Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

Dialogue

Recursive layering as I write ~ my 3 steps

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Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
When I write, it is the voice of the character that comes
first. I hear the dialogue, and it generates setting, conflict and motivation
for me. So when I write, dialogue is first. Sure, there will be tags and
description that comes with it, but it is minimalistic. 
After a run of dialogue, I will head back over the scene and
start layering characterization, reaction and action. I return again to
consider setting. And then again, I return to add sensory details, behaviorisms
and determine what backstory contributed to how the scene went, how it will
affect future plot issues and did any subconscious writing take place that dug
into the story deeper (which is always a hallelujah moment). Sometimes a
character will say something or do something, and I’ll just sit there and
think, whoa, that explains a lot or that is going to be a bugger to get over.
For example, in At Any
Given Time (Students of Jump, a standalone CES novel), Samantha worries about how she’ll react to the sight of blood, hers or someone else’s. She knows it makes her nauseous and dizzy, a complication that worries her. This is not a major issue
for a time traveler under normal conditions, and she has lots of time jumping
experience. But this time with an injured search and retrieval jumper, it turns
out to be a real issue she has to manage through. That’s not the main conflict,
but it sure added dimension to an already bad situation for Sam. The fact that
she is fully aware of her problem with blood and is self-reflective and
determined to get the situation rectified provides humor and stress to the
story that the little aspect of character helped to create.
I suppose it sounds rather clinical to
say I tuck in more details later, but it is not like that at all. The initial run of
dialogue flows out as if I’m eavesdropping from behind something and can’t see
or hear anything but what they are saying. It sets the stage for the whole
scene. The layering is another me standing there in the room, cave, whatever the
setting is and looking around, smelling, touching things, asking the character
questions and really just being a peeping Tom for my reader (and me, too).
Every writer has their own process. This is mine most of the time. Some writers edit like mad as they go and other writers don’t go back over their work until the complete draft is done. And there are numerous variations in between. If you’re a writer, what do you do? If not, have you thought about how writers build their stories? 
#writing
#character
#dialogue
#layering

Learning from the Masters series: Robert A. Heinlein Knew Dialogue

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The art of writing dialogue

I have always enjoyed reading Heinlein’s books, but it is his dialogue that holds my attention the most.  His characters play with words and by doing so demonstrate relationships and conditions.

This excerpt from The Cat that Walks Through Walls is a great example of how his dialogue clearly separated and defined his characters.  Gwen and Richard have just crash landed on the moon and are hanging upside down still strapped into their seats.  It has been a rather eventful landing, the end of which finished with the space vehicle twirling in a wobble on its rocket end until it lost momentum and fell over.  Not once does Heinlein use a tag other than the initial first person reference to the conversation continuing after the landing, yet it is obvious who is speaking.


    I added, “That was a beautiful landing, Gwen.  PanAm never set a ship down more gently.”
    Gwen pushed aside her kimono skirt, looked out.  “Not all that good.  I simply ran out of fuel.”
    “Don’t be modest.  I especially liked that gavotte that laid the car down flat.  Convenient, since we don’t have a landing-field ladder here.
    “Richard, what made it do that?”
    “I hesitate to guess.  It may have had something to do the processing gyro…which may have tumbled.  No data, no opinion. Dear, you look charming in that pose.  Tristam Shandy was right; a woman looks best with her skirts flung over her head.”
    “I don’t think Tristam Shandy ever said that.”
    “Then he should have.  You have lovely legs, dear one.”
    “Thank you, I think.  Now will you kindly get me out of this mess?  My kimono is tangled in the belt and I can’t unfasten it.”
    “Do you mind if I get a picture first?”

