I Wrote Like Snoopy

by +AneMulligan  @AneMulligan

I cut my authorial teeth on dialogue as a playwright. I was the creative arts director for 11 years at my church. We did everything from the 30-second sermon starter to full-length musicals. When I first wrote my first few scripts, my actors often used different words that I'd written, or they changed the sentences around, and even...gasp...dropped words.

But I liked what I heard, so I dissected the changes and found the common ground. I wrote like Snoopy, trying to be literary. Gag. The lines were too perfect and not realistic.

Have you read a book where the dialogue actually pulls you out of the story because it's so stiff and unbelievable? Or worse, it sounds like an info dump, as if the writer's saying, "You won't understand this unless I explain it to you."

Well, thank you Billy Sunday. That'll make me throw a book across the room faster than a politician can empty your wallet. Unless it’s on my e-reader; then I’d delete it before it contaminated the other e-books.

So what does make good dialogue in a book?

It has to be realistic for starters. And it has to be organic to your character. If you're an Oregonian and writing about a Southern Belle, you'd better have a Cousin Sue Ellen read your manuscript, or it may well be stereotyped. The same goes for Sue Ellen writing about a Yankee.

What if you’re writing a young adult book and don’t have any teens or twenty-somethings living at home, and you aren't sure how the characters would really talk? Go to a local mall and hang out in the food court and eavesdrop. Listen to the half sentences, colloquialisms, and especially to the way people answer questions.

One mistake new writers often make is found in the way characters answer questions.

"Good morning, Bob. Where are you headed this fine morning?"

"Good morning, John. I'm going to the hardware store to get a new float for the toilet."

First of all, we don't really care about Bob's toilet, unless his four-year-old flushed the latest Wiki-leaks state secrets. A bit more realistic might sound like this:

"Morning, Bob. Where you off to?"

"Hardware store."

"Anything I can help with?"

"I got it."

"Okay, holler if you need me."

That's how two neighboring men would have this conversation. If it were women, it still wouldn't be complete sentences, but it might go something like this:

"Morning, Sally. Going shopping?"

"Macy's is having a huge sale, and you know those new slip covers I got for the den sofa? John ruined it with cranberry juice."

"I hear you. Bob got mustard on my bedspread. Why can't they be more careful?"

"I think it's in their genes."

"Yeah, he got mustard on those, too."

Anyway, you can see how their conversation veered off the main track. We women do that. Men, not so much.

In romance, Jenny B, Jones is a master at building conflict into dialogue. A few lines from Save the Date illustrate this point well:

"Do you know anything about football?"

"You toss around a ball and throw people to the ground. What else is there to know?"

"Okay then, what's a birdcage?"

"The name of the bar where you met your last girlfriend?"

"A cut?"

"A fantasy I have involving your throat."

She never answered his questions seriously and he kept asking instead of commenting on what she said. It was brilliant dialogue for building character and a great example of verbal ping-pong.

For realistic dialogue, remember to:

Study they way dialogue is written in books you love

Listen to people engage in conversation and study their responses

Do you have any great examples of dialogue to share with us?

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He Said, She Said (Using Tags in Dialogue)

He Said, She Said: 

Are you using too many tags in dialogue?

by Linore Rose Burkard

[This post has been adapted from its original version by Linore Rose Burkard on The Writers' Alley blog)

When I look at portions of work by newer writers, it is common to find them doing one of two things when it comes to dialogue tags: Using too many or  not enough. Both tendencies adversely affect writing, make readers cringe, or tell an editor or agent to stop reading. Since we want people to KEEP reading, how we do avoid both pitfalls? 

First, let's look at the problem with using too many tags (A dialogue tag is when you follow dialogue with something like "he said," "she laughed," etc.)  The first rule of thumb when adding a tag is to ask yourself,

Is it Necessary? 
A tag is only necessary when you need to clarify who is speaking, or to show a reaction that might otherwise be missed. If you insert tags when they are not needed, you are using too many. This makes the writing awkward. 

