and headed for his truck.

So he missed the people that were watching him as he climbed inside and headed away from the office.

And now, that ugly albatross we all know and mostly loathe, stereotypes.

Want to know something? I have no problem with stereotypes so long as they are handled the right way. Calm down, put down the pitchforks and the torches. Allow me to explain.

For me, stereotypes are shorthand. They’re a quick and easy way to paint in broad strokes. Call them a snapshot if you prefer. One quick look around the room of strangers and then close your eyes and what do you see? You see the stereotypes. Look to the left and there are four teenagers leaning against the wall outside the café. None of them is older than sixteen, but they are all trying to look older and failing. Two girls. One has long blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and is wearing a letterman’s jacket that very obviously doesn’t belong to her. Her make up is nearly perfect, if a wee bit too heavy. Cheerleader. Next to her is a short boy, with dark, curly hair and bad skin. He’s carrying his backpack slung over one shoulder but his arms are crossed and he’s looking everywhere at once. When he nods it’s with enough enthusiasm to make his head rock back and forth and his backpack jiggle. His laugh is loud and just a little desperate. Geek. The guy next to him is half a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier. He has sandy blond hair and an easy smile. The girl with the letterman’s jacket is leaning back against him. Odds are he’s the one that owns that coat. The last girl has yet to blossom. She’s long and lean and gangly, and though she’s cute, she has nothing on the other girl and knows it. She keeps looking to the other girl without realizing it, checking to see if she should be laughing. She refuses to smile with her mouth open, because someone might see her braces.

That’s four people. Just a quick flash of details. Hopefully you can now at least get a basic idea of what they are like. Not enough to separate them out by name or date of birth, but enough to get a vague notion of what they MIGHT be like. Might be, because stereotypes only go so far. Or rather, they should only be allowed to go so far. They’re already breaking the stereotype rules, aren’t they? They’re all together outside of a coffee shop. According to most Hollywood movies, they should be natural enemies. Jocks and nerds never associate. Pretty girls and the awkward girl with really bad teeth are supposed to be predator and prey. There is always more to the story than initially meets the eye.

Remarkably few people reflect what we see when we make our first impressions. Listen, I’m 6’2” tall. I weigh in at a svelte 280 or so pounds, and I have a 58 inch shoulder span. I have long hair and a beard. I’ve been known to sport skull shirts because I like them. Most people seeing me on the street don’t think “writer.” They think, “Oh, shit, he’s going to eat my baby and rape my purse.” In fact, I have never eaten a baby and as a rule I consider all purses off-limits. Also, I’m a writer. I just don’t necessarily fit the stereotype. See my point? I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I don’t go out and party. I’m rather a geek, truth be told. I’m okay with that.

Stereotypes have their uses. They should never be more than a starting point as far as I’m concerned. Everyone has a story and as the writer, you should know their stories well enough to look beyond the stereotypes and well enough to escort your readers beyond those very same limitations.

Jim Moore

Dialogue and Accents - Don't Be the Monkey with the Bazooka

2013-04-28T12:22:00.001-04:00

This is one of the magic wands I'll be handing out at the RT Booklovers Convention next week. They arose out of a post I did recently on my personal blog, about how I've become the Fairy Godmother of Good Sex.

I think they turned out pretty cool.

This week's topic is Dialogue: Accents/Slang/Stereotypes.

I think it's interesting that whichever Word Whore came up with this topic added "stereotypes" to the list. Because, while dialogue can be what lifts your story from boring, blank telling, stereotypes are what can make the reader throw the book across the room (even more dire today, with expensive eReaders involved) in frustration.

It's important to remember that the key component of dialogue is the "dia" part, as in two. Can be more, but you need at least two voices to have a dialogue. This is as opposed to the rest of the story, which is essentially a monologue. It's a monologue that might move from the omniscient narrator to the various POVs (points of view) of the characters. But, unless you have two or more entities talking to each other, it's all monologue.

Automatically, you can see why dialogue is higher energy, right?

It's interaction. You can explain things without sounding explainy. Dialogue reveals who the characters are and want they want - both by what the say and what they don't say. The spoken word also adds volumes to show where they come from.

We all know this. Where we come from influences how we speak. Language, first and foremost. Then accent. Then slang and word choice. Do you come from a place where they say soda, pop or Coke? How about creek or crick? Maybe kai-ote instead of kai-oh-te? There's even the famous song, you say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to - let's call the whole thing off.

A good writer can weave all sorts of subtle cues about character into their spoken voice. How educated is she? How did that backwoods grandmother who raised him influence his word choice? What cadence do they use?

For all of this, it takes a good ear for the spoken word. Eavesdropping is a fabulous way to learn. I sometimes think writers who come from a theater background have an advantage here, because they've studied speech patterns. Having studied other languages helps, too. For example, a native English speaker says:

"I am sad" or "I feel sad."

