Two Essential Tips and a Sale
October 27, 2024 by Harvey
In today’s Journal
* An Essential Dialogue Tip
* An Essential Narrative Tip
* A Minor Digression and a Sale
* The Numbers
An Essential Dialogue Tip
When a tag line or brief descriptive narrative is necessary to let the reader know which character is speaking, always, always, ALWAYS put it ahead of the dialogue, not after the dialogue.
This is especially true when more than two characters are involved in a scene.
Putting the tag line or descriptive narrative after the dialogue is a kind of reverse construction, and reverse constructions are almost always detrimental to a reading experience.
Reading a line of dialogue and THEN finding out which character said it will force the reader to go back and read the dialogue again. It interrupts the reading so the reader can take time to figure out which character is speaking and then “hear” the right voice.
Especially if you do that all the way through a story, it will render a very choppy reading experience for the reader.
Very few, if any, readers will continue trying to read such a story after the first few reverse constructions. Instead of reading for escape and pleasure, the reading becomes too much like work.
The reader doesn’t want to work. The reader wants to be entertained.
As a Refresher
A “tag line” is a sentence that identifies he, she, they, or Character Name as the speaker followed by a verb that indicates a form of utterance. The best verb for that is ‘said’. It’s intentionally boring to enable the reader to skip over it more quickly and get to the dialogue.
A brief descriptive narrative is a sentence that identifies he, she, they, or Character Name as the speaker and enables the reader to ‘see’ an action.
An example of a tag line is
Sally said, “Hey, what’re you guys up to?”
An example of a brief descriptive narrative (others call this a ‘narrative beat’) is
Sally walked into the room. “Hey, what’re you guys up to?” or
Sally frowned (smiled, laughed, whatever), her hands on her hips. “Hey, what’re you guys up to?”
This is one of the most basic and essential tips I can pass along regarding the writing of effective, realistic dialogue.
An Essential Narrative Tip
I’ve often said a good fiction writer never uses the “sense” verbs in third-person narrative. The sense verbs are
saw, heard, smelled, tasted, felt or sensed (physically or emotionally), or knew OR
any of the “could” forms of those verbs (could see, could hear, could smell, could taste, could feel or sense, or could know).
There is NEVER EVER a good reason to use the sense verbs in third-person narration.
Note: Using the sense verbs in a first-person (“I”) narrative is fine because the character, not the author, is speaking/narrating.
Every time you write in third-person narrative that he/she/they or Character Name saw (or could see) etc., that is an author intrusion.
You’re inserting yourself between the reader and the story, interrupting the reading of your own work.
And the first cardinal rule of fiction writing is Never Interrupt the Reading of Your Own Work.
The reader isn’t there to hear from you, the writer, anyway. If the story is well-written enough, the reader will be so engaged in the story that s/he won’t even be aware there’s a writer involved.
The reader also isn’t there to read or hear your opinions or biases, and s/he isn’t there to be blatantly told your thoughts on what someone else (the character) can see, hear, smell, taste, feel or sense, or know.
The reader is there to escape his or her own life and be entertained.
The reader is there to eavesdrop on the characters, and to see, hear, smell, taste, touch and feel or sense, physically and emotionally, what the characters are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and feeling or sensing physically and emotionally.
In other words, the reader is there to bear witness to and subliminally experience what the characters are experiencing.
Most of the time these author intrusions come immediately after a line of dialogue.
So when you commit an author intrusion, you’re breaking into the story—interrupting the reader—to tell the reader what s/he just learned from the dialogue s/he read a second ago.
More times than I care to recount or even remember, I’ve read a passage similar to this one:
Clair huffed, scowled, and crossed her arms hard over her chest. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She was really upset.
Bam! Just like that I’m jerked out of the story and reminded, abruptly and rudely, there’s an author out there. Yet the passage was fine without that final sentence.
After I calmly close the book and lay it on the table next to my chair (or depending on my mood, hurl it across the room), I wish the “author” was in the room with me.
Because I want to grab the “author” by the lapels, pull him close to my scowling face, and say, spittle flying, “Seriously? Clair was upset? Well, thank you for cluing me in! No possible WAY am I smart enough to watch a huffing, scowling woman slap her arms over her chest and ask ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and figure out all by my stupid self that MAYBE she’s a little annoyed without YOU telling me! So thanks for that!”
I teach writing into the dark.
I teach trusting your characters. I teach watching and listening to the characters as you run through the story with them. I teach writing down what happens and what the characters say and do in reaction to that. Nothing more, nothing less.
And the thing is this: Never, not one single solitary time in human history, has ANY character in ANY story in ANY genre EVER whispered into ANY writer’s ear, “Hmm. I think maybe you’d better pop on stage and let the reader know I was upset during that scene.”
Just don’t do it, folks.
A Minor Digression and a Sale
Way back, I committed some of those Writerly Sins (free PDF download) myself.
In my defense, I didn’t have a resource like TNDJ to read (almost) every day to help me learn these things.
There were no books like Writing Better Fiction, which as it turns out contains a lot of Writing Realistic Dialogue and a lot of Punctuation for Writers.
There was Strunk & Whites, which is primarily useless for fiction writers because it only mimics what was available to you in high school and college English classes.
And there were a lot of how-to books for writing fiction, but all of them either propagated or shamelessly copied the inane myths of writing.
But there were no good books—by which I mean books filled with valid, fluff-free information—for those who wanted to write fiction. Not one.
But now Writing Better Fiction is available to you.
And I really want to make the dialogue and narrative issues I mentioned above go away, at least among all of you. So I’m putting Writing Better Fiction on sale at my discount site.
The regular price at Amazon and everywhere else is for Writing Better Fiction is $14.99. The regular price at my discount site is $14.
But right now and for the next week, you can snag a copy of Writing Better Fiction at my StoneThread Publishing discount site for only $10.50!
That’s 25% off the already discounted price. This sale ends on November 2.
If you already have Writing Better Fiction, thank you. If you haven’t read it, please do.
And if you don’t have it, do yourself a favor: buy it and read it. You won’t regret it.
Talk with you again soon.
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 1210
Writing of “”
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date…… XXXX
Fiction for October……………………. 77902
Fiction for 2024……………………….. 819410
Nonfiction for October……………….. 26310
Nonfiction for 2024……………………. 329900
2024 consumable words……………… 973349
Average Fiction WPD (October)……… 2996
2024 Novels to Date……………………….. 15
2024 Novellas to Date……………………… 1
2024 Short Stories to Date………………… 18
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..……. 97
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………. 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………..… 255
Short story collections…………………….….. 29
Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.
If you are able, please support TNDJ with a paid subscription. Thank you!