To tell if you are using too many tags, backtrack a paragraph or two when you're editing your work, and try the dialogue WITHOUT the tags in question. Does it still work? Still make sense? Can you easily tell who is talking? If the answer is 'yes' to these questions, then you don't need the tag. Cut it.

What's the harm, you may ask, in making certain your reader knows who is talking? That's what tags are for, after all, right? But here's what happens: Using unnecessary tags makes a work feel stilted; not only does dialogue suffer, but the pace SLOWS.  A reader may not know why exactly, but they'll be fidgeting for you to get on with it. If you do this routinely, the reader will groan. Don't make your reader groan! 

Is Something Missing?

On the other hand, if you fail to give enough clues about who is speaking, this too, will make for unhappy readers. They will feel as though they're missing something, and this is frustrating. They will have to go back and try to figure out who is saying what. When your characters are really strong, there will be occasions when you can omit a tag simply because the spoken words are so distinctly characteristic of that person, it would be redundant to use one. But be sure about this; use a critique partner or two to make sure. If it turns out that readers are confused, then you need a tag. Keep it in. 

Is it Character-Driven?

There are occasions when it's right and good to use a tag even though the reader knows who is speaking.  This may sound counter to what I said earlier, but the key here are the words, character-driven.  This means that it is important for the reader not only to know who is speaking, but to know HOW the character is saying or thinking a thing.  In other words, you want to clarify an emotion that isn't altogether clear from the spoken dialogue. In some cases you may need to specify the tone of voice; or an accompanying gesture the character makes while talking. 

I would caution you not to do this often, and again, use critique readers or beta readers, or an editor to take a second look when there is any question about this.
Also, be sure not to overdo it.  Having a heroine who sighs heavily once a chapter is probably fine; any more than that and the reader will be sighing heavily.  

To emphasize the point of using too many tags,  I leave you with an old poem by the humorist Franklin P. Adams. (He makes the point perhaps a little too well!) 

    Monotonous Variety
(All of them from two stories in a single magazine.)

She "greeted" and he "volunteered";
    She "giggled": he "asserted";
She "queried" and he "lightly veered";
    She "drawled" and he "averted";
She "scoffed," she "laughed" and he "averred";
He "mumbled," "parried," and "demurred."

She "languidly responded"; he
    "Incautiously assented"; 
Doretta "proffered lazily";
    Will "speedily invented"; 
She "parried," "whispered," "bade," and "mused"; 
He "urged," "acknowledged," and "refused."

She "softly added"; "she alleged";
    He "consciously invited";
She "then corrected"; William "hedged";
She "prettily recited";
She "nodded" "stormed," and "acquiesced"; 
He "promised," "hastened," and "confessed."

Doretta "chided"; "cautioned" Will;
    She "voiced" and he "defended";
She "vouchsafed"; he "continued still"; 
    She "sneered" and he "amended";
She "smiled," she "twitted," and she "dared"
He "scorned," "exclaimed," "pronounced," and "flared."

He "waived," "believed," "explained," and "tried"; 
    "Commented" she; he "muttered";
She "blushed," she "dimpled," and she "sighed";
    He 'ventured" and he "stuttered"; 
She "spoke," "suggested," and "pursued";
He "pleaded," "pouted," "called," and "viewed."

O syonymble writers, ye
    Whose work is so high-pricey.
Think ye not that variety
    May haply be too spicy?
Meseems that in an elder day
They had a thing or two to--say.

So-do you struggle with proper use of dialogue tags? Or have a pet peeve about them? Share your thoughts in the comments with the rest of us! 


Linore Rose Burkard (a.k.a. L.R.Burkard) wrote a trilogy of genuine regency romances for the Christian market before there were any regencies for the Christian market. Her books opened up the genre in the CBA. She writes YA Suspense/Apocalyptic fiction as L.R. Burkard, not only to keep expanding boundaries for her readers, but to explore deeper themes. Married with five children, she home-schools her youngest daughter, preferably with coffee in one hand and wearing pjs. Her latest book, PULSE, takes another leap from the usual fiction of CBA writers with cutting-edge apocalyptic suspense.