Whereas a French speaker says (in translation):

"I have sadness."

So, even if your native French speaker is talking in English, she might reflexively frame feelings in terms of having them, rather than being them. This can be a terrific way to show character. Or, your native English speaker might have extensive counseling experience and thus he's more likely to explain himself as "I feel sad," instead of being sad.

Does this sound like a lot of work? It doesn't have to be. If you have a sense of how your character speaks, you should be able to hear them in your head. If this isn't the case, go find someone who's like your character and talk to them. Even on the internet, the way people phrase communications in casual conversations reflects how the speak. Finally, a little goes a long way.

And this is where we come to accent and stereotype.

Okay, you've all read a book where the accent killed you, right? If you haven't, you're lucky. But every once in a while, some tremendously earnest (and likely over-researched) author, will render a character's voice in all it's ungodly misspellings, anachronisms and slang. Thus you get something like"

"Aye, dere! 'En aren' ye ah bonny, wee lassie?"

After one line of this kind of thing, your head aches. Before half a page goes by, you're ready to throw that expensive eReader across the room.

Okay, okay - I know some of you are ready to hurl examples at me of authors who do this really well. Once you sink into the cadence and unusual words, you do just fine. Reading Shakespeare or books in Old English can be like this, and some modern authors CAN replicate this experience convincingly.

But, really, people - unless this is absolutely Your Thing, is it worth it? You can convey a Scottish accent with cadence and a VERY occasional "lass" or "aye." I also believe this is better because, unless you truly are an expert in that language/accent/slang background, you run the extremely grave risk of Stereotyping.

See above. Obviously I reeled off that line for a supposedly Scottish character, but how did I create it? I thought of every stereotypical, cliche word, phrase and phonetic spelling I could and jammed them all into one sentence.

I don't have to explain the problem here, do I?

Okay, maybe for the Branlis in the audience, I should. ;-)

By thinking about the language and how to cram the maximum amount of accent in there, I failed to remain faithful to THAT CHARACTER. I didn't write something my character would say - I wrote something I thought a stereotypical Scot might say. A possibly deranged Scot, totally unrecognizable to anyone who's ever talked to people from Scotland.

I took a great tool and used it badly, without finesse. Like the old adage of handing a monkey a bazooka. If you have something powerful, use it well and use it wisely.

Faffing, Dithering - It's All Procrastination!

2013-04-27T00:30:00.000-04:00

One of the fun aspects of being a writer is “meeting” people from all over the world, especially on twitter (which IS my biggest enabler of procrastination but since Jeffe Kennedy covered that so well earlier in the week, I’m not going there LOL). I have several really terrific friends from Downunder on twitter and they introduced me to the best term : faffing. It even has its own hashtag and a Tshirt. (What you think I’m kidding?)

I guess it actually comes from “to faff about” and it isn’t a euphemism for the other “f” word (or so I’ve been assured by everyone, including such an authority as Worldwidewords.com. Here’s what they had to say about where my new favorite word comes from:

“It starts to appear as a dialect word in Scotland and Northern England at the end of the eighteenth century, as a description of the wind blowing in puffs or small gusts. …It may have been imitative of the sound of gusty wind, or it may be a variation on maffle, a more widely distributed dialect term in Scotland and England that means to… waste time and procrastinate…” so I guess I could be maffling, but does that have a hashtag?

So when I #amfaffing yes, I tend to cruise the social media, lose myself in eBay (the number of categories of things I can search for is amazing and endless and always leads to more treasure hunting…very bad for my budget), do research which leads me down paths to other things I never knew about and before I pay attention, hours have passed and I have all this very scholarly data which is fascinating but can’t be crammed into a romance novel - at best I can say with confidence my Ancient Egyptian heroine used crushed malachite for eyeliner and only I will ever know the entire backstory of where it was mined and how it got to Egypt and what it cost and what other trade goods came from…oh I digress. (Yes, yes I do tend to work Egypt into everything …)

My other favorite word about procrastination is dither. While not exactly procrastinating, dithering overcomes me when I’m doing one thing but somehow I feel I should be doing something else or even two other things and then I get into a grid locked state and can’t make progress on anything, whereupon I go back to twitter and the faffing.

My best tool for avoiding either pitfall is to create a To Do list, figure out what the highest priority item is and then focus on just that one thing until I’ve taken it as far as I can. That frees me up from the glittery attraction of other chores because the Stern Mom Voice in my head says, “What does dusting up the living room have to do with Task #1 on the list, hmmm?” Playing this annoying but effective little recording keeps me from the dithering mode, where I try to do multiple things at once and have a massive FAIL. And possibly require a restorative nap or emergency administration of chocolate.

If the top priority item is too big to do in a reasonable amount of time, I’ll tell myself I’m going to work on it for half an hour, then check it off the list and move on.

