writing techniques tagged posts

Painters have a lot of different tools at their disposal to create an image: oils, watercolors, acrylics, computer graphics. Photographers have light, composition, angle, framing, the capabilities of their camera and film or electronics, and of course Photoshop® and its cousins. Sculptors have stone, wood, found objects, metal, even sand.

We writers have words—hundreds of thousands of them in the English language alone—so there should never be a problem with creating a clear image, right?

Alas, we know that’s not true. It’s not how many or how few tools we have at our disposal, it’s how we use them that matters...

In the last article, I identified the general questions critiquers want to ask about scene and story pace—does it vary, is it appropriate, and if not, what needs to change—and eight factors that affect pace: sentence and paragraph length, active or passive voice, dialogue versus narrative, tone, language, description, complexity, and what’s happening.

Now let’s apply the factors to the questions.

Does the Pace Vary?

As I noted last time, even the shortest piece may have a varying pace but once you get beyond the flash-fiction story or filler article, the pace has to change. Readers need changes of pace to keep their interest...

Whenever characters speak, they’re transmitting information, to one or more other characters and/or to the reader. That information can be truth, lies, or something in-between; it can be emotional (a state of being or feeling) rather than factual; it can be directive (an order or warning) or informational; it can be direct or indirect; it can be any combination of these. This is nowhere near a complete list.

It can also be boring as hell.

What happens is that sometimes, with the best of intentions (or maybe just not knowing any better), an author will use a character to dump information on the reader, rather than doing it himself through narrative. No matter how it’s done, info-dumping isn’t a good technique.

This probl...

OK, I admit it: saying there’s an imbalance between narrative and dialogue in a piece of writing is like saying there’s an imbalance between the ice cream and the banana in a banana split. For some people’s tastes, it’s not possible to have too much ice cream. Or too much banana.

But for most of us, there’s a sweet spot—pun fully intended—around which a little bit more ice cream or banana, or a little bit less, would still be OK.

The same is true of the balance between narrative and dialogue. Except that the range is wider. Much wider.

It’s possible to write and publish a story that has no dialogue whatsoever. I’ve done it...

Contradictions are the stuff of conflict. Contradictions between

• characters’ words and actions,
• what characters say to different people and/or at different times,
• what characters do at different times or in different circumstances, or
• the responses of different characters to the same stimulus

all increase a reader’s tension and interest in the story.

At least so long as the contradictions are intentional on the author’s part.

If they’re not, that could be a problem. Or an unintended or unexpected opportunity. Your job as a reviewer is to not only spot the contradictions, but to evaluate them for effect, motivation, and intent.

Intentional or Unintentional

The first thing you need to assess...

Let’s get this out of the way right up front. This post is about the “f-bomb” and various other phrases and four- through fourteen-letter words that are generally not used in polite company: swear words, curse words, obscenities, vulgarities, the whole lot, and the words we sometimes substitute for them. As a matter of convenience, I’ll call everything swearing.

I know you’ve all heard the usual advice to writers and their reviewers: if swear words are natural parts of a character’s way of speaking, don’t be shy about using them, even if that’s not the way you speak.

But that’s not really enough advice for a writer, nor is it enough for a critiquer trying to determine if such language is being used as it should. That’s what I want to get into now.

Use...

Authors can and do go wrong with their word choices, or use words the wrong way. This isn’t just a case of not understanding Mark Twain’s definition of the difference between the right word and the almost-right word: the lightning versus the lightning bug. It is that, but it’s much more.

There are at least half a dozen ways an author can mess things up for herself and her readers when it comes to word choice. They are: using words that are wrong for

• The story, usually in narrative;
• The character, usually in dialogue; or
• The reader, in either one.

Authors can also simply use the wrong word when they don’t know the difference between two or more words or what a word actually means...

In the movie My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl turned high-society woman of charm and mystery, sings to her would-be boyfriend, “Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words….”

For some writers, that’s not a problem. In fact, they’re too in love with words, and think the more of them there are on the page or screen, the better. Then there are the others who, Eliza-like, want no more of them. Or at least darn few of them.

The days of padding a piece with any and every extraneous available word, á la Henry James, are over. (Well, for new or getting-established writers, they’re over. For über-successful authors like Stephen King, Tom Clancy, or George R. R. Martin, padding may not be intentional, but it’s not edited out, either.)

At the othe...

Writers’ tics—those sneaky, dastardly things that slip into our writing when we’re not looking and make it go CLANK! They’re insidious and terribly hard to recognize: our eyes glide right over them when we’re editing.

And it doesn’t matter how experienced we are, we’re still vulnerable to them.

What are they? Here’s a nowhere-near-complete list:

• Incessantly using unnecessarily intrusive adverbs excessively.
• Clichés we’ve read a million times before.
• The words or phrases we really like to use over and over because they really do a really great job of really capturing what we’re really trying to say.
• Those, like, popular, y’know, empty words or phrases that are nothing but noise. I know: seriously?
• R...

Ah, dialogue. It’s hard for many writers to do well. When it works, it crackles, sings, inspires, enrages, chills, thrills. But when it doesn’t, it might do that too, but for the wrong reasons! It may be stiff and stilted, choppy or verbose, confused or confusing, or have other problems. Any or all of those characteristics can be acceptable, even necessary, when they reflect the character of the speaker. When they don’t, there’s trouble.

Natural Dialogue vs. Written Dialogue

There are many reasons for this. First off, dialogue in writing—all writing: fiction, memoir, and non-fiction—is not natural, but has to sound natural when read, especially out loud...