A Scavenger Hunt In Reverse

One good thing about being a writer is you can talk about the best ways of burying bodies, and no one phones the local boys in blue.

(True story: I was knitting a sock at a writing convention when a woman said, "May I see?" Ordinarily I'd hand over the sock, but I was with other writers, so I handed over one of the double-pointed needles. The woman balanced it her hand, sighted along it, and said, "You could kill a man with this."  I replied, "I'd suggest a number five straight needle instead.")

There are better things to bury than bodies, however. Let's talk about burying details.

The details are where I have the most fun in my writing, and the majority of that fun happens in the editing phase. If you're one of those writers who hates editing, put down your number five straight needle and hear me out: most of the fun in an edit is the addition of depth.

Whether you're an outliner or a pantser, you don't know your main characters as well at the beginning of the book as you will at the end. That's just a factor of spending a hundred hours writing these guys. It's inevitable that as you go back through the book, you're going to find places where, early on, you just didn't know them as well and you glossed something which became more important later.

That's where it's fun. You find places to bury the details. You use that editorial needle and inject their deepest, most hidden motivations under the surface of the story. It emerges in one verb choice rather than another. In chapter three of the first draft, your MC is reading a book; now you'll know the title. In the first draft, your main character seems to have spent a lot of time looking at the moon; well, now you'll know why, and you can change the things she thinks while she gazes.

This phase is like a scavenger hunt in reverse. You know enough to go back and give the underlay. It's as if we need to know the contours of our characters before we can give them their bones.

Will every reader catch all these little moments? Of course not. In fact, I hope not. If someone does catch them all, you're not being subtle enough. But like real people, your characters will have thoughts and motives they're not aware they possess. There will be lies they believe, only they don't know either that they're lies or that they believe them. A lot of these details are there only for me, like a secret I'm telling myself. Why did Tabris look off at the trees when the other angels were joking about board games? A reader could figure it out, but most probably won't take the time.

In my own edits, my agent cautioned me that a certain change might be too much muddying of the character's motivation. I replied, "It's already there. It was already in her, and it took only a few changes in wording to evoke it."

In other words, sometimes you're not adding. You're just transforming potential into reality. You just needed to find it yourself before you could bury the clues for others.

In my sophomore year of college, my English professor spent the first ten minutes of class annoying the hell out of me. She was asking us why Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra was great literature, and no matter what answer we gave, it was wrong. Finally, I raised my hand. "Did you think it was great?" I said. (If you think I'm arrogant now, you really didn't want to know me in college.)  When she said yes, I said, "Why do you think it was great?"

She said, "Because it asks great questions."

A year later, another professor said that if you want people to talk about your work forever, leave a few unanswered questions. Leave them something to debate.

I'm not telling you how to get into the 2410 edition of the Norton Anthology. But I will tell you that if an agent or editor continues pondering your novel for days after finishing, you've got a better chance than if they close the book and never think of it again.

Not that you want to leave your story muddy. Instead, you want to leave us with the sense that all the answers are right there, right in our hands. That the characters, just like all the other people you know, are multifaceted and complex. That they resonate because of the many layers to their motivations, their thoughts, their decisions.

And so, without ever saying it explicitly, you convey that your character has a sweet tooth, or that she found a home base in her grandfather, or that he never feels entirely comfortable with the comfortable life he's inherited. Maybe she has an enigmatic tattoo you never fully explain. Maybe you never even tell us she has a tattoo, but her reaction to someone else's tells us she's got one somewhere under her clothes.

Editing isn't just fixing your errors. It's also fixing the underpinnings of your characters so that they resonate in our minds.

---

Jane Lebak is the author of The Guardian (Thomas Nelson, 1994), Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) and The Boys Upstairs (MuseItUp, 2010). At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four children. She is represented by the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Marianne Strong Literary Agency.

Strengthening Dialogue

In fiction, dialogue can make or break your story. It might be the difference between getting The Call verses a rejection. Some people find it easy to write; others struggle at it. Here are some tips to help you create authentic sounding dialogue:

1.      Listen to conversations

Listening to how people talk is one of the best lessons there is on creating authentic dialogue. What are they saying and how are they saying it? Pay attention to your friends and spouse. Do they use complete sentences and perfect grammar? Probably not.

Pay attention to context. A lawyer will speak differently when in court, defending his client, compared to when he’s talking to his wife in bed. At least I hope he is.

Another thing you’ll notice is that people tend to interrupt each other. Admit it. You do it too, right? And don’t forget, no conversation is perfect. If it were, wives wouldn’t complain that their husbands never listen, and ‘misunderstanding’ wouldn’t be a word in the dictionary.