The dialogue supplies all sorts of details.  Not only are they upside down, but Gwen’s outfit has left her revealing her legs and the borrowed kimona is doing more than just causing a little embarrassment.  Her view is obstructed, she cannot extract herself from her upside down position and it has provided more about her personality and relationship with her newly acquired  husband.  She is handling the situation calmly and able to banter back and forth.  Richard’s response to the whole thing is humorous, playful and providing them both with a way to vent off the frustration they are feeling.  Remember they are somewhere on the moon currently upside down in a craft that has not been functioning properly.  The deck has been stacked against them, yet they behave as if being together is their ace in the hole.  How does this affect the reader?  The reader can’t help but fall in with them.  They are going to get out of this situation, somehow, and it is going to continue to be humorous even when things get worse.

Another feature of this dialogue is the word choice.  Richard describes Gwen’s appearance as “charming.”  Clearly he appreciates the view, but he also appreciates the lady he is viewing and repeatedly uses endearments that support that he would view the whole impression as “charming.”  The allusion to Tristam Shandy lends spice as well; it is a compliment Gwen takes with a grain of salt.  “Thank you, I think.”

Heinlein creates distinct characters, though he has been accused of using the same characters over and over again.  It is more, in my opinion, that he uses the same character type for his main characters: strong, resourceful, nonsensical with a purpose.  But they are not the same character; if they were, the above dialogue would lose its anchor.  There are several cues which assist the reader in tracking who is speaking, but they smooth the reader along.  Richard discusses the appeal of a woman with her skirts over her head, Heinlein describes her reaction to Richard’s statement about her landing the craft, and Gwen calls him by name and demands he help her with her belt that she believes is caught in her kimono.  All these help the reader maneuver through the dialogue.  It is a fun piece of dialogue that lets the reader know the conditions and the characters’ response to it and each other with ease and without a lot of description or overloaded dialogue.

Tuesday prompt: #9 2013

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Regional stories are wrapped around the cultural, traditional, and environmental qualities of the area.  Often dialect is a feature, but not a requirement.  So work on a few paragraphs of a story that can only happen where you are.  Make it utterly dependent on the locale, can’t happen anywhere else but there.

Read Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” or Wolfe’s “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” for example.

Writing workshop: taking the risk to grow as a writer

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A couple of weeks ago, my creative writing class held their monthly workshop.  I have ten students working on various writing forms: poetry, short story, prose essay and novel.  What I noticed is they did not seem to know what to tell each other.   Each one knew what he or she wanted from the others but did not have confidence that the others would want the same.  There were so many, “Hey, your story is just great.  I like all the comic moments.  You really made me laugh.”  No substance to the criticism.  No chance for growth.  And then big, bad teacher thing had to sit there and attack failing description, pages of telling without concrete, sensory imagery, dialogue that offered little characterization, weak construction and a complete disregard for punctuating dialogue and paragraphing.  These students know better.  So why the sudden regression?

This was the sixth workshop we had this year, and my students had gotten
over shyness and taking things personally.  But a new student joining
us from another school and choosing not to speak at all when poetry was
on the floor seemed to take a lot of the earned confidence away from
those who were gaining familiarity with the forms they felt less
comfortable with.

Turning the light on in workshop

Today we sat down and talked about what each writer wanted to know to improve the work submitted to the workshop.   There were some revealing moments.  There had been a real division between the poets and the prose writers, a strong belief that there was little they had in common.  But as they added to the list on the board that each wanted feedback on, so much turned out to be the same: imagery, purpose, viewpoint, consistency, tone, tense, timing, conventions.  Sure there were areas that had greater need:  my novelists needed to know that they were consistent with the details, and my poets’ main concerns were imagery and message.  But they still all needed this feedback to improve and most importantly wanted it.  By the end of our discussion there was a better sense of how not just to use the workshop to benefit oneself, but how to provide the best assistance to the other writers.

This one class discussion brought back the chance for growth in all of them and put a stop to the belief that there was any good reason to sit out when a less familiar form was needing feedback.  It is two weeks before our next workshop.  I will probably have a briefing the day before we start so they can recapture this new view of criticizing each genre and how they can assist their peers in growing as writers.

