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Talking About Dialogue

7/31/2014

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Dialogue is more than words. It can show the reader how your characters interact. In every scene, characters talk (or avoid talking) because they WANT something. They may use different strategies to get it, communicated by words and actions. If one strategy doesn't work, then a character will try something else. That scene construction leads to conflict and forward movement in your story.

The simplest way to make dialogue realistic is to invest time listening to how people really talk. Tune in at a baseball game or concert. Eavesdrop on the booth behind you in a restaurant. Listen to children chatting at the bus stop. What you'll notice is that people don't give a summary of events because the person they're talking to already knows the situation and remembers what's happened to this point. Also (although there are exceptions) people seldom say exactly what they mean. How often have you heard a real person say something like: "I'm being extra particular about ordering my meal from the waiter because I want you to think I'm in control when actually I'm really nervous about being out with you for the first time." That may be an extreme example, but on TV last night, I heard this line of dialogue: "You are a bad woman because ..." I cringed for that writer.

Beyond listening to real people talk, WATCH how they interact. Listen for what isn't being said. This observation can spark ideas about what characters do when they want to avoid communicating. Do they fidget? Dive into their smart phones to play Sudoku? Actions say more than words about how your character interacts with others; they show rather than tell the reader about the scene's undercurrents.

Sometimes, just listening to real people isn't enough. Writing believable dialogue in historical fiction is a challenge. The writer teeters on a tight rope between evoking a sense of the period and being unintelligible to modern readers. If you're writing period dialogue, look at books written around that time, or for the 1920s on, movies. Note words and sentence patterns that convey a sense of the time while still being understandable to modern readers. Arm yourself with a good etymology dictionary to avoid anachronisms, but use your own discretion too about a word sounding right for the historical period. Even when you're right and the word is of the time period, if a reader wonders about it, then you've pulled them out of the story. An example is the word "bouncer." It's been around since the mid-1800s, but if I read it in a story set during the Civil War, will I wonder?

Dialogue is an indispensable building block for constructing scenes. Using these tips can result in characters that interact in engaging, believable ways, so that readers keep turning the pages to find out what your characters will say (and do) next.

This post originally appeared in Laurinda Wallace's SimplyLife blog.

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Point of View: Second Person

7/23/2014

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"When he says 'Skins or blankets?' it will take you a minute to realize he's asking which you want to sleep under." from "How to Talk to a Hunter" by Pam Houston

The example above from a short story addresses the reader as "you." This point of view is called second person. Point of view is the perspective from which the story is told. Because point of view is often challenging, Rose's Red Pen will feature posts about different points of view over the summer. Other posts have looked at first-person singular ("I") and first-person plural ("we") points of view, so now let's turn to "you" and the second-person point of view.

Although this point of view is common in technical writing, ad copy, self-help books, and travel pieces, it's relatively uncommon in fiction. For children, the Choose Your Own Adventure interactive series has this point of view. The reader plays the role of the protagonist, and the reader's decisions determine the outcome of the story.

In adult fiction, the novel Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney is in the second-person point of view, as is Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In short stories, "The Haunted Mind" by Nathaniel Hawthorne and "Sometimes You Talk About Idaho" by Pam Houston are written in the second-person point of view. Portions of some of Margaret Atwood's short stories are also in this point of view.

An advantage of the second-person point of view is that it's immediate and plunges the reader into the action, particularly if the writer uses the present tense:

"You feel the hard shove between your shoulder blades. You teeter on the platform edge, arms flailing. One more nudge, and you fall to the tracks below."

A second advantage of this point of view is that it immerses the reader in the story as the main character. Sometimes, though, readers want to forget about themselves and escape into other characters. Addressing them as "you" pulls them out of the story. Another disadvantage to this point of view is that addressing the reader as "you" can become wearing or irritating, even bullying, as if the writer is constantly telling the reader what to do and how to feel.

If you're tired of reading about "I" and "she" and "he" and ready to be the star of your own narrative, then give the second-person point of view a try. This list of novels will get you started. 

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Alaska's Women Writers

7/16/2014

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My humdrum list of beach reads needed a blast of bracing artic air. I looked north to Alaska, which I had long associated with writers like Jack London. To my delight, I discovered that America's last frontier also teems with exciting contemporary writing by women.

