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Revising Fiction: Avoid These 4 Common Characterization Pitfalls

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by Kirt Hickman

Revising Fiction

You’ve fleshed out your characters. You’ve given them flaws as well as virtues, internal struggles and external conflict, past lives and prior relationships. In short, they’ve become real people with real goals, real motivations, real relationships, and real emotions. Great! Now go back and make sure you’ve avoided the following characterization pitfalls:

1. Characters That Are Too Similar

Make sure each character’s personality is different from that of every other character. You don’t want all your characters to behave in the same way or talk like one another. They’re people, not automatons. If each is like the others, none will seem real. And if your characters don’t seem real, your reader won’t care about what happens to them.

2. A Weak-willed Hero

It’s hard for your reader to relate to a wimp or a pushover. If your hero doesn’t care enough about his cause to assert himself to achieve it, why should the reader care enough to read about it?

Make your hero a doer, not a watcher. If he just stands by while somebody else solves his problems and overcomes his obstacles for him, he’s not much of a hero. Your reader wants a hero who rises to the challenge, faces his problems head-on, overcomes adversity, and either achieves his goal or becomes ennobled by his effort to do so. Put your hero in the driver’s seat, literally and figuratively, at every opportunity.

3. Cliché Character Traits

Go back though your list of traits for each character. Have you created a dumb blonde, a mad scientist, a brutish albino hit man, a crooked sheriff, or any one of dozens of character types that have been done to death in books and movies? Take your dumb blonde and make her not dumb or not a blond. Make your mad scientist not mad or not a scientist.

Consider a western with a stereotypical crooked sheriff. He owns the town, rules by fear, accepts bribes from criminal elements, and has the judge in his back pocket. Too cliché! When I find a cliché character in my own writing, I play “What if…” or “Suppose…” These words help me brainstorm ideas to twist my character until he no longer feels cliché.

For example, suppose the sheriff is a woman. Suppose she’s corrupt in actions, but not in motivation. Suppose she was made sheriff by her father, a powerful and corrupt politician who not only threatens her life, but that of her children as well. Suppose she must find a way to overthrow her father’s influence in order to free herself from his web of corruption.

You see how it works? More subtly, do you have an otherwise-original character who exhibits a single trait that’s a cliché for his character type? The brutish hit man who happens to be albino might fall into this category. Albinos are certainly rare, but in literature and movies, they almost always appear as brutish villains. Move this trait to a sophisticated good guy, maybe even the hero. How might that affect his life, the way people treat him, or his opportunities for social, political, or economic advancement? Is his society tolerant of such aesthetic differences? Does it hinder him in his quest?

Here I must make a distinction between realism and cliché. What if you create a 10-year-old boy who never cleans his room? Is he realistic or cliché? Here’s my test: Do most real ten-year-old boys live in dirty rooms, or do most keep them clean? I suspect the former. If so, a character with this trait is realistic. He should have some trait that’s unusual for his demographic, however, so he doesn’t feel to the reader like a cardboard cutout. If most real ten-year-old boys live in clean rooms but a high percentage of fictional ten-year-old boys are characterized by dirty rooms, a ten-year-old boy with a messy room falls into the realm of cliché.

By contrast, are most sheriffs really corrupt, or are they just portrayed that way too often? In this case, the latter is true. This is what makes the crooked sheriff, the dumb blonde, the mad scientist, and numerous other character types clichés.

Apply this test to each of your characters. If you find a single cliché trait in an otherwise-original character, one solution is to replace the trait with its opposite. Do what the reader won’t expect.

4. Forgetting Secondary Characters

The waiter, the cab driver, the shoeshine boy, and other characters who appear fleetingly need not be fleshed out as completely as your main characters, but that doesn’t mean you should leave them as cardboard cutouts. Give each character at least one interesting trait.

It’s not enough for your characters to be realistic. Make sure each one is both unique and memorable.

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the August 2009 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Revising Fiction: Character Viewpoint

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by Kirt Hickman

Revising Fiction

Every scene must be shown from the viewpoint of one of your characters. In general, you should show the events from your hero’s point of view. The more you show from her viewpoint, the better your reader will get to know her and the more your reader will care about what happens to her. Choose an alternate viewpoint character when:

  • Your hero isn’t in the scene.
  • Another character is in the hot seat. Show the scene from the viewpoint of the character who has the most to lose if events go badly.
  • You must convey some overwhelmingly important piece of information your hero doesn’t know.

Viewpoint Violations
Make sure your scenes don’t express something your viewpoint character wouldn’t know, like what’s happening someplace else or the cause of a phenomenon he doesn’t understand. Don’t express the thoughts, emotions, or motivations of other characters, except as they are interpreted by your viewpoint character.

