Sounds Good

I refuse to take the blame for being late. Blogger was down. Not my fault.

And now back to our regularly scheduled rants and hair pulling...

As has been said many times before, by other people than just me, the key to great characters is dialogue. The way they communicate often tells us just as much about someone as the actual information they’re communicating. If you can’t pull off good dialogue, your career as a writer is going to be an uphill battle the whole way.

The most common way people mess up dialogue is by having, well, god-awful dialogue. Sounds silly, but there it is. Some dialogue just sucks. It’s wooden, on the nose, devoid of any emotion. All you have to do is read it out loud and you can tell it rings false. Making a cheeseburger with rotten meat and moldy cheese is bad—no further explanation is needed. If you can’t figure that on your own, there’s not much anyone can do for you.

The second most common way, believe it or not, is the complete flipside. It’s when people write dialogue that’s too real. Which sounds bizarre, I know, but let me explain...

If you listen to people a lot—people in the real world, not on television—you’ll see that they rarely use complete sentences. Oh, there are a few remarkable statesmen in the world (not all of them politicians) who can speak on any topic and make it sound like they’ve rehearsed their answers a hundred times. For the most part, though, people speak in bits and fragments. We split infinitives, backform verbs, and don’t always match those verbs to the correct number. We pause in mid-thought and try to pick up the threads a moment later. We beat around the bush and sometimes we stall so we can get the rest of our thoughts in order.

You can see this yourself by listening to a recorded conversation. Try it. Ask a friend or two if you can tape a conversation and then talk about anything. The game, politics, a movie you saw, that new pizza place down the street, the new girl at the checkout counter, whatever. They might be a bit stilted at first while they think about being recorded, but eventually you’ll both settle into normal speech patterns.

Now try to transcribe that recording—the whole thing. Write down every pause or false start in the conversation. You’ll probably be surprised how many times you stop in the middle of a sentence and then start over. Or how many times your friend makes a funny noise to fill space while he or she tries to assemble words in the right order.

Get more than two people and you’ll become aware how many random comments people make. And how much space those comments start to eat up, especially when they need to be attributed to someone.

Realistic sounding dialogue is not the same thing as real dialogue. As the saying goes, art imitates life. If art and life are the same thing, though, then you’ve just got life, not art (‘cause we’re not getting rid of life).

I’ve seen a few amateur screenplays that get this wrong in a key way. You know when you walk into a room and half a dozen people say “Hi” and there’s a little burst of small talk from all corners before things settle down again? Some people write that into scripts. So you get six or seven people saying “Hello” and the new arrival responds to all their greetings. Three or four of them ask one like questions like “What’s up?” or “How’ve you been?” or “How’s Wakko?” and the new arrival answers each with two or three words.

Yes, this is very, very realistic. It also means the writer has just taken two and a half pages (when formatted correctly) for what will possibly be thirty seconds of screen time. Unless it’s completely, 100% integral to the plot and half your story will just collapse without it, this kind of thing stands out like a flare for readers as “rookie mistake.” It’s also something that can be written off with “Wakko enters the party, greets a few people, and makes his way over to Phoebe.”

Now, there’s a second part to dialogue that’s too real. If you’ve ever worked in any sort of special field, you’ve probably noticed there’s a certain jargon that develops. Each grocery store, department store, or restaurant has their own behind-the-scenes, shorthand terms for things. If you’ve ever worked in a very intensive field that swallows up a lot of your life—say medicine, the military, or even the film industry—that jargon almost becomes another language. There’s a ton of specialized terms and phrases and abbreviations that get used by people in these fields.

Now, again, here’s the catch. People outside of these fields don’t talk like this and don’t know what these terms mean. Some writers, in the attempt to make their dialogue as realistic as possible, actually make it completely impenetrable. It’s so authentic no one can understand it except other professionals from that field.

The trick for writers is to make this dialogue sound authentic while still being accessible. Think of it like this—you’d never write a character talking with a non stop accent or thick dialect because it becomes difficult to read. You’d pick out a few key phrases and terms and just use those. Things like dropping in “all y’all” instead of “all of you” or saying “pop” instead of “soda.” These give a character a certain flavor without forcing the reader to sound out everything they say.

