Hello, writers.
Another DaKoWriMo has come and gone. I think it was a stressful one and hard to work through. We’re used to January being a fairly calm and easygoing month, especially in the more wintry climes. But this January has been chaotic in the news, as well as in a lot of people’s personal lives. Plus it’s getting harder to separate the two.
So, if you got anything at all done last month, I hereby pronounce you amazing. The month’s accomplishments are below (and please give me your updates).
bonetti: 30 revision tasks; 28 done
dconrad: 20,000 words; 8000 written.
Leo Orionis: Write ‘A New Viewpoint’. Almost done.
Mercy Ormont: Continue/finish Thirty-Nine Years on the Street memoir. Revised earlier writing and 3 more chapters written.
mettlefatigue: Find my WO stories that could go in OFPM. (5 stories found)
Mnemosyne: Finish NNWM 10k-word goal; 8127 written.
reppa: Continuing research on potential projects.
RiverOfTheWest: Complete revisions and illustrations of the history book; 1350 words, cover art & 8 illustrations.
strawbale: Write another alien story + the foreword to the collection. Finished story and foreword. 1400 words into second story,
TASW: 50 pages of Callie and the Solicitresses.
In last week’s challenge, I asked you (inter alia) to limit characters’ speech to 20 words at a time. I’d like to expand on the reasons for that.
Dialogue, in fiction, should snap, crackle and pop. Dialogue is, in a way, mind candy. The reader gets to enjoy a clever and interesting conversation without the bother of participating.
With dialogue, less is more.
You can use dialogue for exposition of facts and character— especially character— but not for massive info dumps. If a character goes on and on explaining why the Jewel of Togwogmagog is more likely to be in the swamp than anywhere else, odds are the other characters have stopped listening.
Ideally, when you look at a printed page of dialogue you should see a lot of white space.
My rule for myself is to never let a character speak more than two sentences, and ideally not more than one. And it’s better if someone interrupts them in the second sentence than if they finish it. Keeps things moving along.
(I may break this rule sometimes, but I try like heck not to.)
Sometimes I play with this a bit. In Jinx’s Magic I had a minor character, a wizard, who never spoke more than one word at a time. It made her stand out a little, gave her some individuality. In Miss Ellicott’s School for the Magically Minded, I never let the dragon speak more than four words at a time. It was one way to show that speaking was hard for him, and it helped give him a distinctive voice.
By the way, here’s something I didn’t know till I learned it from the copyediting department: Interruptions are apparently supposed to be punctuated with an em-dash, whereas if you use an ellipsis, it means the character is trailing off.
Thus, an interruption:
“If we have to walk the whole way back—“ she began.
“Don’t say that. We won’t.”
vs. trailing off:
“If we have to walk the whole way back...” The thought was too terrible to contemplate.
(I used to think the ellipsis ending a sentence was four dots, not three, one of them being a period, but I was scolded most severely for that. I’m not sure if that’s an in-house style rule or an actual rule-rule. I know that in books I read as a child, there were four dots when an ellipsis ended a sentence.)
So, tonight’s challenge.
Write a scene containing dialogue. Two characters are disagreeing about what to do next. You decide who and what. If you can’t decide, have the characters disagree about whether to consult the mysterious and always-offstage Froop about the whereabouts of the missing jewel.
One character can speak no more than four words at a time. The other character can speak no more than two words at a time.
(There can be other words in the scene, besides just these brief utterances in quotation marks. But the actual conversation has to stay within these limits.)
Write On! will be a regular Thursday feature (8 pm ET 5 pm PT) until it isn’t.