When you must convey pure information, include only facts being observed, heard, or considered by your viewpoint character. Doing so makes the information immediate and important. If you provide information your viewpoint character is not experiencing, it creates either a viewpoint violation or a digression. Your reader will recognize both.

Viewpoint, however, is not just about what your character knows or doesn’t know. Your character’s viewpoint must permeate every aspect of your writing, from the portrayal of her thoughts and emotions, to setting descriptions, level of detail and specificity, narrative tone, and even your word choices.

To do this, you must know your character’s likes and dislikes, hobbies and interests, attitude, age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic circumstances, and background. The more you know about your character, the more real she will be to you and to your reader.

Setting
Describe your setting in a way that reveals your viewpoint character’s attitude and emotional state. Is the room cramped, or cozy? Is it cluttered, or lived in? Consider this passage:

General Chang reclined in the womb of his stronghold with his feet propped on the conference table.

What does the word womb tell you about how Chang feels when he’s in the control room of his stronghold? Later I describe this room from the perspective of my hero, who has been brought there as a prisoner. He’s not going to think of it as a womb. Your word choice must reveal the attitude and emotional state of your viewpoint character.

Let character viewpoint define how many and which details to include in your descriptions. A character who’s interested in architecture would drive down a street and notice the buildings. A character who’s more interested in cars would notice those. A cop looking for a suspect or informant would focus on the people.

When Chase, an accident investigator in my science fiction novel Worlds Asunder, approaches a crash site, he has time to take in the details that are important to his case:

Chase’s first view of the Phoenix was a mere glint of sunlight on the horizon. As he drew closer, the fuselage came into view, jutting skyward from the flat terrain like a solitary tombstone in a field of glittering metal. The effect gave a surreal beauty to the desolate scene.

The pod came to a stop at the boundary of the debris field. The ship was close now. The fuselage, largely intact, rested at an odd angle at the end of a long scar in the landscape. A debris field stretched out to the northwest. Dents and cracks that marred the hull suggested that the ship had tumbled into its final resting place. The aft section, the cargo hold, was mangled.

Chase not only notices the details but also assesses what they tell him about the crash. Contrast this with the following passage, which takes place during a gunfight inside the enemy stronghold:

Two terrorists moved before them as they wound their way through the labyrinthine passages. The defenders stopped at each intersection to fire a few odd rounds, which slowed Chase and his party, but the men never stayed in one place for long. Twice the terrorists fired through a window to bring down isolation doors and seal off part of the complex.

Here you get only a vague sense of passages, windows, and pressure doors. I left out the details because Chase has neither the time nor the inclination to notice them.

Vocabulary
Character viewpoint should also determine the language you use. People from different age groups, regions, countries, cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, levels of education, time periods, and even genders speak differently. Write your narrative in your viewpoint character’s natural voice.

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the July 2010 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Revising Fiction: The Seven Deadly Sins of Writing Dialogue

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by Kirt Hickman

Revising Fiction

Realistic dialogue is one of the most difficult things for some writers to achieve. Compressing your dialogue to as few words as possible will help. If you’ve done that and the dialogue still rings false, look between your quotation marks for these deadly sins.

Everyday Dialogue
Skip the pleasantries every reader knows occur at the beginning and end of a conversation:

“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine. How are you?”

It’s boring. Start the conversation at the point where it becomes interesting.

Informative Dialogue
Never have a character say something that everybody in the conversation already knows.

Consider this passage from an early draft of my science fiction novel Worlds Asunder in which Snider speaks with the manager of Stellarfare, a commuter starline:

“May I remind you,” Snider said, “that NASA is your regulatory authority. I can revoke your license to fly from Lunar Alpha.”

“Don’t bully me. NASA is funded by taxation of the businesses that operate from its bases. Stellarfare alone supplies a third of that funding for Lunar Alpha.”

Both characters know this and the only person who doesn’t know this is the reader. That’s who these characters are talking to, not to each other.

Informative dialogue can often be corrected by moving the information from the dialogue to the thoughts of your viewpoint character:

“I’ll revoke your license to fly from Lunar Alpha.” Snider’s voice shook with forced civility.

“Don’t bully me. Revoke our license and it’ll be the last thing you do as director. When you’re replaced, we’ll return.”

He was right. Damn it, the manager was right. Stellarfare provided a third of NASA’s funding for Lunar Alpha. Snider’s threat had only solidified the man’s resolve.

Direct Address
Direct address occurs when a character says the name of the person he’s addressing:

“What time is it, Jennifer?”
She consulted her watch. “Four o’clock, Tommy.”

