The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (8 page)

Second, whenever possible, set up your dialogue scenes so that they play out "one-on-one," getting rid of other characters (who might interrupt and make the conversation more complicated). Setting up one-on-one dialogues makes life simpler all around. If Joe and Bill are to talk in your story, and you also have Sam and Fred standing around, figure a way to have Sam called to the telephone; Fred decides to go to lunch;
now
you have a one on one between Joe and Bill, and it's easier.

Remember, too, that most of the time your dialogue will become sleek, swift and contemporary if you will just provide your viewpoint character with a
conversational goal
. A viewpoint with a goal—information to be sought, or an opinion to be sold—will tend to keep things moving in a straight line even when the other character is being obstreperous. The strongly goal-motivated talker will not allow pages to fill with rambling talk. He will stick to the point, or keep dragging the conversation back to it. And he won't allow long speeches from anybody; he'll keep insisting on a return to the issues at hand.

Having a conversational goal helps you avoid the impulse to drag dialogue out endlessly, beating the subject to death, too. If the characters stick to the point—and one of them must insist on doing so—then the conversation not only can't wander too far away; it can't extend past the
point of decision on the point at issue
.

In this regard, it's vital to make sure both characters are listening. If Character A wants to talk about who stole the money, but Character B simply won't pay any attention, and keeps mumbling about his golf score last weekend, all is lost... nothing will make sense or progress. You need to make your dialogue participants listen, then respond directly.

If you fill your story with people who don't want anything, of course, all is lost anyway because there can be no focus, and therefore no linear development.

Sometimes, vaguely realizing that their dialogue is failing, novice writers get cute, witty or classic. They have their characters start mouthing trochaic hexameters, or spewing mouthfuls of classical allusions, or talking in formal riddles or paradigms. You have perhaps seen some of this dreadful stuff in an occasional published story or even book. (Every so often a miracle occurs, and such nonsense gets purchased, but not often enough that you can count on it.)
Nobody
talks like these characters. Maybe Tennyson did, but he was surely the last one. Vast, poetic oceans of verbiage surge and roll, their compound-complex breakers crashing over the gerunds and participles littering the story beach. Terrified of short, simple, direct dialogue that somebody will understand and possibly even like, these overambitious fictioneers ruin their story dialogue.

Simplicity... directness... goal orientation... brevity. These are the hallmarks of modern story dialogue. Nothing else will suffice.

Check the dialogue in your own copy. One of the simplest tests may be visual, and can warn of a possible problem. Look at several pages of your story that contain dialogue. Is the right-hand margin grossly irregular, many of the character statements going only halfway across the page, and others filling only perhaps a line and a hall? In newspaper terms, do your dialogue pages show a lot of white space?

If they do, good. If they don't, it may mean that your characters are being too long-winded.

Look, too, for clearly stated goals in the dialogue between your characters. If one or both characters have a goal in mind, they won't tend to wander so far from the point... and make speeches. See if you have small mob scenes that you could simplify by setting up one on ones as we just discussed.

Make sure you're following the rules of stimulus and response as outlined in Chapter Eleven.

Now, it may be that you will occasionally allow a character to ramble briefly in order to make the dialogue appear more realistic; you may even let one character briefly lose the thread of the conversation, and need a repeat of something just mentioned. These are fine little tricks. But they are not the norm. Modern dialogue tends to be brief, punchy, single-issue oriented. Impatient readers demand no less.

In writing a draft of a dialogue scene, you may find yourself with ten points in your mind all at once—aspects or questions or comments that you as the writer know must be in the scene somewhere. Sometimes, in your creative anxiety, you may catch yourself letting a character blurt out long diatribes, listing point after point you had in mind. At the stage of first draft, that may be okay; after all, part of what you're doing is just getting the thoughts down so you can start fixing them.

On revision, however, those multipoint speeches will have to be broken down into much smaller components. More exchanges will have to be devised. A page of gray speech in first draft may become five pages of lively dialogue, half of each right-hand page blank, in the revision. That will be good.

There was a time, not so
long ago, when fiction writers strove for authenticity in some of their stories by attempting to imitate regional and ethnic dialects and pronunciations by purposely misspelling words in their dialogue. Today such practices have fallen into disfavor. For one thing, it takes a very high degree of skill to depart from standard English in dialogue without unnecessarily distracting the reader. For another, styles simply change, and stories using such devices today often seem quaint and old-fashioned. In addition? the sensibilities of minorities are keener today, and they tend to view such mangling of characters' speech as offensive.

For all these reasons, the use of funny spelling or other typographical devices to indicate minority deviations from standard American speech is frowned upon by most cautious editors, and may earn a rejection for your otherwise admirable story.

Some attempts do get by editors and are published. In one recent story, which won't be identified in order to protect the writer, characters in a small town invariably said "shure" for "sure," and "reely" for "really." Try to pronounce these colorful spellings differently than you pronounce the standard spelling, and you begin to see how absurd specialized lingo can become.

All attempts at specialized dialogue or speech devices are not that silly, but all are very difficult to bring off convincingly. Even trying to create "Britishisms" for a Londoner in your story may look awkward to the reader, or even wrong. British argot and slang change as quickly as does American usage; if you get caught using last year's terminology, your informed reader is going to think you're an oaf—and not like your story.