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Hit and Run Emotions by DiAnn Mills

by DiAnn Mills @DiAnnMills

While driving back from the grocery store, I was hit by a truck and the driver took off. The emotions I experienced were shock, anger, and a twinge of fear. The latter one was probably because I write suspense, and my mind always goes into story mode. But the truth is, fear often results from the unpredictable and suspicions from those who harm us.

Are you guilty of hit and run emotions?

The same applies to the characters in our stories. What happens when a writer has a character encounter a traumatic incident and there’s no reaction? Or what happens when a character responds to a minor incident with drama-queen emotion?

Both scenarios can destroy a reader’s reality check and toss the reader out of the story. Future purchases from that writer are nil. Sad, but true. Not much opportunity for a second chance when there are so many writers competing for our attention.

To avoid hit and run emotion in our stories, we can take steps to ensure our characters’ reactions to events are met with responses that are in character, realistic, and slide into genre.

In Character
For credible emotion, we writers must thoroughly understand our POV characters. This means taking time to develop their personality, unique traits, and backstory. A character who handles anger by stuffing it may logically end up with an ulcer. A character who deals with anger by breaking noses may need anger management classes. The first key to overcoming inappropriate reactions lies in characterization.

Realistic
Many writers keep a journal of the happenings in their lives and how they reacted. It’s been said that if a writer is unwilling to seek resolution to life’s explosions, then the writer will never be able to write about those same emotions effectively.

Dramatic reactions to small incidents initiates skepticism in the reader, unless the writer is gifted in humor. Even those stories must be crafted with care. When a hero or heroine appears callused to tragedy, displays an absence of wit or logic, or is over-the-top in dialogue, readers no longer care about the character or the story.

Don't hit the reader with a drama queen!

Genre 
The many genres provide us an opportunity to show our stories through a variety of techniques. The criterion dictates the story world’s dialogue, culture, goals, setting, and symbolism. The seven universal emotions stated in Tonya Reiman’s,The Power of Body Language are surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and contempt. Every POV character experiences these emotions according to genre guidelines. Here are a few examples:

Contemporary: Today’s world is filled with instant information from various communication devices. Problems arise from dealing in a world where change is the norm. A character is continuously assaulted with situations that involve coping devices according to traits and backstory. Contemporary characters filter a whirl of happenings through their personal data bank of their past.

Historical: The past is known for its slower pace of living. Communication from local,
national, and worldwide events shape the future many times before the character learns about them. Culture and gender often dictate how a character receives and processes emotion.

Romance: Romance is an emotional adventure. This aspect of novel writing can be woven into any genre. A thread of romance invites a reader into a dreamlike world of fresh and breathless love.

Create emotions for your fantasy world.

Speculative:This genre has a broad range of categories from fantasy to sci-fi. Here the setting and culture blends with character to show how emotion is received and processed. Because the story world is unusual, how a character views emotion is according to the writer’s discretion.


Suspense: Suspense can be written into any genre, much like romance, but the character’s reaction to a state of anxiousness or uncertainty with a blanket of fear leads the character down a path of uneasiness and often apprehension. Heroes and heroines walking through suspense are survivors who have learned to manage and compartmentalize their emotions in a way that is healthy and believable.

Hit and run emotions. We writers don’t have to be labeled with this criticism because we understand the power of character, reality, and genre.

DiAnn Mills is a bestselling author who believes her readers should expect an adventure.
She combines unforgettable characters with unpredictable plots to create action-packed, suspense-filled novels.

Her titles have appeared on the CBA and ECPA bestseller lists; won two Christy Awards; and been finalists for the RITA, Daphne Du Maurier, Inspirational Readers’ Choice, and Carol award contests. Library Journal presented her with a Best Books 2014: Genre Fiction award in the Christian Fiction category for Firewall.