Jean Craighead George mined literary gold when she wrote Julie of the Wolves back in 1972. While not an Alaskan, George wrote the Newbery Award-winning novel after spending a summer in Barrow learning about wolves at the Naval Artic Research Laboratory.

Since then, other women writers have explored Alaska across many genres. Here's a small sample of what I discovered for my summer reading list.

For young readers, Shelley Gill writes both fiction and nonfiction. Check out Sitka Rose or Prickly Rose for fiction and Alaska's Three Bears for nonfiction. Mindy Dwyer puts an Alaskan spin on classic fairy tales. See The Salmon Princess and Alaska's Sleeping Beauty.

For middle readers, Kirkpatrick Hill has written several books, including The Year of Miss Agnes. Her latest book, Bo at Ballard Creek, won the 2014 Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Award.

Women writers dominate the mystery genre in Alaska, with long-running series by best-selling writers Sue Henry and Dana Stabenow topping the list. For literary fiction, check out Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child and Nancy Lord's book of short stories The Man Who Swam with Beavers.

Nancy Lord writes nonfiction as well, including Early Warning: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North and Beluga Days: Tracking the Endangered White Whale. Sherry Simpson, a former Anchorage Daily News reporter, has a wonderful book of essays called The Way Winter Comes. She has also written several other nonfiction books about Alaska. Velma Wallis, who grew up in remote Fort Yukon, retells Athabaskan legends in the haunting Two Old Women and her second book Bird Girl and the Man Who Followed the Sun.

If you'd like to explore more writing from our biggest state, check out Alaska Sampler 2014. Editors Deb Vanasse and David Marusek created this free e-book, which features ten of Alaska's finest contemporary writers.

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Describing Amounts

7/9/2014

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Can you spot what's wrong in each of these sentences?
  • She has less quarters than Jim.
  • Over a hundred people attended the meeting.
  • He needs alot of practice.
Choosing the right words to describe "how much" can be confusing, but five simple rules can help.
  1. Use "less" for indefinite quantities, those you can't count. "The teacher has less time to grade papers this week" or "This recipe would taste better with less mayonnaise."
  2. If you 're writing about something you can count, then use "fewer," not "less." "She has fewer quarters than Jim" or "He found fewer seashells on the beach than he expected."
  3. Use "over" to describe where something is, not to describe an amount. "The fish jumped over the net" or "The railroad company built the bridge over the lake."
  4. Use "more than" to describe an amount. "More than a hundred people attended the meeting" or "That bottle holds more than a quart."
  5. "A lot" is always written as two words, no exceptions. I remember it this way: Would you write "abit" or "alittle"? The sentence above should be: "He needs a lot of practice."
Keeping these five rules in mind will make it easier to correctly describe amounts. 




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Point of View: First Person Plural

7/2/2014

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"We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . " -- The Declaration of Independence

In honor of Independence Day, I thought I'd open with this example of the first-person plural point of view.

Point of view (POV) is the perspective from which the story is told. Because POV is often challenging for writers, Rose's Red Pen will feature a summer series about POV. Last week's post covered the first-person singular POV. Let's move from "I" to "we" with another example of the first-person plural POV:

"We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise." -- Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

The "we" are either characters in the story or bystanders observing the action. Writers rarely use this POV, but it can be effective. Other examples are William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily" and Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club.

The advantages of using the first-person POV are:
  • Readers are immersed in the story, as if they were one of the characters and part of a select tribe.
  • Because the narrators represent a group perspective, they can know and share a lot of information about the main characters.
  • The narrators can both observe and comment on the action, similar in function to a Greek chorus.
The disadvantages of this POV are:
  • It can become annoying, even claustrophobic for readers.
  • Because the narrators can know so much, the temptation is to tell readers everything rather than showing them through action and letting them draw their own conclusions.
I plan to kick off my Fourth of July celebrations with a book in this rare POV. I'll settle back into a deck chair with my book and a glass of lemonade, waiting for the fireworks -- both on and off the page.



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    Rose Ciccarelli offers writing and editing services through Rosebud Communications.

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