2 posts tagged “dialogue”

I started working around 1:30 and I was done at a little after three. I wrote 2600 in that time. H was napping, Z was playing and I did nothing but write and listen to music (Nirvana). The music helped.

I blogged that I wouldn’t break 100k (I didn’t want to). I just looked at my final word count and it’s 99,994. LOL. Well, I didn’t break it! On January 18, I had 64 pages and about 37k. It is unbelievable to me that I wrote 118 pages, 63,000 words in three weeks. That’s a NaNo in and of itself.

As to the ending, from the beginning, my idea was that the end would be Seth telling his poetry teacher (Jason Braddock) that he was going “home.” The question would remain “what did he mean?” That we would have some idea that he might have meant “where he came from” but that it might be “to Natalie.” Turns out that he didn’t do either. He connected with home (his mother) but he broke another connection (Natalie). I also realized that I was trying to fix all of his problems and that that wasn’t going to happen. Late in the process I hit on the idea of using color to indicate where he was on a spectrum. Like everything horrible and terrible that he hates about himself and life would be red. Everything perfect and wonderful is blue. In between, there’s purple. I didn’t do it consciously. I saw the pattern of it, plus he’d written a poem he called “Blue/red.” I saw that I used a fair amount of red early on (I plan to go back and tweak this), then purple, then blue. Like PSU’s blue, for example.

Things got very blue with Natalie (her mood ring was blue all the time, he got a blue PSU backpack, it was spring and the skies went from gray to blue, etc.). Then I did something with purple and I thought: What if he slides back down the spectrum? Not a crash back to the other end but just an adjustment? Like if you’re riding a bike or running and you go really fast for a while. Eventually the pressure of pushing yourself makes you run out of gas and you don’t exactly quit. You go to a reasonable, comfortable place and that’s where you stay.

So the ending isn’t neat and complete but I think it’s satisfying. People might say, “Why the whole Natalie thing at all?” It’s there b/c it’s part of what changes him. He reaches something he didn’t think was possible for himself. Just b/c he didn’t hang onto it doesn’t mean it was a waste. We all have relationships that just ended. Thing is, he knew it was ending, which is more than most of us get.

Theryn asked what was next. If I can get some ideas, I want to get back into selling erotica and I have a book idea. I know, I know. Plus I’ll be editing RFM and I guess I’ll begin agent shopping again sometime this year. As I blogged before, Hawk thinks RFM is more marketable than WS. WS would be more popular in a mainstream way. RFM is aimed more toward a certain reader and a fair number of people wouldn’t like it. There’s a fair amount of soft drug use, there’s violence, there’s an awful lot of sex (not much graphic description but some four letter words) and Seth throws “fuck” around the way some people use “the.” In fact, the very first word in the Project 365 photo I took of the screen when I finished is "fucked." Yes. It's that frequent.

As I wrote to fredlet, WS & RFM aare llike my other children. I love them equally. Some novels are loved more equally than others. WS was my passion. The story I always had brewing that I wanted to tell. RFM started out as a very simple idea and blossomed into this incredibly fucked-up, bizarre little story that I didn't know I wanted to tell.

I blogged recently about an article that said all fiction is in some ways autobiographical. There's some of me in Jake (and in Thaddea), yes. There's a whole hell of a lot of me in Seth, Natalie and April. Even in Braddock. I think RFM is the closest I will ever come to writing a memoir or autobiography. It's closer to me than I expected it to be. When I felt like it was too close, I brought it closer. With WS, I pushed it away I think.

I used a lot of details from my life in RFM, esp for Natalie. Her apartment is my apartment. Her roommate situation is what mine was. She's an English major. She transfers schools after that spring 1992 semester. She has a crazy mother driving her away. Difference is Natalie did it the way I wanted to and she also had Seth to give her that push. The only person pushing me was me.

The details from Seth's childhood are mostly imagination. The feelings however are mine. The detail about the scars inside his sister's mouth. The fear that you never knew what you were coming home to. That's true. Seth's voice is pretty much my voice, only run ragged and roughshod. Jake's voice is older than Seth's, with different experiences. It's still similar to mine but not as close.

April is not nearly so close to mine but she didn't open up in the same way Natalie did. We don't even get her last name. She was supposed to be a minor character, a distraction. She ended up with third billing (probably tied w/ Braddock). She also gave me my ending and she got her belly button pierced. I think April is more how I wished I could be at that age in that place. She does what she wants, she has what she needs and she has a safety net. I also made her be from Erie, which is a personal invocation of "home." Not many people would get that reference and it's not important that people do; it's there for me.

The writing style is very different from WS. I developed a thing of dropping the subjects off my sentences. Helps keep from getting long pps full of sentences beginning with "I," for example.

I had some trouble w/ tense shifts. I kept slipping into present tense. I do use present tense in flashbacks b/c it helped add immediacy. Coming out of the flashbacks was hard. The climactic scene toward the end especially, since he slipped in and out of the flashback and therefore between past and present tense.

The book is structured by month. Each section does have chapter breaks. There are 18 total. There's no chapter break in the third section. It goes like this: January, February, August 1989, March, April, May. The story is set in 1992. I established it mostly through music. I did come right out and say it was 1992 near the beginning.

Music is intrinsic to the story. Seth loves music. When we first see him, he has "Don't Bring Me Down" in his head. Natalie's neighbor, whom Seth nicknames "Pink Floyd," is always playing music that can be heard through the walls (Pink Floyd was based on my IRL neighbor, whom I called "Pink Floyd"). There's mention of the new U2 album (Achtung Baby), Nirvana (Nevermind), Metallica (the black album) and Tori Amos (Little Earthquakes). There's classic rock like The Who and The Beach Boys (I didn't choose them arbitrarily either). When April asks him to recite one of his poems for her, he says he doesn't know them offhand. She says to tell her some song lyrics instead and he quotes "Bodies." He has a Clash t-shirt. Braddock has a Buzzcocks t-shirt. Near the end, he buys a guitar, thinking he can make some money by writing and playing songs.

I think that's enough deep discussion for one day. It's done. And now... editing.

Dialogue. For me, dialogue is the easiest thing in the world to write. You don't have to worry about grammar. You can use it as a shortcut to say what you like. You can establish character. You don't have get fancy with the tags ("said" and "asked" are all you really need).

So why is it that everywhere I read lately the dialogue is so... bad?

We had some DOW stories with dialogue that was absolutely unreadable, written in dialect that, even if you deciphered it, made no sense.

In other stories, everyone talks the same way.

In the latest example, people aren't using contractions and are giving grand speeches on their deathbeds.

Dialogue. I can't understand why so many people have so many problems with it. Write like people talk. Period. Yeah, they should be saying something. Don't waste your words. But which would you rather read?

"Oh darling, how the moonlight radiates through the window illuminating your fine flesh."

"Damn you look delicious."

I vote for (and write) option B.

BTW: Today's new words: 3147. I rawk hard.

ETA: The person who wrote the piece of junk that inspired this post didn't like the fb and removed the post. There was an hour of my life I can't get back. I won't be doing ANY fb at TC for quite some time. I'm pissed. off.