Not going to tell you how many times I drifted off into faffing during the writing of this blog post!

Justifying Procrastination

2013-04-26T12:38:00.000-04:00

GAH! I nearly missed doing my post at all this week. NOT because of procrastination. Because, for freaking once, I am not engaged in some lame displacement activity. I'm finishing a book. That's due Tuesday. And that has no ending. Yet.

But I'm writing. All day long. Bashing my brain against the intractable 'why isn't this scene working' questions, and listening to the characters whispering when I finally collapse in exhaustion at night. For the record, they now shower with me, too, and I've taken to carrying a sticky pad and a pen in my shower bag to catch what they say the second I have a towel wrapped around me.

However. It's possible I'm in this position because of previous procrastination. My favorite? Pseudo-science on TV. Real science on TV. Anything that *could* be true and that would be 100% freaky if it were. Yes. I'm talking mega-tsunamis, conspiracy theories and 'the aliens are among us' diatribes. Ghosts, assorted monsters, Atlantis - it's all great procrastination stuff.

Two reasons for that.
1. I can turn it on and do the dishes while it plays - I 'learn' something AND get chores done at the same time. That's efficient, right?
2. All of these shows are fuel for the fiction fire.

See? Totally justifiable. Now. If you'll excuse the lack of eye candy and the tardiness of this post, some characters are summoning me back between the sheets. Of virtual paper.

I'll Tumblr For Ya...

2013-04-25T09:00:00.000-04:00

by Allison Pang

I own this topic like nothing else.

I am the master of procrastination. If I can find something else to do beside whatever I'm supposed to be doing, I'm a happy camper.

Oh hey, shouldn't my house be clean? My house should be clean. Like I really need to get into the corners of that bathroom. And go through that closet that I never use. I'd get so much more done if that closet were organized, right?

*ahem*

At least until I run headfirst into a deadline - in which case I become completely screwed - but that's slightly different topic.

So, my two biggest weaknesses?

Games...and Tumblr.

The games is a given. I generally try to limit myself to playing only on certain days, or games where I can save and quit in between missions. (As opposed to Civ V, which is the devil. JUST ONE MORE GRANARY. ONE MORE BATTLE. ONE MORE CITY TO FOUND. Seriously, the micro managing is sort of addictive. So, yeah. I gotta stay away from Sim games. They NEVER end. And then it's 4 am and I haven't done shit except build an empire.)

And then tumblr.

OMG. Tumblr.

It's chaos incarnate, and for what it's worth, I cannot turn away. It's like dashboard roulette. Just keep refreshing and see what pops up! Social Justice topic of the week. Porn. Kittens. Gay porn. Writing advice. Random WTFkry. Porn. Animated gifs of porn. Every fandom everything - tho heavily dominated by gaming fandoms, sherlockians, whovians, comics, LotR and marvel movies. Fanfic. Naked men. Naked ladies. Tattoos. Wonderful freaking art. And porn.

It's a geek's wet dream, frankly.

(There is something called Tumblr Savior - which I highly recommend for home and office use. It only works if people tag their posts, but there's nothing quite like surfing some lovely art with the kids behind you and then OMG. GIANT PEEN SHOT to make one a bit nervous.)

My own tumblr is a mix of writing advice, pictures of foxes, my own smutty Dragon Age fanfic, and just shit that makes me laugh. Which is why I tend to frequent Tumblr in the first place. I'm in great need of stress reducers. Tumblr fills that need, but it comes at a price. Since there's new stuff on it every second, I have to stay away from it when I'm trying to write. I've had to resort to Freedom, like Jeffe mentioned - because like chocolate, I appear to have zero willpower when it comes to refreshing it. And refreshing it. And refreshing it.

>_<

But I'll grant that the people on Tumblr are quick.

Just look at the Thor trailer that came out the other day. Within minutes, there were gifs and memes popping

up everywhere. Mostly because LOKI AND HIS HAIR. OMG.

And tumblr exploded.

(Which you can read about on The Mary Sue, because it seriously exploded.)

I tweeted briefly about the fact that mr. loki looks a bit like Gotye here, but I was already too late, because 3 seconds later?

Yeah. They went there....

Anyway, not sure if I'm being all that convincing here or frightening people off, but it makes me laugh and sometimes that's the best thing about procrastination. :)

Huggin on my Topic

2013-04-24T10:48:00.002-04:00

I really embraced the topic this week.

Procrastination.

See, I totally could have written this post last week, ahead of schedule. But I thought, "Meh."

My phone alarmed last evening, reminding me to write my weekly post. I had worked hard for a couple of days. My back was aching bad. I said, "Meh. I'll do it tomorrow morning. It's about procrastination anyway."

So this is my procrastination post about procrastinating about my post. What did get done, however, was the yardwork, the house cleaning, the laundry, the cooking, the shopping and the writing /editing on current works in progress.

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