Nate's Workshop On Horrible Writing #3

Copyright 1998-2004 by Nate Leved

Horrible Writing Tips:
DIALOGUE: Do you want to make your horrible stories more interesting to your readers? Well then, add dialogue. People listen to other people talking because they want to hear what those other people are saying. People like to read dialogue for the same reasons. It's much better to let your characters tell your story than for you to do it by narrative. In other words, it is better to show than tell. Let your readers eavesdrop on the action! Of course, a certain amount of narrative is necessary to set scenes, build characters and string the whole together. Many short stories, especially those of the horrible genre require quite a bit of narrative to pull them off, in fact. But where possible, include dialogue between your characters. The more the better. Wanna develop the character of one of your guys? Why not let one of your gals who is hot for him describe him to her girlfriend? Now, that could get down right exciting!

I mean that you'd probably drone on telling your readers about what a great guy and good lover old Joe happens to be, but check out what happens when that hot, little, red-headed Molly Jean Bedrow tells Sally Ann Wanton about her big Joe fantasy... "Oh Sally, you wouldn't believe how big he is! My God, Sally I thought I was gonna die! He picked me up, and I though he was gonna shove me through the wall... Then, he went faster and faster until the spittle started running down my chin... I almost passed out! Sally? Sally? Are you all right, Sally?"

However, don't just make your characters babel on meaninglessly as your readers will say, "Huh?" Instead, you must see to it that your characters talk about events, situations and conditions that are pertinent and indigenous to the gist of your story. Of course, small talk is acceptable in reasonable amounts. That's just part of human interaction, and any story without it would be missing an important and expected device. Perhaps, it would be best for you to read several stories while paying attention to the various dialog segments, and while doing so, observe how other authors handle their characters and steer their conversations.

Then on the technical side, learning acceptable punctuation is necessary too, but that's just mechanics. More important is good variation in directing the statements, queries and exclamations of your characters, so your readers know who is saying what. A short conversation or interchange between characters may be strung right into your paragraphs. However, longer conversations, most offen are written in sort of a screen play style, but without so much character reference. This is especially true when there are just two characters conversing. In this case, only an occasional reference to who is speaking is necessary.

Few markers can be more tiring than too many "he saids" and "she saids." Look at this sample telephone conversation: Pouring a stiff drink, Joe phoned his boss, Blade Forbes, with the news of the pending disaster to see what to do next. "Yo Blade," hollered the excited engineer into the phone's black mouthpiece. "The whole darn mountain's ready to come down! What the heck are we gonna do?" "Now, settle down, Joe. I know that you're stressed, but you need to get up on that mountain and warn as many folks as you can to pack up and get away from there!" "Ya, I know, Boss, but who's gonna run the machines here?" "Who cares, Joe?" asked Blade, the quick thinking manager of the Kazoo Company. "In a short while, it won't matter. Now, quit fussing and fuming. Get yourself up there on that mountain, and do it now!"

Do you see how you can string an interchange together without an overabundance of he saids and she saids? Also, notice the speech corruption such as gonna and gotta. Just listen to people talk, and you'll hear a quite a bit of this sort of thing. Of course, if your characters are upper crust types, your readers will expect more correct English from them. Fewer slang and corrupt words would be acceptable. In other words, you had better match your character's dialog with his or her character, place of birth, age, and educational level. Notice how Joe's boss uses a slightly higher level of language and keeps a cooler head in this emergency than does his employee, Joe?

There are also subtle or outright brash differences between males and females. People from the Southern part of the country speak differently than people from the Northern climes. The same holds true for Easterners and Westerners. Foreigners speak differently too. Not only does their accents make them obvious, but so does the manner in which they frame their sentences. For example, in standard English, we place the adjectives before their nouns. For example: "The girl had a red dress." On the other hand, a person from south of the border, down Mexico way would say, "The girl had a dress, red." "La muchacha tiene una vestida rojo."

Also, many languages phrase their sentences in a manner that sounds strange to English ears, but none-the-less, is quite correct in their own language. For example an Italian, fairly new to English might say something like, "Mama mia, that red car, she ran the red light." In many languages, especially the Latin-based variety, all things have a gender-- even a rock! Yes, objects are either male or female. In English, we have dropped the gender specific clauses and descriptions, and a car is just a car, and a sigh is just a sigh... It is well to keep all of these little points of interest in the back of your mind when introducing your various characters into your story and again when running them through their paces.