DiAnn is a founding board member of the American Christian Fiction Writers; the 2015 president of the Romance Writers of America’s Faith, Hope, & Love chapter; a member of Advanced Writers and Speakers Association, and International Thriller Writers. She speaks to various groups and teaches writing workshops around the country. She and her husband live in sunny Houston, Texas.

DiAnn is very active online and would love to connect with readers on any of the social media platforms listed at www.diannmills.com.

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Character conversations

Author Amber Stockton

When I first began writing, I thought I’d be better suited to screenwriting, as it didn’t require so much description. Conversation has never been a problem for me—I’m outgoing and I love people.

It didn’t take me long to realize I could blend my love of dialogue with the scenes happening around the conversation for a total experience. Writing realistic dialogue doesn’t come easily to everyone, but it’s worth the effort. Nothing pulls the reader out of a story faster than bad dialogue.

First of all, familiarize yourself with these five things to avoid, then I’ll share the 10 Ways Dialogue Defines Characters.

Five errors to avoid

Before you can write excellent dialogue, learn how to avoid these five key components:

1. Stilted language: Your character’s words don’t sound like natural speech.
2. Filler: Conversations that don’t move the story along or shed any light on your characters.
3. Exposition: Characters who wax philosophic on the plot issues or repeat something for the readers’ sake.
4. Naming: Characters who repeatedly use the name of other character’s in the scene to identify them.
5. Dialogue tags: Overuse of such tags as exclaimed, cried, mumbled, whispered, etc. For most uses, the largely invisible said is the most appropriate choice.

Each of those five can kill your dialogue, but worse, bore your reader. Alfred Hitchcock once said a good story was “life, with the dull parts taken out.” Keep this in mind as you revise dialogue.

10 tips for defining your characters by dialogue

1. Observe real people and real conversations. You can discover creative and fascinating dialogue by listening to how people really talk. Skip over the distracting parts (um, like, y’now) and get to the meat. When you apply those styles to your characters, you’ll be surprised at how naturally they give away integral components of their personalities and lives.
2. Apply limits. Keep the interchanges to one thought per character per dialogue segment. Any more and you risk impeding the flow of your story. Caveat: If your character happens to be a rambler, then let that person go from thought to thought. But, otherwise, keep it simple.
3. Create differences. Make certain your characters use different styles, patterns, and word choices. Read a sequence of lines out loud. If you can’t tell your characters apart by dialogue, your readers won’t be able to either.
4. Vary the dialogue with action. Writers often use too many dialogue tags—this will pull the reader out of your story. Instead, try using character or action tags to break up the stream of conversation. Describe gestures, facial expressions, movements, or even inner thoughts. These can offer great insight into a character’s thoughts and personality.
5. Let your characters talk freely. When it feels like a character is talking directly to the reader, saying or explaining something simply for the reader’s sake, they get bored. Assume your reader is intelligent and will infer what’s necessary from the story. If you’ve done it right, you won’t have to explain, and the reader will be pulled along on the wave of the conversation.
6. Do your research. Don’t use styles, words, grammar, and phrases that don’t fit with the setting or time period you’ve established. Get to know your characters well. Interview them to learn all about them. Know the language of the setting and get it right. On the other hand, avoid stereotypes.
7. Watch your tone. Characters are like people. You wouldn’t speak to a stranger in the same way you’d speak to a friend or loved one. Neither would your characters. Be careful what attitudes you convey through dialogue. You can show feelings for people when you use the right tone and words.
8. Throw in some subtext. People are curious creatures. They don’t often say what they really mean. If you want your characters to come across as real and natural, they’ll do the same thing. If one character is angry over one thing, but doesn’t want the other character to know what it is, have him get angry about something else to cover up the truth. The anger is still there, but the other character doesn’t fully understand the reason.
9. Allow for surprise. Have you ever read a story and been surprised by something a character says? This is an excellent way to keep the reader turning the pages. If your dialogue becomes too predictable, the reader will know where the conversation is headed. So, let your characters act out of character. Just make sure they have a legitimate reason for doing so, or your reader might get frustrated.
10. End the conversation well. Don’t leave your reader or your characters hanging at the end of a dialogue exchange.

