Let’s all pretend we didn’t see the clickbait headline.
One of the things that new writers often find most difficult is writing good dialogue. This is because dialogue is hard! A new writer’s dialogue will often be clunky and mechanical. So here are a few quick tips on how to make your dialogue more alive.
Dialogue is character.
What someone says, what they don’t say, and how they say it will tell you a lot about a character.
The difference between what they say, do, and think will tell you even more.
Suppose your character is afraid of stairs. They may well not come out and just say that. Maybe, when faced with stairs, they will lie. Maybe they will try to distract. Maybe they will suggest an alternate route on a spurious reason. Maybe they will tell the truth after all. Whichever option, that will allow us to understand something about their character, and their relationship with whoever else is in that scene.
Dialogue is conflict.
This doesn’t mean your characters need to be arguing or shouting all the time. It means that they each go into a conversation with a particular purpose in mind, and those purposes will probably be in conflict in some way. Your characters will try to get their particular desired outcome while avoiding the other character’s desired outcome, however minor the difference between them might be.
As a result, they will ignore what the other says, they will answer questions with questions, they will talk at cross-purposes, they will try to push their agenda in the conversation, they will try to hide information that the other character is trying to discover, and so on. Not all of these things at once, of course, but at least some of them most of the time.
Dialogue is not a way of passing information to the reader.
The worst kind of dialogue is where characters discuss something not because they need to find it out or understand it, but because the author wants the reader to learn or understand it. Doing that leads to absolutely horrible dialogue.
That’s not to say that the readers shouldn’t learn anything from the dialogue. But they should only learn it if there is an absolutely solid, irrefutable reason for the characters to be discussing it.
Dialogue is not a way of characters (directly) passing information to each other.
It’s tempting to have a character ask another questions and get direct answers in response. But that will turn your dialogue into at best a police interrogation and at worst a lecture. Straightforward question-answer dialogue in anything other than the most trivial situation is utterly dull. (See “Dialogue is conflict”.)
There are whole books on writing dialogue, but if you keep these simple hints in mind, you’ll find your writing taking on a whole new life. And that’s even before you introduce characteristic speech patterns and stuff like that.
Every now and then, you will see someone object to the presence of potatoes in a fantasy story. The argument goes that, because potatoes originate from South America, having them appear in a pseudo-Medieval, pseudo-European fantasy is an anachronism.
And I don’t care.
If you’re writing a secondary world fantasy based loosely on Medieval Europe, let’s be honest, you’re working with a lot of assumptions already. You’re assuming that somehow, on a world with a different geography, geology, climate, history, and pre-history, humans have not only managed to evolve but that they have evolved weapons, ways of living, customs, and diets that are similar to those that evolved here on Earth, in Europe.
That’s stretching credibility to an extreme. But it doesn’t end there. You’re assuming that, for the most part, the same plants and animals (plus some random fantasy ones) evolved also, again despite the differences in the world, even including perhaps the addition of magic.
How about birds? Birds are fucking crazy. How likely are birds?
As most people know, birds are dinosaurs. They are descendants of the very few, small species of dinosaur that survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, when the giant asteroid smashed into Earth and wiped out most life, just like we’re descendants of the small mammals that survived. If the asteroid hadn’t hit, or if it had hit a different spot, no birds. No birds. Your fantasy novel requires an identical extinction event with identical effects if you want birds. That’s not happening.
That’s hardly the only example.
Your secondary world fantasy (and mine) makes no sense at all. It is based on a series of such unlikely coincidences and assumptions that it wouldn’t happen.
And, bearing all that in mind, you’re hung up about this fantasy world having potatoes in a European-modelled region rather than a South American-modelled region? Or the idea that, in that world, there might have been trade in potatoes between those equivalent regions a few hundred years earlier than happened on Earth?
So, no, I don’t care about potatoes in your fantasy. Put them in. Turn them into chips. Add ketchup. Why not?
I mean, not a wrap with a nice gift card and a ribbon, but more of a kind of a wrap with a bit of old newspaper and some hastily stuck-on tape (yes, I’m aware I’m mixing metaphors). But it’s still a wrap, okay?
In other words, I have finally – finally! – finished the first draft of my new novel. And, yeah, I’m pretty excited about that!
This is my first novel for adults that I’ve done since I knew what I was doing with this writing thing. Not only have I now finished the first draft, but I like it! It’s very me. We’ve got cool magic and dead gods and murders and people getting the shit kicked out of them and all the swearing I couldn’t put in my middle grade novels.
The first draft has come in at almost exactly 100k words. I already know there are some bits I’m going to cut and some bits I’m going to insert and a whole bunch of bits that I’m going to fiddle around with, but I reckon it’ll come out not too far from that total.