A great example of this would be television shows like House or NCIS or (dare I say it) JAG. These are shows about people in exceptionally specialized fields, each of which has its own terminology and jargon. In real life, if a handful of lawyers were discussing a case or four doctors were sitting around discussing possible diagnoses of a patient, odds are most of us wouldn’t understand a single sentence (and none of the doctors would look like Olivia Wilde). So the writers of these shows only pepper the dialogue with such terms and flesh out most of it with straightforward, easily-understandable terms. Think about it—when they’re in the middle of a diagnosis, most of their dialogue is explaining their ideas so they’d make sense to a layman.

“Tansey syndrome explains the aversion to light and pale skin. But if you write off the pale skin as a side effect of light sensitivity, not an actual symptom, chloroblastosis of the heart is a better match. It explains the aversion to light, elongated teeth, and the craving for blood... So start treatment for chloroblastosis.”

We don’t need to know what Tansey syndrome or chloroblastosis is because it’s getting explained to us. It’s not how doctors would actually talk, yes, but it still sounds good to the layman and it’s understandable to the layman. And it’s got enough facts right that hopefully doctors won’t be too annoyed or amused. Ignoring the fact that I just made up two medical conditions.

When I was writing Ex-Patriots I knew there was going to be a strong military presence in the book. While I don’t have any experience in that world myself, I was extremely fortunate to have a web of people I could call on. My best friend was in the Air Force. My dad was in the Navy. My step-sister was a Master Sergeant in the Army. I also know a couple other authors with a wide range of military experience.

But I also knew I was writing for a much broader audience than just the military. So I needed to have soldiers speak more like civilians at some points. If I didn’t, I’d run the risk of either alienating the readers or having to explain large swaths of dialogue. Neither prospect was all that exciting.

So don’t write what you know. Write like you know what you’re talking about.

Next time, writer challenge!

Until then, go write.

More Shameless Self-Promotion...

On the off chance you didn’t know, I write books for a living. People actually buy them. For money.

A while back my publisher cut a deal with Audible.com and now they’re having a wonderful little cross-promotion called Zombiefest. All this summer there are going to be zombie audiobooks up for great prices from Audible.com. I’ve got one in the first wave, just released today (Ex-Heroes) and it seems I’m also first out in the July wave, just after Fourth of July, with Ex-Patriots. Plus the books in the July wave come with a little bonus material, also by me, called The Junkie Quatrain.

So check it out.

Thursday I still plan on rambling on about how you can sound professional. Is anyone still reading? Haven’t been any comments in a month or two, now...

This IS Ceti Alpha Five!

If you get that title reference, you probably feel an equal mix of pride and shame. Just like I do for coming up with it.

For those of you who don’t get it, it’s from a sci fi movie where the characters suddenly discover they aren’t on the planet they thought they were. They (and the audience) had gone along assuming they were on planet A, only to discover they were on planet B instead. It’s a mistake that costs them dearly—they end up getting little parasitic worms stuck in their ears.

Silly as it may sound, a key part of storytelling is knowing the world your story is set in. I can tell the story of a noble knight on a quest to find the Holy Grail, but depending on the world I set it in, he can be a glorious hero (The Once and Future King) or a deranged madman (The Fisher King). We’d all frown if one of the Bourne books had him stopping an alien invasion and we’d shake our heads if Jack Reacher took on a cult of Satanists that had summoned an actual demon.

One of the biggest ways writers mess this up is to take too long to establish what kind of world they’re in. For example, they’re doing a spoof-comedy, but the first thirty pages have been completely straight. Or (on the flipside) they do establish the world and much later in the narrative try to switch that world to something else. I’ll blab on about that in a minute.

For now, consider the movie Predator. The original, with Governor Arnold, Governor Jesse, Secretary of Defense Carl Weathers, and screenwriter Shane Black.

Predator begins with the team landing in Central America and getting briefed on their mission. They head into the jungle, locate the crashed plane, find the enemy camp, and have an awesome gunfight. Then Arnold discovers that Carl set them up and dumped them in the meat grinder. They head back out for the rendezvous... and that’s when they discover there’s something else in the jungle.

We’re, what... half an hour into the film at this point?

Except... that’s not how Predator begins. If you think back, the movie actually begins with an alien spaceship flying past Earth and launching off a small shuttle/ drop pod. We’re told in the first minute of the film that this is, ultimately, a sci-fi story. We may get distracted for a bit by the hail of bullets, but when the title alien shows up it isn’t a surprise... just a bit creepy.