Strange to say, but danger lurks also in much use of mainstream American slang and colloquialism. All such speech fads change fast; what's trendy today may be already dated by the time your magazine story or book see the light of day. It seems only yesterday that kids said things were "super" or "neat." Later the same things were said to be "awesome" or "out of sight." In the academic world, where slang doesn't go, specialized jargon changes just as fast. Where college professors once talked about "paradigms," they began talking about "models," and where they used to say a certain change would "reverberate," they later said it would "impact." Surely you can think of many similar examples.

The moral? Avoid trendy speech. It will certainly date your story next year, or the year after that. Just read Sinclair Lewis today to see this clearly. A novel like
Babbitt
was on the cutting contemporary edge when it came out many years ago. Now the archaic slang makes much of it read like a museum curiosity.

Words misspelled to indicate offbeat pronunciations, dialogue words full of apostrophes to indicate the dropping of letters, excessively fragmented sentences in character talk, and all such devices of realism are often extremely irritating to editors and would-be readers alike. They sometimes obscure meaning, too. And they distract readers from what's going on in the story, and instead focus them on your verbal gymnastics. An occasional elision and use of standard contractions will suffice to make your dialogue readable and realistic. All attempts at more only court disaster.

Finally, while we're looking at ways your lingo can mess up your story dialogue, please consider another error that beginning writers often make in quest for realism. That's the whole question of profanity and obscenity in character speech.

I am now in my third decade of dealing with young writers. Quite a few over the years have been military veterans. Many of these guys wanted to write fiction based on their experiences in the military. Inevitably, they brought me copy studded with oaths, obscenities, curses, filthy puns and all manner of verbal crud like that which is so prevalent in the military (and in a lot of other fields, for that matter). When I protested that a very great many editors are surprisingly bluenosed about excessive use of "dirty words," my young males always protested vehemently that that, after all, "is the way it is."

I have seldom succeeded in convincing them that dirty talk often looks dirtier on the page than it actually is. I have tried to convince them that such strong words, if they are to be used at all, should be saved for those story situations where a really strong word really is needed to convey the emotion. But I haven't convinced many of that viewpoint, either.

So over the years a steady stream of Army/Navy/Air Force/Marine stories and novels filled with dirty words have winged their way out of Norman, Oklahoma, and its environs, headed for the great literary marts of New York. So far, every one of them—
every one of them
—has failed to sell. And I am convinced that the gross language was the only factor that doomed several.

Most of us let slip a cussword once in a while. A few in a novel are certainly not going to shock anybody. But it's a rare, rare bird who has enough talent to sell a story or novel with a high percentage of those words in it. You might be able to mention several examples of books that prove such realism does get published. I can give you the names of dozens of talented people who never got published at all because they couldn't keep the garbage out of their characters' mouths.

You will make your own decisions about character speech. However, I hope you'll think about the points just raised. Oddball spellings, excessive dropped letters to indicate colloquial mispronunciations, attempts at racial or ethnic dialect, and heavy use of realistic dirty talk all risk offending someone; some you might offend will be editors, who have the checkbooks, and others may be members of honorable American minorities who have already been thoughtlessly battered, verbally and otherwise, for a dozen generations or more. Under such circumstances, is it really necessary?

Wally, my problem
student, brought me some story dialogue the other day. It read like this:

"Don't make me go any closer!" Annie cried.

"There's nothing to fear," Joe soothed. "See?"

"That's easy for you to say!" quoth Annie.

"Is that better?" asked Joe.

"Oh, yes!" murmured Annie. "Much!"

"Annie, you do love me, after all!"

"Yes!"

I'll spare you the details of the real-life conversation that then ensued between me and Wally. However, the gist of it from my standpoint was that I as a fiction reader didn't have any idea of what was going on in Wally's story in the dialogue just quoted. Wally protested that he had, after all, followed the rules of stimulus and response, and had given me
everything
the characters said; therefore, he couldn't understand what my problem was.

I then tried to explain to Wally that the dialogue left me at a loss. Among other things, I could not:

"Wally," I concluded, "dialogue without any sense impressions, thoughts or feelings of the viewpoint character gets totally abstract; it stops making sense; the reader gets lost. I'm not suggesting great, purple patches of stuff—just enough to keep me oriented."

Wally went off and rewrote. He soon came up with something like the following (his additional material is italicized):

The chill wind tugged at Joe's coat as he pulled Annie closer to the edge of the cliff. Behind them, gusts swayed the ponderosa pines. A few feet from where he now led the quaking girl, the granite escarpment simply stopped. Beyond the brink was the windy vastness of a sheer, thousand-foot drop, straight down
.

Annie's shaking became more violent, and her eyes glistened with sudden, frightened tears
. "Don't make me go any closer!"

Joe stepped back a step, leaving her alone on the brink. He had to make her confront this terror or she could never forget what had happened here last summer
. "There's nothing to fear," Joe soothed. "See?"

Annie's wide eyes took in the space between them—how much farther back from the edge he had moved, leaving her alone
. "That's easy for you to say!" she said bitterly.

Suddenly Joe couldn't be cruel to her any longer. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her, intent only on protecting her, always, if she would just let him
. "Is that better?" he asked.

"Oh, yes!" Annie murmured
gratefully, snuggling against him. "Much!" Still crying, she raised her face to his and gently kissed him. Her perfume,  mountain flowers, surrounded them. Joe could scarcely believe the glad certainty that swept through him. She clung more fiercely
.