Notice how natural the dialogue feels when I remove the characters’ names from the spoken lines:

“What time is it?” Tommy asked suddenly.
Jennifer consulted her watch. “Four o’clock. “

Self-talk
Often, when a character talks to himself, the author is using contrived dialogue to relay the character’s thoughts, as is done in this passage from a critique submission (reprinted with the author’s permission):

“I feel like I’ve been run over by a Mack Truck,” he moaned. “Where am I anyway?”

He rolled his eyes from side to side and tried to think. “I can’t see a thing,” he said aloud and tried to sit up again. This time the ground moved beneath him.

“Oh oh,” he said. “An earthquake?” He tried to concentrate. “Naw. It’s not like that at all. It feels more like ball bearings rolling around under me.”

Because your scene is written from your character’s viewpoint, you can communicate his thoughts without having him say them out loud:

Luke’s body ached like he’d been run over by a Mack Truck. He rolled his eyes from side to side in the darkness to clear his head.

The earth began to shake. Not like an earthquake. More like ball bearings rolling around beneath him. “Whoa.” It was the strangest thing he’d ever felt.

Mismatched Dialogue, Actions, and Emotion
Consider the following passage:

Jorge slammed his fist on the table. “Well, you know, I really don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

If the speaker’s words are inconsistent with his actions, the reader won’t believe whatever emotion you’re trying to show. Make your character’s dialogue match his emotions:

Jorge slammed his fist on the table. “Over my cold carcass.”

Overuse of the Exclamation Point
Reserve exclamation points for when your character is genuinely shouting.

Neglecting to Read Out Loud
Once you’ve purged all of the sins described above, read your dialogue scene out loud for sound and pacing. Does it sound natural? Does it have the rhythm of speech? Is it tense and engaging? Have you achieved the desired pace? Only then will you know if it’s effective.

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the June 2009 issue of SouthWest Sage, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Revising Fiction: Is it Show? How can you Tell?

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by Kirt Hickman

Revising Fiction

You’ve heard it before: Never tell something you can show. This is a difficult concept for many new writers, but it’s crucial. It lurks beneath a multitude of self editing sins: problems ranging from passive voice to information dumps and narrative summary, to absence of tension, and others. Telling the story, rather than showing it, gives it the detached feel of a news article. It keeps the reader from experiencing it as though she is the viewpoint character. It leeches the importance—the very life—out of the events.

What is Tell?

How do you know if you’re showing or telling? My rule of thumb is simple.

You may state facts:

Gerri threw the contract onto the floor, snatched up her coat and stormed from the room.Don’t draw conclusions for your reader1:

Gerri was angry.In the first sentence, you see Gerri’s actions and are allowed to draw your own conclusion that she’s angry. This is show. In the second, I’ve drawn the conclusion for you. This is tell. Decide for yourself which is more compelling to read.

Consider these examples from a critique submission.2 The scene is written from the viewpoint of a teenage boy.

Tell: There was someone breaking into the house.Show: The trapdoor burst down and Ian jumped backwards. Dust showered the cardboard boxes that cluttered the closet floor. As soon as the ladder thunked down, a black boot stepped onto the top rung, followed by another.This example is the next sentence of the same submission.

Tell: [Ian’s] first thought was that he should probably get help, but he was much too distracted.Show: Before [Ian] could run for help, the shapely legs of the woman in the boots arrested him.Ian fails to move because of the intruder’s shapely legs. This shows that he’s distracted without saying, “He was distracted.” The phrase “before he could run for help” shows Ian’s thoughts without saying, “He thought he should get help.”

Here’s an example in which the same author did a delightful job of showing:

[Rhiannon] leaned forward, her eyes fixed on the artery that had begun to pulse faster as she leaned close to it.This is a great line. It shows the emotions of both characters. Rhiannon, whom you’ve surmised is a vampire, leans forward with her eyes fixed on Ian’s pulsing vein. It’s absolutely clear what she wants, and the author never said, “Rhiannon was hungry for blood.” Ian’s artery pulsing faster shows his fear without saying, “He was afraid,” or “He was excited.” Context will establish which emotion he’s actually feeling.

How to Show

Rewrite any sections in which you’ve told something. To find a way to show it, ask yourself this question: What can the viewpoint character see, hear, feel, smell, taste, or recall, that allows him to draw the conclusions that you’ve told instead of shown? In other words: How does he know this? If you’ve drawn a conclusion for the reader, the viewpoint character must also have drawn this conclusion. On what is his conclusion based?

If the viewpoint character has nothing upon which to base the conclusion, no way to know the thing you’ve told, then the section of tell constitutes a viewpoint violation. Delete it or find some other place in your manuscript to reveal the information. Keep in mind, though, that if you move it, it’s still tell. You must still convert it to show.