Today I wish I was perfect, and probably tomorrow, too

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It is hard to believe, but I am close to publishing my second book at Smashwords.  This work is an anthology of shorts stories, Gardens in the Cracks & Other Stories. They are loosely connected by the “world” they are all derived from in that similar technology and history are imbedded in each.  The title piece (“Gardens in the Cracks”) and another short work (Scrapper, a novella) have some characters in common as well as time and general locale.  The remaining stories developed out of experiments of one sort or another: repeating motif, what if, narrative from a secondary character, and such.  I think all writers will agree, the editing is the hardest part.  I have gone over them so many times looking for every error I can.

Besides the fact that I write recursively and therefore edit constantly as I write, I am now on my fourth line edit of this work.  I can say that turning on the feature that checks grammar and mechanics in a word processing program can be the most annoying and beneficial experience.  I found myself examining nearly every sentence and defending or correcting innumerable aspects of my writing.  Frequently, the program would highlight a word or two and state “if you are using this to mean…., then you are correct.  But if you mean…., then….”  I can’t say how many times I said, “Can’t you tell?”  Every once and a while I was glad it did not let a single questionable word by, as I had in fact used a word incorrectly.

Dialogue can play a large part of a fiction work, and in an effort to sound like the genuine article, my characters often speak in phrases or are not necessarily grammatically correct.  So I was reminded on a regular basis that I had fragments of sentences or slang where I intended them to be.  This still was a benefit as I noticed that some of my characters did this more often than others, and I had the opportunity to decide if this was a characteristic I wanted for the individual or if it was too heavily used.

The fine tooth comb that I am using now gives me a headache, but not using it would be worse than a headache.  So off I go again scraping each sentence free of error.  This is one of those times when I really wish I was perfect.

How to write good dialogue

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Writer at work

Teaching dialogue is not easy, partly because we all talk without paying attention. To write dialogue you have to have paid attention to others talking.  But that’s eavesdropping!  Okay, so listen without making any judgements, and definitely don’t make any faces or any shocked sounds in response to what you hear.  This is scientific research; be objective about it.

  • So listen.  Note how two (or more) people talk without really responding directly to what each person is saying.  This is important. We rarely answer questions directly because we often don’t want to give away anything important, and we have other things on our mind at the time and want to share or not share those things, so we tend to answer off topic.  Also, if we have a long term relationship with the person, we are going to talk in a sort of short hand, fragments, incomplete sentences. Some writers like to mimic this very tightly, others prefer to write in complete sentences while maintaining all other aspects of authentic speech.

Example:
“Honey, where did you put my keys?”
“You never gave me any keys.”
“No. They were here on the table, where your hat is now. So where did you move my keys?”
“There weren’t any keys when I put my hat there.”

  • Note, the person responding to the question has not once answered the question.  The hat person is more worried about being blamed for losing the keys then helping the key person find them.

  • Dialogue also needs to be essential.  Don’t waste time with dialogue that isn’t offering something: characterization, rising action, relationship dynamics and such. 

So in the above situation, maybe the hat person does in fact have keys, but they are the keys to a new car, and hat person just wants to get key person to get frustrated enough to confront him, so he can then jangle them in key person’s face, get that reaction he has been hoping for.

  • Add action, physical movement, reactions, etc., to create a greater sense of individuality and scene for the reader.

Modified example:
     Jill picked up the sweaty baseball cap and peered beneath it at the otherwise empty hall table.  She tipped the cap to look inside and then called over her shoulder loud enough to be heard in the next room, “Honey, where did you put my keys?”
     “You never gave me any keys,” was the muffled reply.
     “Noooo,” she stretched the word in mild irritation.  “They were here on the table.”  She clenched the hat tightly and dropped it back down.  “Where you hat is now.” Pivoting on one heel, she turned to the doorway.  “So where did you move my keys?”
     This time the response held the same note of irritation as her own, “There weren’t any keys when I put my hat there.”