Composing Dialog Or Just Nuts?

December 29, 2016December 29, 2016 / Lisa / 2 Comments

Our mail was supposed to be forwarded and the post office sent it all back instead. I told my husband I’d call them to complain.

I then went to bed and couldn’t sleep because of all the dialog I was busy composing. Not just dialog but whole scenes. I’ll say this, then she’ll say that, and then I’ll…and in every instance my words were calm, dignified, witty, and cutting. And then I thought, ‘this might make a blog post’ and began composing. It took forever to fall asleep and now I don’t remember any details of what I composed.

The same thing happens when out in public people watching. I’ll overhear or see a conversation and immediately think, ‘what if this happened instead…’ and the scenes start running through my brain. For example, getting coffee recently. A man in a big truck flirting with the barista. I sat there waiting, thinking, what if she thinks the guy’s creepy? What if she has a crush on him? The scenes become either a romance movie or an action film depending on my mood. Eventually, by the way, real dialog came out of my mouth. ‘Hey! I’m here in a big truck, too. Can I get service?’

This got me wondering if everyone’s mind works like that. So this morning I asked a friend what she would think if I asked her to call the post office and complain.

‘That I have to call the post office and complain. Maybe put a reminder to call in my phone.’

‘That’s it?’

‘What else is there?’

Well, let’s see. There are important variables of dialog where you’ll be calm, dignified, witty, and cutting.

I think everyone has those moments hours after a confrontation where you think ‘I should have said…!’ But this is more about a brain where there’s constant scenes being created and flowing. Some make it into books. Some snippets of dialog come out of character’s mouths. That dreaming sort of scene/dialog sequence is going on all the time. It makes me wonder if this is typical for writers or if non-writers do the same thing.

In reality, dialog is far different. I called the post office.

I was not calm, dignified, witty, or cutting.

High Stakes in Mysteries

December 5, 2016 / Lisa / 4 Comments

I’m reading Revising Your Novel by Janice Hardy and here’s a bit from the book that made me laugh. It’s from a section dealing with how to fix scenes where stakes might be too high, or not high enough.

“If the protagonist walked away, what would change? This can help spot stakes that seem high, but aren’t really. For example, ‘they could die’ should be the highest stake of all, but if the protagonist walks away she’ll live. Problem solved. Sure, others might die, but do readers really care about a faceless mass of unnamed people? Nah.”

That made me think about something similar, one of the biggest issues for me in reading (and writing) a mystery series.

Those ending scenes when everything’s about to be wrapped up, all will be disclosed, and there will be the final life-or-death battle between the good guy and the bad guy. Yes there are authors out there that kill off the protagonist of a series, but that’s rare. So is there any reader out there who thinks the protagonist might actually die in those scenes? Most commonly, no.

So then how high are the stakes, really? If you know the main character is going to survive, then there isn’t any reason to have that whole final scene. When I’m reading a mystery series and get to that part, to be honest, I skip it and go the ending where all the threads get explained. And even as I write one of those scenes, in the back of my mind I’m thinking ‘how many are going to skip this?’.

What makes those final high stakes scenes work for me as a reader, and that I need to remember as a writer, is to place the risk elsewhere. Since I know the protagonist is going to survive, then what keeps me reading is if the author has taken the one thing that is most important to the protagonist, and put that at risk.

If that character cares deeply about something, and that could be taken away, then I’m going to be hooked as a reader and race through the tense scenes. Think about it. An author may not kill off the protagonist, but it’s way easier to remove something the character cares about. Secondary characters can be mourned and then replaced, right?

I want the risk, the scene that keeps my heart racing, to be something where I don’t know what the author is going to do. Something where I don’t sit back and scoff and say, ‘go ahead and pull the trigger; you’re not going to kill off the main guy in your series’.

As an additional thought, that type of scene might work just fine in a stand-alone mystery (since there’s no series, the protagonist might not make it) or in the first or second books. Mainly because you don’t know if the author is going to stick around and make a series or not. But after the third book, when a series is here to stay, that final scene stops working for me.

And I stop reading them.

There are some cases where I stop with the whole series. My husband and I used to be big fans of John Sandford. But after twenty-some books they all sound alike. The protagonist wanders around and asks questions, the answers lead up to the final life-or-death scene, and the protagonist survives. The books are so boring now I can’t even go back and re-read them.

And after this, I go back and re-read the endings of my books and squirm a bit. In my defense, it’s the first few so the series isn’t in concrete yet. Which means…who knows what’s going to happen in the next one?

(Ha! Aren’t I tricky, sneaking in a blatant teaser?)

Labels, Irony, and Writing

November 27, 2016 / Lisa / Leave a comment

Yesterday I posted a personal essay that was difficult to do. Today, I want to tie that to the craft of writing.

If you write something that dips into your deepest emotions, if you write something brutally honest, something that makes you squirm uncomfortably, or be a little fearful of ‘putting it out there’ then you’ve written something true. And even if those who read it have never been in that situation, they will respond and recognize the underlying emotions.

If you read something that makes you squirm a bit, that causes an emotional reaction, that sticks with you and won’t let you go after the last word has been digested, then the writer has succeeded.

If you can’t touch those deepest wells of emotion, if you can’t be brutally honest in your writing, if you can’t pull up words that battle to stay hidden, then you’ll have a hard time eliciting responses in your readers.

No one ever said writing was easy.

When you write something that scares you because of that honesty, and your trusted friend reads it and says ‘holy shit!’ then you know you’ve been true to your inner soul.

When you think your writing is filled with believable characters with honest emotions, go back and see if you can dig a little deeper, pull off a few more scabs, and expose a few more wounds.

If you’re afraid to write it, then it needs to be written.

If it won’t let you go, it needs to go into words.