Be particularly attentive to dialog tags that tell emotion, as in this example:

“Herrera was on board.”“On the Phoenix?” Chase said, surprised. “What was he doing there?”You may have shown the emotion well enough through the actions, thoughts, and dialog of the character. If you have, that’s good. If not, find a way to do so. Either way, delete the part of the tag that tells emotion.

Below, I offer three ways to correct the passage above. I show Chase’s surprise through his actions, thoughts, and dialog, respectively.

“On the Phoenix?” Chase glanced at the central hologram, as if it could somehow confirm the news. “What was he doing there?”“On the Phoenix?” He couldn’t be. “What was he doing there?“On the Phoenix?” Chase said. “What the hell was he doing there?”If finding ways to effectively show your characters’ emotions is difficult for you, you’re not alone. For help, read my series “13 Ways to Show Character Emotions” beginning with part one.

1Noah Lukeman. The First Five Pages. Simon & Schuster. 2000.
2Excerpts from critique submissions are reprinted with the permission of the original author.

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the May 2008 issue of SouthWest Sage, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



What Writing Books Don’t Tell You

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by Kirt Hickman

I do a lot of critiques, and I see similar mistakes in submission after submission. Eventually, I began to realize that the problems I see most often are those that I didn’t learn from writing books. For whatever reason, these key pieces of advice have managed to slip through the cracks. Writing books don’t discuss them, or the books contradict one another, leaving writers floundering for the correct answer.

Filter Words
I first learned about the damage filter words can do in a critique that David Corwell wrote for me. Later I found an article that called them “viewpoint intruders”—an apt name, because that’s what they do. These are words like saw, felt, heard, watched, etc., that take the reader out of the character’s point of view.

Consider this example from a critique submission, in which the filter words are shown in bold text.

Clara looked around at her fellow passengers. She overheard snatches of conversation in Italian. She saw parents feeding snacks to children, even a breast-feeding mother.

Here, the reader isn’t looking at passengers, overhearing conversations, or seeing parents feed children. The reader is standing at a distance, watching Clara as Clara looks at, overhears, and sees the action of the scene. These words have become a filter between Clara and the reader.

The author can eliminate the first sentence because Clara doesn’t see herself looking around. The rest of the passage can be written without filter words:

All around Clara, people spoke in Italian. Parents fed snacks to their children. One woman nursed her infant.

Notice that the original narrative focuses on Clara (Clara looked, she overheard, she saw), while the revised narrative focuses on the things Clara is focused on (people spoke, parents fed, one woman nursed). This is as much an issue of character viewpoint as it is an issue of narrative style. When you write, don’t focus on your viewpoint character. Rather, focus on what your viewpoint character is focused on.

Prepositional Phrases
Many books will tell you to omit any word that’s not absolutely necessary, and that’s good advice. What they don’t point out is that those unnecessary words often appear as prepositional phrases. Examine every prepositional phrase in your manuscript. Does it provide information that’s both new and necessary? Consider this example:

Chase stood among the clues in the cockpit and let them tell their story.

If the reader already knows Chase is in the cockpit, write this as:

Chase stood among the clues and let them tell their story.

Depending on the context, you may only need:

Chase let the clues tell their story.

Now you’re writing a tight narrative.

“That”
This one I learned from Larry Greenly at an SWW meeting years ago. The word that is often used unnecessarily. It becomes a speed bump that slows down the reader. Consider the following example, excerpted from a letter my hero wrote to his daughter in my own science fiction novel Worlds Asunder:

I’m writing to let you know that my homecoming will be delayed. I know that you and the girls were looking forward to seeing me, but a case has come up that will delay my departure.

Wherever you see the word that, delete it and read the sentence without it. If the sentence still makes sense, omit the word that. In this example, only the third occurrence of that is necessary.

I’m writing to let you know my homecoming will be delayed. I know you and the girls were looking forward to seeing me, but a case has come up that will delay my departure.

Direct Address
Direct address occurs when a character says the name of the person he’s addressing:

“What time is it, Jennifer?”

She consulted her watch. “Four o’clock, Tommy. Why?”

“Already?” He snatched up his backpack and bolted for the door. “Jennifer, my mom’s gonna kill me.” He didn’t even help clean up the toys they’d strewn across the living room.

Some books advise writers to use direct address as a way to avoid attributives. I disagree. Notice how much more natural the dialogue feels when I move the characters’ names from the spoken lines to the dialogue tags:

“What time is it?” Tommy asked suddenly.

Jennifer consulted her watch. “Four o’clock. Why?”

“Already?” Tommy snatched up his backpack and bolted for the door. “My mom’s gonna kill me.” He didn’t even help clean up the toys they’d strewn across the living room.

