Effective Dialog

"Words-
so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary,how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."

                                            --Nathaniel Hawthorne

This is the part where I envision a few "Mwhaha's", but that's only if you're considering using your words for evil. Hawthorne makes a pressing observation with this quote, noticing how the construction of our words serves a purpose and a specific one at that. We worry about our writer's voice or our character's point of view or the goals we wish to convey within each scene all for the purpose of intriguing our audience.

Back in the good 'ol days, words were meant to communicate not just feelings but everyday things. Certain forms of poetry, for example, weren't just meant to woo courtly lovers; they could also express one's gratitude for an invite to a party, one's distaste of what another said about them the day before.

Words can do anything, more so if you know what to do with them.

I'm a fluffball addict. I like to flourish and type until every last word rounds my point. That has the potential to work in some instances where emotions run high or tension tumbles through run-on after run-on, but there are other times when the reader will start begging you to put them out of their misery.

Do it. It's really not that hard and it's kind of gratifying.

Let's take dialog, for instance. Those words probably hold more than any other cluster of diction throughout your piece. Not only do they reveal the voice we mentioned earlier but they reveal a character's habits and characteristics, how they interact with others. Dialog serves as the catalyst to get the story moving and my story had finally seemed to collapse under the weight of all those words.

So I decided I needed some help from this:

The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass has many great tips for cleaving away the unnecessary weeds of your manuscript so that it can prosper in a greater light. Out of his many great chapters, one happens to be on your character's voice which--as I mentioned before--stems from passages of clean-cut dialog.

Clean-cut. Tight and meaningful, not bogged down by fits of pointless action.

The chapter suggests that the writer take a passage of dialog from their manuscript and strip it of its tags and its surrounding action. Then the chapter has the writer form each line into back and forth insults. Then lines of 1-5 words. Then a passage where only one character speaks, the other reciprocates with an unspoken response like a shrug, an expression, an abysmal nothing.

I tried each exercise for at least two of my passages and noticed how effective it had been in speeding things along and moving my scene from one point to the other. Best part? I didn't have to sacrifice my characters' interactions and, in turn, their personalities.

Words hold so much power when used in a proper context and in this case, when practiced to perfection. I suggest you find this book and make it your literary bible for the longevity of your manuscript. You won't be disappointed!

Conclusions

"My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations." --Augustus Waters The Fault in Our Stars

Here's what I love about this quote: it's a beautifully crafted way of saying "I can't find ways to express something great".You've got the shining image of potential in the stars, then the collaborative and glorifying image of the constellation itself.

We all wish to find expressive ways of conveying good thoughts and intentions. But the problem lies with the scorching potential, the scattered ideas that accidentally find themselves incinerated by their effort to find greatness.

Let's call these constellations conclusions. Whether it be a critical analysis, an argumentative essay, or something creative like a short story, I can never wrap up the points to my stories in clear and concise ways. Anybody else have this problem? Comments from professors range from "too much fluff" to "repeated analysis" to "poorly structured ending". Comments I long to see are "nice focus", "powerful consideration", "clearly defined point", or "Heck--this is just fantastic".

Seriously. Anybody else find themselves grappling for the same feedback?

After the umpteenth attempt at tying up the lose ends of my novel, I found myself on the final pages last week. I remained bogged down by the final pages until last night. Whatever I do, whatever Andrea says or whatever Reese does in response to Meredith's folly, it never seems to be enough in regards to connecting with the reader. So here's what I do: I stop writing. Conscientious of too much fluff, I lean back and breathe, think of how this may be too much and how some things--probably most things--have been mentioned before somewhere in the draft.

The big thing for me is that I want to get my point across, but I also involuntarily want to suffocate readers with words and words of reiteration and emphasis. But in reality, that doesn't have to happen. Readers can be spared of repetition's choke-hold, it's just a matter of knowing which words need to be one-hit wonders and which words hold the importance to entice the reader one more time.

Conclusions don't have to clear things up--they can be a precursor to the following adventures of the characters we fall in love with--but conclusions do need to be snappy to some degree, as I'm learning with each reread and each attempt at revisions.

This site has a great list of inspiring things to remember when concluding a novel. Now that I've read through them, my week-long battle with the end might have sparked a month-long war...