Just to let you know, when your characters start commenting on the writing and tropes WITHIN THE MANSCRIPT, you need to fix thing.
From a book I was editing, an internal thought of the POV character: “Goodness knows but he was the worst kind of one-dimensional character wasn’t he?”
I nearly facepalmed … if your characters are telling you this about another character, you as the writer need to listen.
And just in case you think this is a rare thing. From a book review I did: Also when the characters start commenting that things seem a little over the top, and the story is not a parody, then you might need to cut back. (in this case the number of mafias in play: London, Italian, maybe Russian, a failed London gang, and out-of-nowhere a deceased Irish branch)
So many prologues in the slush reads. All used wrong.
Best use is murder mysteries when you show the murder and then the rest of the book is your Point-of-View character (the detective).
Worst use – the world building vomit of high fantasy where you have to tell us the last 10,000 years of history for the planet including interactions of the gods.
Well, if readers don’t want it, they can skip it.
Why do you have words in your story that readers can skip?
In April I struggled with several flashes and ended up rewriting them. I know, I know, that is not how flashes work – it is write and done, yes? But the story or scene just didn’t work. They were passive, telling, not showing. The dialogue fell flat. They were a mess.
In particular, I rewrote two of the four flashes for the Under Contract Series.
N is for Noise (4/16/2023) seemed okay as is. Q is for Quicken (4/19/2023) mostly stayed as is, just needed brightening. A quick rewrite. Y is for Yield (4/28/2023) got burned to the ground and totally rewritten. Z is for Zzzz (4/30/2023) needs to be burned to the ground and redone, but I haven’t done that yet. I was tired of rewriting and realized that this particular series will not go on to bigger things. I decided to leave it as is because it does present all the bits of the scene I wanted. It just didn’t have any umph.
After rewriting them, I ran across Writer Brandon McNulty vlogs on dialogue and what was the ACTUAL problem I was struggling with in April got revealed. Dialogue – I was writing bad dialogue and when I fixed things, they became good dialogue.
Mr. McNulty defines Good Dialog as
Natural – Sounds natural to the character, scene, and world.
Conflict – Attacks or defends
Subtext – Expresses unspoken meaning
In his first Round (video below), he defines five examples of bad dialogue …. but also gives an example of when “bad” can be done well.
On the nose – States the obvious; baldly states thoughts or feelings; no mystery, subtlety, or subtext.
Melodrama!!!
As you know Bob (I have covered this in my editing rants and writing exercises before)
Forced poetry (I usually call this purple prose)
Wooden Dialogue – Too formal; unnatural; on the nose.
In his second Round (video below), he gives five more examples of bad dialogue and how they could be fixed.
Name calling
Preachy dialogue
Filler Dialog
Relentlessly Repeated Phrases
Clunky Comebacks
Now, all the examples he gives are spoken in movies or in video games instead of reading aloud examples from books. He is using the video medium, so pictures and speaking are the best for the format, but the examples do translate well into writing.
How Y is for Yield got fixed mostly is I added Conflict, one of the marks of good dialogue, and I made it more natural. It was already pretty natural, but there wasn’t really a conflict. If you read it, you might think “where is the conflict?” because the two aren’t actually arguing. They are just talking as people do. But Malcolm is a teen and while he wants to talk about his day, he also doesn’t want to talk about his day. Abby understands this and gently pries the information out of him that he wants to share. She makes him face a hard truth about himself, and then puts him in the position of having to report all of this to his mother. There actually is a lot of subtext happening; Malcolm is in his last year of high school and is facing a lot of changes in his life and needs to sort them out. Abby is being a sounding board, a very active sounding board in that she is making him talk. The conflict is internal to Malcolm, but being shown through his conversation with Abby.
I’m actually very proud of the final product I came up with there in the second try at that flash.
Z is for Zzzz hasn’t been fixed. Nearly all the words exchanged are FILLER dialogue, very clique. And the entire thing is WOODEN – some of the things Abby says is Unnatural to her manner of talking. Overall, the dialogue is way too formulaic. There is absolutely no conflict, internal or external, and no subtext. I break all the Good Dialogue rules and click off the boxes for several of the bad dialogue lists.
At least, the flash now serves a purpose: “If you can’t be a good example, be a bad one.” And Z is for Zzzz certainly meets being a bad example.
Under Contract was interesting to write in that each of the flashes is from a different POV. If I ever rewrote Z is for Zzzz, the conflict would be internal again – this time for Jonathan. I would make it much more of a ghost story, expanding on the scare atmosphere and maybe even leave a lingering fear in the Normal Man of the supernatural he has to live with. Except I really don’t like that twist for this family story. I don’t want to create internal conflict between the house dwellers. Which is one of the reasons this scene will never be rewritten. I can’t do it to make it a good scene and still have the story be the one I’m trying to tell. Yet this scene is essential to the overall story.
The Under Contract series was initial worldbuilding to see if I have a broad enough story and thick enough plot. In this case I don’t.
But it did give me a better feel about writing dialogue. A good lesson.
Variation is the spice to take words out of the bland.
Vary the people. Don’t have them all sound alike. Did they have different educations? Did they grow up in different parts of the country? Do they come from different income stratus? Fix the dialog – don’t let it be stale.
Vary the sentence length. Make Music! (See this previous post about the Music of Words.)
Vary sentence structure. Don’t be all “noun verb noun”. Break out some prepositions. After that, maybe add some sentences clauses to the beginning and end. Have conjunctions, but don’t put one in every sentence.
Anyone else getting tired of the science-fiction trope where the underclass of society are tricked or drafted into serving the military to protect corporate interests? Even using the best of the best equipment, the debt-ridden and the poor are tapped to populate the military for the interstellar wars while the rich stay back on the core worlds.
Science fiction is used to explore concepts of real life – to take a concept and play out it long-term progression on society.
So as much as I look forward to the day when this trope may be retired – as long as our present-day culture continues to use this concept, our sci-fi writers will keep shining the glaring light of self-reflection through speculative fiction.