Widow/Orphan Control
Widow/Orphan control is a function in MS Word that tries to prevent a single line of a paragraph from appearing at the top or bottom of a page. When this function is turned on, it creates a variation in the number of lines from page to page. It looks sloppy. Turn this function off in the “Format Paragraph” menu, under the “Line and Page Breaks” tab.

Proofreading
Many books advise proofreading carefully. In my experience, that’s not enough. You must have somebody else—a qualified editor—proofread your work. Writing books do not sufficiently stress the importance of this. When I started paying a proofreader to go over my submissions, I began placing in contests and getting positive replies from editors and agents about 50 percent of the time. Prior to that, I received nothing but rejections. Don’t underestimate the power of proofreading.

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the May 2012 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Make Your Characters More than Cardboard Cutouts

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by Kirt Hickman

Revising FictionYour characters must not be automatons. Your reader must buy into them as real people with real goals, real motivations, real relationships, and real emotions. They must have flaws as well as virtues. They must face internal struggles and external conflict. They must have past lives and prior relationships.

Use the tips below to individualize each of your characters. The traits you assign don’t have to be sensational. They can be small, even subtle, qualities. Your goal is to make each character a believable individual, not an incredible eccentric (unless, of course, you want him to be).

Give each character a unique set of physical traits.
These don’t have to be scars and tattoos, the obvious choices for truly unique identifiers. Furthermore, these traits need not be unique among all humanity, just unique within the context of your story. If you choose traits that are extraordinary, account for them in a credible way through the character’s background.

Give each character a unique style of speech.
Each character should have a unique combination of dialect and vocabulary, based upon his personality, level of education, and upbringing. Make your characters’ speech rhythms different enough that if a line of dialogue written for one character were attributed to another, that line would sound out of place.

Give each character a flaw that the reader can understand.
If you make your hero perfect, she won’t be credible. Even if you manage to make her believable without building in a flaw or two, your reader won’t be able to relate to her. Write about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Your hero’s flaws often provide a source of internal conflict overlaid upon the external struggle provoked by the villain. Ratchet up the tension in every scene by exploiting your character’s flaws to make her trials more difficult.

Give each character a special skill.
Special skills let your reader see into some aspect of life, some hobby or profession, that he might find interesting. Introduce your character’s skill early in the story, well before she needs it. Otherwise it will seem contrived—an afterthought you invented to get her out of whatever fix you put her into. Present your character’s skill at a technical level your reader can understand, and provide only information that is directly relevant to the events at hand.

Give each character a definable personality.
Is your character optimistic? Pessimistic? Grumpy? Funny? Flirtatious? Adversarial? What does she get fired up about? The environment? Animal rights? Poverty? Duty? Family? Honor? Love? Hatred? Vengeance? Let’s face it, without a definable personality and a passion for something, your character (your hero in particular) will be boring.

How does your character respond to frustration? This is an important decision. Your plot consists of obstacles and events designed to frustrate your character’s efforts. How will she react? Will she get angry? Resourceful? Determined? Depressed? Will she get even? Will she seek help? Will she pray? I’m not suggesting your character should respond to every situation in the same way, but people tend toward certain emotional reactions to frustration. Your character should too.*

Give each character an identifying line, mannerism, or prop.
Give your reader something to associate with your character besides a name. Establish identifiers early, preferably the first time you introduce the character. Exhibit the identifiers every time the character appears in a scene.

Give each character virtues.
This is particularly important for your hero. Generally speaking, the reader must like her. No matter how many internal demons your hero has to overcome, she must have at least one redeeming quality that your reader can latch onto and that makes him say, “I care. I hope she overcomes it all because she’s worth saving.” Give virtues to your other characters as well, including your villain. The villain rarely considers himself to be the bad guy. Whatever he does, he does for a reason. Sometimes it’s just for personal gain. Often, he believes he’s working toward some greater good, however warped that perception might be.

Know each character’s backstory.
You must know the details of your hero’s backstory in far greater depth than you’ll ever reveal in the pages of your novel. Your character’s past has made him the person he is today. His past will determine his emotions, attitudes, and actions. And it will justify them to the reader. His past will make him real.

Know how each character will change throughout the story.
The change your character makes, and the way that change comes about, is the character’s arc. Provide an arc for each major character, not just the hero, but make the hero’s arc dominant in the story.

*See also Nancy Kress, Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint from Writer’s Digest Books (2005).

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the July 2009 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Dialogue Compression: The Key to Realistic Dialogue

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by Kirt Hickman

Realistic dialogue is one of the most important things to achieve in your writing. It’s also one of the most difficult. When people talk, they ramble, they pause, they repeat themselves—they say all sorts of unnecessary things. Written dialogue that includes all this stuff will be cumbersome. Your reader won’t have the patience for it. The objective of dialogue is to make it more efficient than normal speech yet still have it sound realistic. This is what makes dialogue a challenge.