On the other hand, one recent book I read was 100% set in the real world. Everything about it was realistic. The basic idea was two people who had found the last notebook of a dead research scientist who claimed (in his notes) to have discovered a cure for cancer. The cure for cancer. The entire book was about them trying to figure out what the heck they had while half a dozen pharmaceutical companies chased them—all wanting the notebook one way or another. Well, in the end they escape big pharma, sell the notebook to a group of researchers for a couple million dollars, and cancer is cured across the globe.

Yep. We cured cancer everywhere in the last seven pages. Go us.

I also once saw a script that started out as a dramatic comedy sort of thing. Young woman, single mother, trying to make the best of life even though she keeps getting knocked down... we’ve all seen it a few dozen times. That was the first forty odd pages. Then, on page 44, if memory serves (almost 3/4 of an hour into the movie, mind you), we discover that the old man she just helped cross the street is actually the Easter Bunny, who decides to reward the woman with a wish for her random act of Christian charity.

That’s right. A key point in this story is that the Easter Bunny spends his downtime walking among us disguised as an octogenarian. And the Easter Bunny is all about Christian charity because... well, the brown of the chocolate and the brown of the wood of the cross... or something...

Like any other disruption in the flow of a story, it’s very jarring when a story is set up in one world and then veers off into another one. It’s like discovering that one of your main characters has actually been insane all along. It forces the reader to re-examine what’s come before, and not in a good way. In fact, more often than not, these sudden shifts in tone and world force a story into pure comedy. Again, not in a good way.

Consider this. There’s a classic Saturday Night Live skit which claims to be the famous “lost reel” of It’s A Wonderful Life. In this, just as everyone’s sitting around singing and rejoicing, Uncle Billy remembers that he misplaced the money in the newspaper Mr. Potter took. It only takes a few moments for this realization to turn the celebrating friends and family into an ugly mob, and they march to Potter’s house, give the man a mass beating, and burn his home to the ground. The End. The Simpsons did something similar with a lost final reel of Casablanca. Here Ilsa parachutes out of Laszlo’s plane to be with Rick, saving him from (and killing) Adolph Hitler in the process. The happy couple is married shortly afterwards. The End...?

No, seriously. That’s how they “ended” Casablanca, with the ellipse and the question mark. Which, as Bart points out, leaves them open for a sequel.

So just by (hypothetically) shifting the tone/world of the endings, both of these classic, award-winning films become absurdist comedies.

Now here’s a key thing to remember. You can still have a fantastic story set in the real world provided the events of your story don’t change the world. If I wage a secret battle against lizard men from the center of the Earth and at the end of my story no one knows the war happened, then the world hasn’t changed, has it?

Perfect example—Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not only does this story involve a Nazi plot to seize arcane objects across the globe, it has reputable archeologist Henry “Indiana” Jones finding hardcore evidence that God is real. Think about the repercussions that information would have. If someone went public in the 1930s with absolute, undeniable proof of God’s existence, what kind of world would we be living in today? What kind of story would you be telling?

Which is why that evidence never goes public. We’re left with the distinct impression no more than a dozen people know what Dr. Jones recovered from that island, and that he’s been well-paid not to talk about it. And the Ark... well, we all know what happens to the Ark, don’t we?

I really, really hate to use this analogy, but it is perfect. If you want to set an amazing story in the real world, you need to use conspiracy theory logic. Yep, the same reasoning used by the birthers, moon-landing deniers, and “9-11 was staged” folks is what makes for a good fiction story. How sad is that?

By conspiracy-theory logic, the lack of evidence for X is the proof that X is true. Any facts that disprove X are manufactured by the powers that be, thus further proving X is true. And if you stumble across a few coincidences that imply X is true, well, that of course is solid proof that X is true.

Y’see, Timmy, by this chain of reasoning, the untouched real world is undeniable proof the imaginary world of your story is true. Only the BPRD knows what really happened to Adolph Hitler after the Occult Wars, so it’s understandable that most of us only know the publicized version of events. There are a dozen enchantments that keep the magical world of Hogwarts and Diagon Alley separate from the real world, thus the fact that no Muggle has ever seen Hogwarts pushes the idea that the stories about it are true. Only a worthy mortal can lift the hammer of Thor (bonus points if you remember its name—offer not good after Friday), but we all know we’re not 100% worthy so we accept that we’ve never had the chance to lift it. The fantasy world doesn’t change the real world, so that fantasy world is more believable.

So do amazing things in amazing worlds. Just make sure no one finds out about it.

Next time, I wanted to rant a bit about sounding like a professional.

Until then, go write.