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I’ve begun more seriously toying with the idea of writing stories. Last year, as you know, I took a short-fiction writing class, and then, when it was over, promptly forgot about doing my own writing until just about now, when I’m starting to get all fired up about it again. Why? Well, cause I like it, of course, and also because I’ve been reading this blog, Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer’s year-long online writing workshop/blog. It’s updated twice weekly with discussions on the technical side of storytelling. Fascinating stuff; not to be missed by aspiring writers, or just people interested in the anatomy of a novel. You normally have to pay to get instruction like this. Pretty cool!

Since this is the first of my Don’ts series, I’ll do a little explaining. As I’ve said before, while I am not formally trained (much) as a writer, I am a shameless elitist. And in the past few years of reading, I started unconsciously quantifying what I liked and didn’t like about books I read, and why I liked or didn’t like it. With my recent enrollment in a writing class, and my subsequent attempts to write fiction of my own, as well as my reading of other amateur fiction, I’ve come up with an unofficial list of things not to do when writing. I’ll be writing posts on a number of different elements of writing; this post will be on dialogue and how not to do it well.

• Exclamation points: This one is simple; don’t use too many of them. People don’t tend to exclaim too much except in high drama moments. Dialogue with too many exclamation points just seems overwrought, and, well, like the author is trying too hard.

  There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule, but they are mostly in comedic writing, and then only when the author is particularly skilled.

• Synonyms for “said”: I’m talking about words like “screamed”, “exclaimed”, “whispered”, “commented” (especially “commented”), “cried”, “laughed”, and the like. Don’t use too many of them. In fact, try and minimize the use of these altogether. “Said” pretty much says it all. Use of other words, I find, tends to overwhelm the dialogue and not let it, ahem, speak for itself.
• Adverbs: Things like “she said quietly”, “he whispered brokenly”, etc. Again, they tend to be melodramatic and overwhelm the dialogue. The dialogue should communicate the mood all by itself, with little or no help from outside description like this.
• Exposition: This should, in most cases, not be allowed. It is, sure, necessary sometimes, but (a) not as often as you’d think, and (b) very rarely done well. The rule? Never explain in dialogue what both the speaker and the listener already know (nor, indeed, what the speaker wouldn’t include in the conversation because it would be inconsequential). If it’s crucial to the reader for the clarity of your story, do it outside dialogue, in the narrative, where it belongs.
• Realism: This is perhaps the hardest part of dialogue to get right, and yet the most crucial. It ties in quite closely to characterization; make your characters talk like real people. Don’t make them say things they wouldn’t normally say*. Dialogue that is poorly tied to the character, that is not consistent, can be the quickest destroyer of the reader’s trust—and by extension, interest—in the work.
• Pacing: This has to do with the rhythm of your characters’ speech. Don’t make it too fast; your character is not likely to spout huge sentences with no pauses in the middle. But also don’t make it too slow; this just drags the conversation out and risks boring the reader.

I think that’s all I’ve got. As I said, this is largely from my own figuring and experience, and perhaps is not the conventional wisdom.

* See my post on dialogue in The Criteria, the bad and mediocre dialogue examples.

my writing class, but this one is my favorite: Steven Koch’s The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop. It takes a very back-to-basics approach that seems both very intuitive and completely revelatory. I’m finding reading it to be a very inspirational experience. And here’s my first revelation:

“But”—you may say—”I don’t even know my story yet.” My answer is: “Of course you don’t know your story yet.” You are the very first person to tell this story ever, anywhere in the whole world, and you cannot know a story until it has been told. First you tell it; then you know it. It is not the other way around. That may sound illogical, but to the narrating mind, it is logic itself. Stories make themselves known, they reveal themselves—even to their tellers—only by being told. You may ask how on earth you can tell a story before you know it. You do that by letting the emerging story tell itself through you. As you tell it, you let the story give you your cues about where it is going to go next. At first, you must feel your way, letting it be your guide. You may eventually be able to plan the whole scope of the work down to its smallest details, as J.K. Rowling is staid to have done with all her Harry Potter books. But in the very first phrase of its creation, any story must be teased out from the shadows of your imagination and unconscious.

<Ted “Theodore” Logan>Whooaaa</Ted “Theodore” Logan>. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know you could start with just a glimmer of an idea. I thought you had to have the whole thing outlined out before you even started. You mean I can just…start writing? Excellent.

And that’s exactly what I ended up doing. The first week of class, the instructor assigned us the opening scenes of our stories. I was, to say the least, alarmed. I thought I’d get the chance to ease into it, not be required to jump into the freezing ocean all at once. I had no ideas, no stories I wanted to tell, and I started to panic a little. So I decided to get my mind off it, because, even untrained as I am, I know that panic would bring me no closer to a solution.

I was reading Charlie Huston’s Already Dead at the time, and so I picked it up; I had, in fact, just begun it. Now, Huston, along with Lee Child, is just the sort of writer I’d like to emulate. Clean, immersive writing, great dialogue, addictive plots. And maybe I was unconsciously keeping that in mind when I read that night, because I read a scene near the beginning of that book where the main character is sleeping and gets woken up by a phone call. And boom, I had my idea.

And it was enough to get me through the opening scenes. I had a couple of vague ideas about what would happen after the first two scenes—but not, you understand, the whole story—and I started writing. But then I hit a wall. I wrote myself into a sort of corner. If I went with my original vague idea, the beginning of the story wouldn’t work anymore. It wouldn’t make sense. I had to start seriously thinking about the story, the plot, the structure (the meanings and differences of which terms, by the way, I had not known until I read further in the Koch book):

The way—the only way—to “find” your story is to tell it. Nobody in the whole world has ever before told the story you are about to tell. You yourself have never told it to anyone, not even to yourself. You may have lots of intuitions about what the story is going to be, and you may even have a sort of summary overview of it. These are good and useful things to have; they are fine places to start. They are not enough. Until you actually tell the story, the whole story, it will be nothing but smoke. Moreover, you probably will not tell the story exactly right the first time you try. You’ll make wrong turns, use the wrong key, or use the right key in the wrong door. After all, you have nobody to guide you. If you are like most people, you will have to tell this story more than once—maybe even several times—before you really get it down.

Okay. So I kept writing, tweaking here and there—at that stage I was pretty happy with what I’d actually written; it was just the backstory I had to figure out, to assign motivation to one of the characters—and thinking hard. Then I found it, the thing that would fix my problem, and I had another crutch. Something to get me through the next couple of scenes and into my other vague idea. For a little while, I had clear sailing.

And somewhere in the middle of that writing, the stuff that I had sort of a plan for, everything clicked. I saw the shape of the whole thing, maybe the major turning points, and—this is very important—the final scene. And now I know where I’m going, and, pretty much, how I’m going to get there. The details are still a little sketchy, but that’s okay. The sort of exploratory writing I’ve been doing so far, letting the story do the work, has been working pretty well up till now. May as well stick with it.