The single most effective thing you can do to make your dialogue realistic is to compress it.

Wordiness

Cut any line of dialogue down to as few words as possible. Consider the following passage, excerpted from a critique submission with the author’s permission. The viewpoint character observes this exchange between a young woman in a tavern and a druid who has just walked in.

One of the girls suddenly stood and waved at the shrouded figure. “Hey, Cuddles, it’s Nancin! What are you doing here? Hey, this might just turn out to be some fun after all. We have to get together later on and catch up on old times. I haven’t seen you since that party at Sister Hillary’s Nunnery and Bawdy House back in ’65. Come on up to my room when we get through with this rah-rah what-ever-it-is that’s going on here and we’ll crack a bottle or three and talk about old times – and more. Hot Damn, Cuddles is back, WHEEE!!!”“Silence Woman! Hold your tongue. There is serious business afoot—and many unanswered questions. We will surely talk, later, and in private . . .”“Okay. I can wait for you to finish playing those ‘serious business’ games that you little boys insist on playing. Just don’t forget that you and I have more important things to do.” The soft purr of the reply held the promise of interesting times ahead.This passage can and should be greatly compressed. In the first paragraph, Nancin rambles for far too long. The druid, a man of some renown, would probably be embarrassed by Nancin’s outburst. He would likely stop her. The rest, I’d compress as much as possible without sacrificing the essential voice of each character:

One of the girls stood and waved at the shrouded figure. “Hey, Cuddles. What are you doing here? This might just turn out to be some fun after all —”“Silence, woman,” the druid said. “We’ll talk later.”“Okay,” came the soft purr of her reply. “Just don’t forget that you and I have more important things to do.”Decide for yourself which passage is more engaging.

Compression can make dialogue more crisp and realistic even in less extreme cases, as in this example from my science fiction novel, Worlds Asunder.

“Randy performed the preflight checks according to protocol.”“Randy did the preflight checks correctly.”Meaningless Words

Eliminate expressions that don’t carry meaning, such as:

“Well,” “Hey!” “Um,” “Aw, geez.” “Oh my gosh.” “Right?”Phrases like these make dialogue sound rambling and unimportant. They reduce tension. These types of expressions can be useful in making each character’s speech distinctive, but use only one per character and use it sparingly.

Sentence Fragments

Consider the following dialogue exchange:

“Have you had lunch?”“No, not yet.”“Do you want to go to Stufy’s?”“That sounds good.”People don’t generally speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences. Look for opportunities to use sentence fragments to emulate real speech patterns:

“Had lunch?”“Not yet.”“Stufy’s?”“Sounds good.”It not only makes your dialogue more natural, it makes it more crisp. It quickens the pace.

Contractions

Use contractions wherever possible. Otherwise your dialogue will sound clunky and mechanical:

“We will need results on this one,” Snider told Chase. “And we will need them fast.”Contractions make dialogue more natural:

“We’ll need results on this one,” Snider told Chase. “And we’ll need them fast.”Use these tips to compress your dialogue, to make it realistic, taut, and engaging.

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the April 2009 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Taming the Beast: What to Do with That Frightful First Draft

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by Kirt Hickman

You’ve gotten your first draft onto paper, but it doesn’t look anything like the novel you envisioned. Somewhere along the way, it took on a life of its own. It became grotesque: overblown, disorganized, and rife with inconsistencies. Your writing is flat, your characters are boring, and your plot contains so many dead ends it resembles a maze for some masochistic lab rat. Somehow it got so out of control that you can’t imagine now how to rein it in.

While this article doesn’t address all of these problems, it will answer this question: What now? Before you examine the structure of your scenes or the tautness of your narrative style (see “Revising Fiction: Ten Tips To Tighten Your Narrative Style“), you’ve got to tame the monster you’ve created. You’ve got to trim the fat and organize the rest.

Scene Cards

To organize, create an index card for each scene. Give each scene a name and number and write it on the scene’s card. Then read through your manuscript and make the following notes on the cards:

1. Scene Purpose

Each scene must have a purpose; it must advance the plot or develop character (preferably both). Any scene that doesn’t is either a digression or it just conveys information. Delete it. Find another way to provide the necessary information. Make a note on the card of any scene you plan to move information to. Ideally, each scene that you keep should also show conflict between characters, create suspense, and show how the day-to-day life in your world is different from your reader’s life. Jot down ideas to enhance these characteristics of each scene.

2. Type of Scene

Is the scene an action scene? A romance scene? A dialogue scene? Something else? Write it on the card. Don’t string too many action scenes in a row. You want to excite your reader, not fatigue him. Similarly, don’t put several passive scenes together; you’ll risk boring your reader.

