Inventing Reality Editing Service Blog

Have you ever wondered why some television characters always wear the same clothes? Gilligan of “Gilligan’s Island” always dons his red shirt and white cap while Fred Flintstone always wears a spotted leopard’s wool. Such characters appear less real because in the everyday world, people wear different clothes from day to day.

Likewise, you don’t want your characters to always refer back to one another with the exact same word throughout your story, particularly in a novel. Such a word is called a “referent”.

In the real world, different people refer to us in different ways. Suppose your name is Amanda Philips. Your co-workers might call you “Amanda”, your close friends “Mandy”, your significant other “Snookums”, your professional contacts “Ms. Phillips”, your kid sister “Manda”, etc.

Consider how “Star Trek: The Original Series” handled referents for its characters, particularly Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott. Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy refer to him as “Scotty”. Mr. Spock calls him “Mr. Scott.” Others call him “Engineer Scott.” This is a realistic way of handling referents.

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(c) 2008 Rob Bignell

Tags: characters, dialogue, referents, style

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Sometimes the only purpose of a story’s sentence is to say that nothing happened. Such sentences are called “nulls”. An example would be the sentence “He said nothing.” Fortunately, nulls are easy to spot: if your story were occurring in real life, nulls would be the points where nothing happens. Nulls can be deleted from the story. They slow down the piece’s immediacy and dramatic tension.

Tags: dialogue, dramatic tension, nulls, style

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Since dialogue in fiction is contrived, a challenge facing authors is to find ways to make it sound realistic. Try these techniques:

n Pay attention to speech rhythms – Read the dialogue out loud to see if it sounds natural. If it sounds like you’ve written a homework assignment or like the characters are too dumb to say more than a couple of words at a time, then it probably needs to be revised.

n Create generational tags –Each new generation creates its own slang that separates it from those who came before. Your characters, even if living in the 26th century, probably will do the same.

n Devise local tags/slang - Colonists on other worlds will have specialized slang that arise out of their new surroundings; just think of Australians. Mark Bowman in his short story “The Drop” uses such future slang words as “spliced “touching down” and “cropping the juice” and aphorisms such as “Time is energy” in light of their technology that allows space travel.

n Develop economic class tags - People of the future, if there are economic classes, will have ways of identifying themselves as different from one another, merely based on their lifestyles. Perhaps the wealthy will be able to travel between planets while the less fortunate are “grounded” to never leaving their world.

n Build a lexicon of shop talk - In-group jargon of specialized professions will be used with even greater frequency that today as we become more dependent on technology. Warp drive engineers must use some jargon and have some inside jokes down in the engine room.

n Minimize mannerisms – Stutters and spelling words to match the pronunciation of dialects only forces the reader to pay attention to individual words rather than the story. Save mannerisms for special occasions.

Tags: characters, dialogue, jargon, mannerisms, slang, tags

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No doubt your novel will include dialogue in which characters speak to one another. Unfortunately, too many beginning writers drag their story into a furrow of tedium by poorly handling dialogue. The problem is that their characters’ dialogue mirrors actual conversations too closely.

Realistic dialogue in a story isn’t a copy of how we really speak in everyday life. Our daily conversations are filled with niceties, formalities, repetition and the mundane. They often are tedious and even banal.

Writers can’t afford to waste a word of their story on such dialogue. Instead, they should keep in mind that dialogue in a story – unlike real life – always must have a conversational goal. Dialogue is a means of characterization, a way for characters to push forward their agenda vital to the plot. Characters engage in competition and verbal combat via their dialogue.

Tags: characters, dialogue, plot

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Sometimes you do need to include the information provided in the info dump in your story. The best way to accomplish that is to incorporate it into your tale:

n Rewrite so that it’s part of the description or so it’s implied in the dialogue - This is the best way. You are now showing the information rather than telling it.

n Have the characters read or see a news report – If the information can’t be rewritten, use this ploy. Only give the information necessary to the plot, however, not the entire news article or report.

n Provide journal entries or captain’s logs - In 10 seconds, Captain Kirk gets you caught up on the plot. Usually some conflict needs to be noted or implied in the log, however, so that there’s dramatic tension.

Tags: dialogue, exposition, info dump, setting, show vs. tell

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Description in your stories shouldn’t be limited to landscapes and introductions of characters. While most description in a story will be devoted to those purposes, there are other times when a single phrase or line of description can be inserted amid action and dialogue with great effectiveness.

One such insertion is known as a “reaction shot.” A term commonly used in science fiction workshops and critiques, reaction shots is a cut away from the narrative to show a character’s emotional response. Consider this example from Benjamin Rosenbaum and David Ackert’s short story “Stray”:

“You smoke?”

Ivan blinked up at him. What was this? “I have,” he said.

Tags: description, dialogue, dramatic tension, reaction shot, setting

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