VOICE: An author should develop a voice, or better yet, many voices. The more voices an author can generate, the more varied will be his or her stories and idea choices. Consider the author's voice and it's effect on his or her story. A voice telling a "Mickey Spellaine" type story is necessarily different than that of an author, spinning an "Agatha Christy" type novel. The voice of James Mitchner is quite different than "Louis L'amor" and so on. Often, the subject matter and plot of a story will dictate the proper voice. Other times, a voice will pop in to the head of an author, and that writer will then generate a story to fit that particular voice. More often than not, when this happens, the story seems to write itself. Weird!

WORDS: The quality and level of the words used to make up your story body must, of course, be closely in accord with a given voice. Again a rough-tough, male detective story will need a "Micky Spellaine" or "Sam Spade" sort of voice. The dame with the tight dress climbed into her bright red sports job. She raced the motor and took off like a flash. Man, she was moving fast, but I was right on her tail, my Mustang sliding around the corner after her... Conversely, a high-toned story, featuring "Snavely Whiplash," would require a more refined voice and vocabulary. ...Pouring a spot of well-aged liqueur into a large, cut crystal brandy snifter, Snavely, swirled the mellow liquid for a few moments before passing the vessel, deftly beneath his sensitive nostrils... Of course, this is not to say that Snavley couldn't be included in the afore mentioned, fast-paced, detective story, but the general tone, voice and vocabulary of the story would remain with the "Sam Spade" sort of voice. ...The prissy Englishman edged into my office, looking as out of place as a whore in church, but he needed my help to find his missing girlfriend, Hermionie. Last he heard, she had run off with a rat-faced little guy with a big gun in his back pocket along with a wad of bills large enough to choke a horse...

FLOWERS: When you first start writing, you'll probably use a plethora of descriptors, like adjectives and adverbs, trying to add color and volume to a lean (austere) story line. Get over it! No body wants to digest a ton of descriptors about a vase full of posies. Who Cares? Your readers wanna know about who's being bricked up in the alcove in the basement! ...Scrape! Scrape! Scrape! sounded the metal trowel guided by the clawed hand of the monster. Spittle running down his chin, he laughed like a fiend at the dismay in the eyes of his victim. He liked it. Squirming in her bonds, the poor girl twisted and turned, trying to extricate herself from the evil clutches of her heinous nightmare as the monster mortared in the last brick of her tomb...

COMMAS: Ditch the commas anytime you can get away with it unless you want to slow down the action and make it drip from the ceiling. I only used three commas in the fast-paced brick job in the last paragraph. Notice how fast that puppy reads even though I used reversed participle clauses and unusual words with abandon? I only needed three adjectives too. Yet, the thing pukes color. How much description do you need as her sphincter muscles let loose from abject fear? Replace the adjectives with action! Notice that I didn't slow down the action by adding too much? I resisted using the word "reflected" in the eyes of his victim. Did I need to say that the monster was "insane"? Hell, the girl was tied up! She couldn't extricate herself from the clutches of the monster. He was nowhere near her. She was inside while he was outside. She didn't need to escape the monster; she needed to get loose from her situation. She was caught in a freaking nightmare, and she wanted out. The faster you can run her through the gauntlet, the better! Seventy words did the job. Go on to something else!

TELL IT LIKE IT IS: Get that story on paper! Yes, spew the thing out like stucco out of a spray gun. Don't worry about the cute stuff or the depth or the color or any of that other writer's crap. That stuff is the problem of people with writer's block and nothing to say. Get hot, and mix it up. Don't pull any punches, and let it all hang out. Grab a big hunk of story and slap it on the page, and whatever runs off, drag it over to the next page. Build excitement, momentum and horrible horror! Gross the buggers out! Let the screaming fill the room until the cops start knocking on the door. Pretty soon the spittle will start running down your own chin, and your pages will fill up as fast as that monster could lay bricks. Do this, and you will have a Hell of a story. When you are done, eat a pizza and go to sleep. There will be plenty of time tomorrow to edit the work, fix the spelling, add some missing words and agonize over the punctuation. Don't let the writing process hold you back!

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