Color-code the title row of your scene cards with highlighter markers (pink for action scenes, yellow for passive, orange for others) and lay the cards out on a table with the highlighted title showing. This will give you a good visual display of the distribution of the action. Look for scenes that you can move to create a better balance.

3. Inconsistencies

As you wrote your first draft you may have made decisions that created inconsistencies in your characters or plot. If so, decide how best to resolve them, and in which scenes. Note any necessary changes on your scene cards.

4. Suspense Elements

A suspense element is any question you’ve raised in your reader’s mind, any loose end you need to tie up in another scene. On your scene cards, note the suspense elements you introduced or resolved in each scene.

Then go back through the cards. On a separate sheet of paper, list each suspense element. Next to it, write down the number of the scene in which you introduced it and the number of the scene in which you resolved it. Did you resolve them all? If not, tie up each loose end. Either find a scene in which to resolve it, or don’t bring it up in the first place. Make notes on the appropriate scene cards.

Rewrite Your Scenes

Before you rewrite your scenes, save your manuscript and begin working on a separate draft. If you decide later that you need something you’ve altered or deleted, you’ll be able to retrieve the original.

During this rewrite, you’ll throw whole scenes away, write new scenes, and revise some so extensively you’ll have to start them over from scratch. Every scene will need some form of revision. Don’t let this discourage you. You must trim the fat from your first draft and bolster the weak or missing elements. You already know what changes you need to make; you’ve noted them on your scene cards. Now rewrite each scene using these notes as your guide. When you’re done, review your notes to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

Now your manuscript is ready for the more detailed editing required to clean up your scene structure, narrative style, and dialog. Those topics, however, I’ll leave for future articles.

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the March 2009 issue of SouthWest Sage, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



What the Right Comparison Can Do for Your Story

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by Kirt Hickman

A picture is worth a thousand words (pardon the cliché, but it’s true). Good fiction draws the reader away from his mundane life and transports him to a world of wonder wholly different from his own. Whether this difference is physical, cultural, psychological, or situational, metaphors and similes can help bring your fictional world to life.

Description

When you use these comparisons, you draw a mental picture that relates an element of your story to something within the reader’s realm of experience. In the following example, several characters in my science fiction novel, Worlds Asunder, cross an open expanse of the Moon’s surface.

…the four of them made a dash for the building. They ran side by side. In the Moon’s gravity, they rose slowly with each stride and returned to the ground just as slowly, only to bounce again and again until they reached their destination.

This passage contains a detailed description of how my characters run in low gravity. It tries to invoke an image that will bring my setting to life and show how the Moon is different from Earth. The problem is, I’ve used so many words that by the time the reader gets to the end of the description, he no longer cares about the image. He just wants to get on with the story. Comparing the characters’ motion to something familiar can invoke the desired image more clearly, and with fewer words, than literal description:

…the four of them made a dash for the building, bounding up and down in a ragged line, like so many horses on a merry-go-round.

Taking the merry-go-round out of context, putting it on the Moon, and using it to describe running makes the comparison unexpected. I’ve used a familiar object to show how my setting differs from the reader’s here and now.

Yet I can improve the passage further. The word “building” lacks description. How big is this building? What does it look like? I’ve missed an opportunity to remind the reader that I’ve taken him to another world. In an earlier scene, I described the building like this:

The habitation dome was maybe a hundred meters in diameter with the semi-cylindrical protrusion of the equipment garage on one side, the only obvious entrance to the structure.

Can you picture the building? What if I add this sentence:

From afar, it looked like a giant igloo on a vast stretch of dirty ice.

The comparison solidifies the image. In Worlds Asunder, I refer back to this description in the merry-go-round scene by changing the word “building” to “igloo”:

…the four of them made a dash for the igloo, bounding up and down in a ragged line, like so many horses on a merry-go-round.

Emotion

You can use comparisons to invoke emotion. The following passage describes the wreckage of a crashed space ship:

…the fuselage came into view, jutting skyward from the flat terrain, surrounded by sparkling debris.

Perhaps this invokes an image, but a couple of well-drawn comparisons will enhance the emotional impact.

…the fuselage came into view, jutting skyward from the flat terrain like a solitary tombstone in a garden of glittering metal.

When the fuselage becomes a tombstone in a garden, it forms the emotional image of death. It reminds the reader of something he already knows: a body lies here, probably inside the fuselage. The viewpoint character is approaching a grave.

Viewpoint

Comparisons can express an idea or a character’s viewpoint more effectively than direct narrative.

…a tremendous pop reverberated through the cavernous hangar from the huge doors in front of the cockpit window. The squeal of the unused rollers filtered into the cabin like a scream of protest against this change in military posture…

This passage doesn’t specify what the change in military posture is. Nevertheless, when I use “scream of protest” to describe a simple sound, I don’t have to tell the reader how the viewpoint character feels about the change.

