It can be easy or it can be hell

 

My characters are talking to each other. They are a team, so they have to.

Dialogue can be easy or it can be hell.

And how to make them all sound different – more like themselves and not like the other guy. It ain’t easy. The ideal is that you should be able to tell who said what without the dreaded he saids and she saids. Nice work if you can manage it, as someone once said.

I usually get the words down and then add necessary tags so that we don’t get totally lost about who said what to whom. Then I look to make it more interesting and that means adding some action. What are they doing while they have this dialogue? How are they feeling? Is that coming across in what they say, or have I got to resort to telling readers how my characters feel? Maybe I can get away with saying she is angry if I say “her anger rose until it boiled over in a splurge of boiling hot words.” (A bit wordy but you get the idea.)

I like to add northern dialect to some of my characters, but its easy to go overboard with it. I know what they’re saying, and I hear it around me most days but dialect may not carry to the far corners of the world. Sometimes I toss in a glossary at the end and leave it at that.

It’s a balancing act I find entertaining.  Once I’ve done my best shot, I leave it and go back a day or two later when I do a read through. I have to do this. This time I’m glad I did because I’ve found characters talking about something that hasn’t happened in their world. I know it’s going to, but they shouldn’t know about it yet. So easy to get confused with time lines. They almost deserve a post to themselves.

Men do not notice...

MOST improbable headline of the week? “Men do not notice women in high heels.”
It followed publication of a study by Northumbria University, where researchers observed men’s reactions as a series of women walked past, some wearing stilettoes, some not. Apparently their recorded emotional response to women in high heels and those in flatties was indistinguishable. Well I’m sorry but either the guys had water flowing through their veins or someone at the university had forgotten to plug in the machinery. Of course blokes “notice” women wearing high heels! Saying they don’t is like saying women don’t “notice” a man in uniform! (And by “notice”, we all know what we mean). Along with sheer stockings and lacy underwear, high heels are among the most potent weapons in a woman’s amour armoury. The research also said that the men couldn’t tell any difference in the way women walked depending on whether they were in pumps or heels.Whaaat?!? I refer you to an early scene in Some Like It Hot (the funniest film ever made) in which Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon watch Marilyn Monroe sashaying along a railway station platform. She is, of course, wearing killer heels. “Will you look at that?” Lemmon breathes to Curtis. “It’s like Jello on springs...” I rest my case. Men of Northumbria, hang your heads in shame.

This came from Richard and Judy in the weekend's newspapers. Since Northumbria Uni is where I did my library science and in my local city of Newcastle, I can tell you that there are some who dislike make-up and would claim that personality and intelligence far outweighs physical attributes. Sounds like the researchers hit on a group of such people.

And before you all die of boredom, here's the last set of rules for writing fiction

Neil Gaiman
1 Write.
2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3 Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5 Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7 Laugh at your own jokes.
8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

What five years does...

I recently put an excerpt from my first published novel up a post on bellesandbeaus

It was interesting to look back and see how I was writing then and compare it to how I’m writing now. I have to admit I made all the common errors everyone talks about – repetition and overuse of words, etc etc, but in spite of it all I can see a directness I like in that early story (which was the longest of my four published titles).

Perhaps I’m now trying to hard. It’s a question that concerns me sometimes. In absorbing all these rules of how a writer needs to write to please editors and gain a contract, I may have lost that vital spark, that freshness that makes things leap off the page. Or maybe I’m deluding myself, and I never had it at all. That’s possible, too.

I read a post yesterday and planned to keep and comment on it. When I went back to read it again I found I’d deleted it along with all the other stuff that comes in everyday, so I cannot refresh my memory, or give credit to the author, which is a shame. The gist of the post was that a writer gives away a lot of his or her own personality in writing. I’ve heard this before, and I’m not sure I agree with the premise.

Surely a writer makes things up, uses her imagination, builds a story around characters which are usually (but not always) a mish-mash of people we know and characters we’ve read or seen on the screen with a dash of our originality thrown in? What makes a successful story-teller but the ability to blend traits we recognise with out-of-the-ordinary, heroic style deeds? To take and everyday situation and think What if, and take it from there, into realms the ordinary person in the street would never contemplate?If that is what fiction writing is about, where is the danger of revealing one’s own personality? More on that tomorrow.

And just in case you wondered, the starter was salmon...and it was delicious. But it has absolutely nothing at all to do with this post!