2.      Watch TV shows and movies

This is a great exercise for studying dialogue and dialect. You can even download movie and TV show scripts from the internet for free and study them.

3.      Read

Study how your favorite authors approach dialogue. Like in TV shows and movies, you’ll notice that the dialogue gets straight to the point and moves the plot forward. You don’t want to waste the reader’s time with mindless chatter that does nothing to advance the story. In real life, when you meet someone, you tend to go through the formalities of small talk first. Don’t make this fatal mistake in fiction. If it’s not important to the story or characterization, cut it.

4.      Do a dialogue pass when editing

This by far is my favorite trick. Copy a scene from your manuscript, and strip it down to the dialogue. For example, here’s an excerpt from City of Bones by Cassandra Clare:

It was Alec who spoke first. “What’s this?” he demanded, looking from Clay to his companions, as if they might know what she was doing there.

“It’s a girl,” Jace said, recovering his composure. “Surely you’ve seen girls before, Alec. Your sister Isabelle is one.” He took a step closer to Clary, squinting as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “A mundie girl,” he said half to himself. “And she can see us.”

“Of course I can see you,” Clary said. “I’m not blind, you know.”

Now strip it down:

 “What’s this?”

“It’s a girl,”

“Surely you’ve seen girls before, Alec. Your sister Isabelle is one.”

“A mundie girl,”

“And she can see us.”

“Of course I can see you,”

“I’m not blind, you know.”

The next step is to read the dialogue OUT LOUD. This is the only way to tell if it flows and sounds authentic. And if you can’t tell who said what, then you need attack this issue so that each character sounds unique. This topic is a post in itself.

Another thing I’ve discovered by doing this is that sometimes dialogue begs to be expanded on. But when you try to do this in the draft you’re working on, it doesn’t seem to work. Once you’ve removed physical beats, dialogue tags, etc, you’ll find it much easy to write the missing dialogue.

Once you’ve finished editing your dialogue, bold the ones you’ve changed, deleted, or added, and place it back in the scene (or delete unnecessary ones). You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to work in the new and improved dialogue this way. Try it out and see for yourself.

Does anyone else have tricks for writing authentic sounding dialogue?

Stina Lindenblatt writes romantic suspense and young adults novels. In her spare time, she’s a photographer and blogging addict, and can be found hanging out on her blog, Seeing Creative.  

It's All About The Details

In one writing seminar, a classmate wrote in my margins, "God is in the details." While that quote comes from an architect, a good writer will use details to infuse the work with life.

But, you may say, readers want to escape from everyday details.

True, but details create the world, and the world interacts with the characters. Writers call this "verisimilitude."

Imagine a scene in which John meets Mary to break up with her. As the writer, you get to pick the place. Since it's set in New York, you decide on a pizzeria. Now put yourself in that pizzeria. Are there booths or tables with chairs?

What's on the table? Salt, pepper, red pepper flakes? Is there graffiti on the table? What does it say? What does your pizzeria smell like? Is the place crowded? When was the floor last swept? Is the menu on the wall? What are the guys doing behind the counter?

As you answer these questions, consider your characters' mood. Consider what's about to happen and how it's going to take place, and then craft the details to enhance the scene. Mary is about to be broken-hearted; the salt and pepper shakers are only half-full. If John is angry, maybe he chooses mushrooms even though Mary dislikes them. Is it going to be a heated breakup? Details tell how your characters perceive the passage of time: maybe while waiting, a bored John runs his finger up and down the glass curves of the red pepper shaker.

Given just the right emphasis, a detail enters the reader's mind, delineates the boundaries of the characters' world, and then fades. The reader picks up the tension but never traces it to the puddle of condensation growing around the water pitcher or to the flickering fluorescent light behind the counter.

The magic of details is how they telegraph to the reader things the narrator knows but doesn't tell (as in a third-person narrator foreshadowing). Moreover, good use of detail will alert the reader to circumstances even the narrator doesn't know. For example, a woman who over time mentions how her daughter is secretive about what she eats, vanishes into the bathroom after meals and has unexplained bad breath can telegraph to the reader that the daughter is bulimic even though she herself never puts the clues together.

Details at their most basic help convince us of the world's reality, but at their best they keep the reader interpreting the story in "realtime." So while we may read to escape the details of our lives, details in the story assist in the reader's escape.

Jane Lebak is the author of The Guardian (Thomas Nelson, 1994), Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) andThe Boys Upstairs (this December from MuseItUp). At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four children. She is represented by Roseanne Wells of the Marianne Strong Literary Agency.