Use Comparisons Carefully

Look for opportunities to use comparisons in your fiction, but don’t overdo it. A well-placed comparison that invokes the right image, at the right time, will enrich your story. But if every paragraph contains one, you’ll force too many unrelated images upon the reader. Your own world will get lost among them.

Beware misused, imprecise, or cliché comparisons. Misused or imprecise comparisons can confuse your reader, and cliché comparisons will have no emotional impact.

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the February 2008 issue of SouthWest Sage, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



Revising Fiction: 13 Ways to Show Character Emotions, Part 3

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by Kirt Hickman

This month’s column completes a three-part look at techniques that can help you show your characters’ emotions effectively. So far, we’ve learned to:

1. Use emotional honesty.
2. Convey the source of the emotion.
3. Avoid clichés.
4. Use metaphor.
5. Use concrete details.
6. Use internal monologue.
7. Use dialog.
8. Show physical response.

Additional techniques include:

9. Have the character respond to the emotion in an unexpected way.

Snider pulled Chase aside. “That was a lovely exercise,” he spat, “but you haven’t answered the basic question: Why?” Veins bulged in his forehead as he said the last word. His eyes, crazed as though he was on the verge of a breakdown, spoke of the unbelievable pressure that he must be under. Chase had thought he’d understood, but matters were apparently worse than he’d imagined.

“Look, Morgan.” Snider dropped his voice. “You must answer that question. And soon. I’m getting to the point where I don’t even care if it’s the right answer.” He looked Chase in the eye. “You hear what I’m saying?”

In this example from my science fiction novel, Worlds Asunder, Snider responds to his stress by essentially telling Chase to lie. This is surprising, because Snider’s primary concern has been his own reputation, which could be ruined by such a lie.

This technique can be tricky to employ because the emotional response must be believable, even though it’s unexpected. The key is to make it specific to the character. I do this here by incorporating one of Snider’s tag lines: “You hear what I’m saying?”

10. Use one emotion to express another.

The following day they received a broken transmission from Snider, crackling through a faulty connection in the comm gear. A pair of geologists had arrived on the scene and found Herrera’s bodyguard dead in the cabin. Chase swallowed hard and bowed his head for a moment…

“Everyone else is missing,” Snider finished.

The news was good and bad. It reminded Chase of the fragility of life and the cold ruthlessness of space. And he mourned the loss, even though he hadn’t known the man. But according to Snider’s report, the rover was still moving. Somehow the others had found the means to endure without the protection of a ship or habitat.

In this example, I talk about mourning over the man found in the wreckage, but because Chase didn’t know the man, there’s no basis for his grief. What he’s actually feeling is hope for those that still live. The mention of mourning is a way to express Chase’s hope by contrasting it with another, dissimilar, emotion.

11. Use external setting to mirror your character’s emotions.

In the following example, Bill has just awoken from a coma. Dana has stepped away from his bedside to allow the nurse to assess his condition. Notice how I use the sunlight in the hospital room to reflect Dana’s feelings.

The sun warmed the room through the durapane window, suddenly now bright and cheerful as if it had just risen. Dana returned to Bill’s side and kissed him again, this time on the mouth. “I thought I’d lost you.”

12. Use character action.

Gerri threw the contract onto the floor, snatched up her coat, and stormed from the room.

This example uses Gerri’s actions to show her anger.

13. Express the emotion in a way that is specific to the character.

[President Powers] felt like she had when she was twelve, when she and her friends were playing in the surf off the South Carolina coast. She’d waded in too far and a large wave had washed over her, pulled her under.

China armed in Earth orbit and the United States ignorant. She couldn’t breathe. A cold pressure squeezed in around her, holding her down while she was powerless to prevent it. She heard Norton slam the table through the muffled sound that filled her ears. They were arguing, Norton and O’Leary, but only Norton’s voice penetrated the president’s consciousness with the words incompetent and consequences.

Finally, like it had when she was twelve, the wave receded and she came up for air. She banged her cane on the hardwood floor to bring civility back to the meeting.

In this example, I use a specific event from President Powers’ childhood to express her sense of being overwhelmed in a way that is specific to her.

The techniques in this three-part column are valuable tools to master. If you’d like to see a more in-depth treatment of this topic, I recommend Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood.1

Read the first two parts of Kirt Hickman’s series:
“13 Ways to Show Character Emotions,” Part 1
“13 Ways to Show Character Emotions,” Part 2

1Ann Hood, Creating Character Emotions, Story Press Books, 1998.

WorldsAsunder125_2Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the October 2008 issue of SouthWest Sage, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.



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