[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Hey Varq, FYI, I just wrote the first few sentences of my Great American Novel. Maybe I will hire you as editor for the project.[/quote]
Really?
Good luck, my friend. It’s a helluva ride, and 99.99999 percent of the time, you don’t even get this lousy t-shirt. But it’s worth taking, I reckon.
One piece of advice: Pick up a book you really like and study a couple page’s worth of dialogue. Note how and how often attribution (e.g., "said Ishmael or, as I prefer, “Ishmael said”) is offered. Note when attribution is skipped completely. That is the one thing that (in my experience) doesn’t come naturally, even to a great writer.[/quote]
I need all the help I can git, I reckon. Bring it on.[/quote]
I think that’s great, Push. You have so many good stories, I’d love to see them on paper.
Good advice from SMH, and I’ll offer my own.
When I was a copywriter in Tokyo we had a junior copywriter who was a born comedian. Very funny guy. However, his writing was stilted, stiff, and not funny at all. It boggled my mind that there was such a disconnect between his speech and writing. But it’s a lot more common than you might imagine. People think that they have to be more proper and serious when they write, and perhaps that’s true for business communication, but it’s death for fiction.
I told him to take whatever he wrote, and read it out loud. If it sounded stupid or unnatural, I told him to change it until it was something that he would say. He balked at first, saying that what he would normally say didn’t seem serious enough, but I told him that was the point. If it sounds unnatural to the ear of the writer, it will sound twice as unnatural in the head of the reader. He finally started following this advice, and his writing got much better–and funnier–as a result.
This goes for all writing, but especially for fiction, double for dialogue, and quintuple for dialogue that incorporates any sort of regional dialect. In short, if “you” are narrating the story, write how you talk. And when you read the dialogue out loud, read it in the voice of the characters who say it. If it’s written exactly how they sound in your head, it’ll sound the same when you read it. But just to make sure, let someone else read it out loud to you. If their reading of it sounds like your character is supposed to sound, you are home free.
Another point: describing a scene is tricky. You can paint a lush verbal picture, meticulously covering every detail, or you can describe in very broad, stark strokes and let the reader fill in the details in his mind. There are pros and cons to both. My writing used to be lavishly descriptive, but advertising and screenwriting cured me of that. Short, pithy, concise phrases are best in most cases. Think Hemingway rather than Emily Bronte.
I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve written. Maybe we can discuss my role as editor over some roasted meat and whiskey sometime soon.