This was a brief introduction into some dialogue tools. Once you get into it and grasp the importance of real dialogue for real characters, you’ll be able to layer in many other facets that will bring your story to life.  

Tiffany Amber Stockton, who writes as Amber Stockton, has been crafting and embellishing stories since childhood. She is an author, speaker, and virtual assistant who lives with her husband and fellow author, Stuart Stockton, in Colorado. Her latest book is Antique Dreams for Heartsong Presents. She and Stu have one daughter, one son, and a dog. She has sold 13 books, with more on the horizon. Visit her online, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

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Dialogue ~ The Voices in Your Head

Dialogue is so important, because readers like to get to know characters the same way we like to get to know people in real life. They like to hear people talk and see people act.

So if you want your readers to like your hero, you don’t need to tell the readers how wonderful he is. You don’t have to bog the novel’s opening down with backstory telling how hard life has been for the hero and how he’s done great things despite all that.

What you need to do is give him a voice. Throw him into a situation where his good qualities will show, allow him to speak, and let the readers fall in love.

How do you give your characters strong voices? 

You do it by knowing your characters. Have a picture in mind when you write. Hear the voice. Think of real people or movie characters. I’m not saying to go for a cliché. I’m saying that if you listen to a lot of dialogue in books or movies or in real life, it will be easier for you to write it, and if you have a specific accent in mind when your character speaks, she will feel more real to your readers.

The accent of a character has to be consistent, but you need not be afraid to write a strong accent for fear of forgetting to put it in. The stronger the accent the easier it is to hear and write.

“Oh, Mr. Bennett, you do delight in vexing me!” Can you hear Mrs. Bennett saying that? Every time she speaks you know what her accent is going to be and you know that she will be talking about her lack of money or her poor nerves. That's Mrs. Bennett.

Your characters need to have very strong voices, too. They need to be unique and fun, but also predictable. Meaning they need to be so well done that the reader knows who is speaking just by the line of dialogue, without any tags. 

Maybe I’m odd, but I take on the accents of other people really easily. One of my friends told me years ago that when I spoke to my kids I sounded just like an Alaskan Native. Well, my sisters-in-law were all natives and they spoke to their children a certain way, so I adopted that way of speaking without even knowing I was doing it.

I do the same thing with writing--only I do it on purpose. If I want to write for a certain magazine, I sit down with ten issues and I absorb the voice of the magazine. The next piece I write, then, has that voice.

I think we have to do the same thing with dialogue. If we want our characters to sound real, we have to have real voices playing in our heads as we write. I had a crit partner who pasted pictures of her hero and heroine up on her cork board as she wrote. So one time it was Vin Diesel in Fast and Furious. She heard his voice every time time she wrote one of his lines of dialogue  And her dialogue was some of the best I've read. 

What about you? Are your characters based on people or characters you've seen before? If so, how do you keep them from being clichéd? 

photo credit: ohhector via photopin cc

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sally Apokedak is an associate agent with the Leslie H. Stobbe Literary Agency. She's in the process of of building a dynamite list of authors. She is also active in the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.

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The Ever Elusive Voice

Lindi Peterson is an author of contemporary Christian romance novels focusing on the amazing love of Jesus Christ and how His love influences our ability to love one another. She lives north of Atlanta, Georgia, with her hubby. They are empty nesters as far as children go, but they do support, feed, and care for a dog, 2 cats and 2 birds (who are at often times way louder than the kids used to be). She'd wanted to be a writer ever since she can remember. So, about 12 years ago, she started writing novels. Writing for publication is an amazing, crazy journey, but she wouldn't trade it in at all!

The Ever Elusive Voice

Are you a new writer? If not, do you remember being a new writer? Do you remember hearing words that you knew what they meant, but the way people talked about these words indicated there was more to the picture than you knew about.

I remember the words that eventually left me befuddled.

Fresh.

Sparkle.

Voice.

Looking at those words we all know what they mean. But what they mean in the writing world can wreck a novelist and result in a lot of rewriting and some sleepless nights.

And maybe even some rejection letters.

“We’re looking for a story that’s fresh!”

“Your characters don’t sparkle.”

“The voice isn’t distinctive.”

Yeah---have you heard this before? If not in the form of a rejection, how about from a critique partner? Or what about in a workshop? Well, I have good news and bad news. Bad news-two of these words we aren’t talking about today. Really, there’s not enough blog space!

Seriously though, each of these words has an extremely important role in your novel, but, (good news) today we are going to focus on one.

Voice.

Because I think having a distinctive voice is one of the most important aspects of this business. When your voice shines, you can tell your story. You can impart to readers the way you ‘feel’ about the story—because to me, voice is about feeling.

Think of it this way. How do you converse? Pay attention to conversations around you. Do you hear people’s beats? Do you notice pauses? Awkward ones? They are all a part of real conversation.  Take notice of the way you talk. The emphasis you put on certain words.

I have a little exercise on voice finding. I do this a lot and I find it really helps me pull from all sorts of places inside where all those feelings are just fighting to come out and grab your reader. I do this especially if I have a scene that’s not quite coming together. I write it in first person. Then I write it in third person. It’s amazing the way each scene pulls out different aspects of what is going on. Then I mesh the two together. It’s kind of like bringing in the best of both worlds. And this is true for all the scenes in your novel. Dialogue and description.

Voice isn’t just about dialogue. No, it’s the way the novel flows. It’s the way the beats fall. It’s the composition of the way the novel is put together. It all really comes back to voice.

I find that rough drafts are the best expression of voice. Of course, there’s usually rewrites, but hopefully rewriting doesn’t pull the ‘you’ out of your novel. Because it’s that gut writing that comes from deep within that’s going to make your novel different from everyone else’s.

Drat—voice can be hard to explain. I hope I’ve shed a little light into the topic of the ever elusive voice. I’d be happy to answer/ask questions and discuss this topic.

A side note: An author whose voice I love is Alice J. Wisler. I love picking up an Alice J. Wisler novel. I know what I’m getting when I read Wisler. Amazing voice. Check her out if you haven’t and you’ll see what I tried to explain in this blog post. 

Left, is a photo of what I stare at as a write. I have 2 bulletin boards. This is a picture of one of them. I love starting at things that remind me of my current WIP. 

Oh, and there’s a picture of one of my cats, too. My hubby and I have 2 cats, 1 dog and 2 birds. Even though we are empty nesters, we have a loud house!

Thanks for having me here today!  Novel Rocket rocks!

Her Best Catch

Allison Doll's mother is rebelliously turning fifty, her two best friends have started dating and a gorgeous injured relief pitcher named Ashton Boyd has joined her Sunday school class, rocking her world into confusion, heartache and temptation, places she hasn't visited in a long time, much less all at once.

But with the help of family, old friends she really hasn't lost, a new friend she really can count on, and God, she begins to find out whether she'll always be a girl waiting for life to happen or a woman who's ready to commit to her best catch.

And that's not all! Be watching for Summer Song.  Here's a tease ... 

Pop-Princess Summer Sinclair doesn't know what to do now that she's cleaned-up and sober. She knows God's been nudging her, but since God is unfamiliar territory she feels scared and alone. Everything changes when she meets Levi Preston, a Christian musician who tries everything he can to show Summer what true love really is. But when Summer's life starts replaying Levi's past, his faith is tested. Will visions of their past prevent Summer and Levi from living the life God has for them? Or will true love triumph giving Summer and Levi their own Summer Song.

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