Okay, that’s the good stuff. Here’s the stress: I don’t have a title for my book! I always have a title for my books when I start, even if they eventually change. But this one? Nope. I kept thinking I would come up with one eventually, but I didn’t and I still can’t think of one and, and, and. Please give me a title. Any title. Your title will do. Do you have a good title for your book? Can I steal it? Pretty please? Okay, I’m stealing it.
I’m planning to take a month off this book then plunge into the rewrite during our summer trip to America.
And now I have to think of something else to write.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about the language we choose when we write fantasy novels, particularly when it comes to the last middle grade I wrote and the current adult fantasy I’m working on. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I’m doing here, so I’m going to lay out my thinking, and you can all tell me if I’m completely wrong.
But first (and this is related), the brilliant translator Anthea Bell died recently. She translated some very important novels into English, but she will always be better known as the translator, along with Derek Hockridge, of the Asterix graphic novels from French into English.
Now, imagine you’re writing a secondary world fantasy (i.e., a fantasy novel set on another, alternative world). In your story you are, of course, writing about characters whose language is not English (I’ll keep saying English because it’s the language in which I write, but assume also any other real-world language). Now, you could write the whole thing in a made-up language (yes, we are looking at you, Tolkien). But that’s not going to get you very far.
Now, obviously the whole thing is made up. There is no fantasy world out there (*sniff*). But we’re pretending there is, and if we’re good enough at it, readers will buy into it. We will accept without having to have it spelled out that what we are reading is a ‘translation’ of whatever fantasy language your Point of View characters speak into English.
This immediately means that you have to make the same kind of choices that translator like Bell and Hockridge have to make when translating a book written in a French. How do you translate a joke or a colloquial phrase? Do you translate it word-for-word to give a feeling of the pattern of the language but risk it losing all meaning in English? Or do you choose an equivalent joke or phrase in English and lose the cultural hints and world-building that the language could otherwise give? Or do you mix it up on a case-by-case basis, dropping in a few fantasy-sounding phrases in between the standard English phrases?
And imagine you’re translating a work from a foreign language that was written in, say, 1400? Do you translate it into period English? Or do you translate it into modern English? How far do you go?
Let’s take the example of a fantasy novel that takes place in a period that is roughly equivalent to the Medieval period. (In other words, somewhere between the fifth and fifteenth centuries.) Do you choose to write it in English that would be appropriate for that period? I think the vast majority of fantasy writers would reject that choice. (Remember, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales was published in 1387, towards the end of the Medieval period. The period was well over by the time of Shakespeare and the King James Bible.) Very few readers would be interested in fantasy novels written like that. Writing only using English words and phrases in use by the fifteenth century is out for most writers and readers.
But, at the other extreme, it would be peculiarly odd to pick up a pseudo-Medieval novel and read phrases like “hit the buffers” or “laser-like precision”. Including phrases that obviously refer to technology simply not in use in the period would be off-putting.
So let’s move on to more ambiguous examples. How about the word “okay”, which causes a degree of ear-steam from some readers. Although the origin of “okay” is contested, it was popularised in 1840. Clearly 1840 is far after the medieval period. But are you genuinely going to cut out every word or phrase popularised after 1840? That would leave you with a very dated-sounding language. Charles Dickens published The Pickwick Papers in 1836, so maybe you should use that as reference for style and language?
Again, I hope not. That just wouldn’t work for a novel written now.
Where do you draw your line?
For me, it comes down to the type of book you are writing. A funny book, like the Asterix graphic novels, lends itself to a much looser translation. Getting in jokes is far more important than reproducing the exact dialogue.
Also, if you’re writing a grittily realistic fantasy, ironically, you will probably end up using much more contemporary language, because it lends a harder edge to modern ears than more archaic language. If you’re writing a classic fantasy, like most of those published in the 1980s, you probably want to tone back your more modern phraseology, reduce contractions, avoid words that ‘feel’ modern (even if they aren’t). There are plenty of novels like that being written and published right this yea
I’m curious as to what choices others make on this, how you draw the line, what kind of language throws you out of the story, and so on.
(I’ll put a link in the comments to where I link this on Facebook if you find it easier to comment there.)
I know this because, once again, I have started trying to write a high / epic fantasy (I really don’t know the difference between those two subgenres) having forgotten exactly why I don’t normally write this kind of stuff, despite loving to read it.
The reason is simple: names.
I literally (literally literally) cannot figure out how to come up with good names for characters in a secondary world fantasy. Other writers seem to do it with no trouble. George Martin has literally (not literally) a million characters, but he mostly uses ordinary names, occasionally changing the spelling a little.
Those with a linguistic bent figure out how languages are put together and create names sensibly (although most don’t go full Tolkien and create entire languages first, the nerd).
Others just throw a bunch of syllables together and come up with what look like unlikely anagrams, but let’s face it, those tend to be pretty crappy.
Then there’s me. Who just stares at the page and can’t come up with *anything* that sounds even vaguely non-stupid.
Now I remember why I don’t write high fantasy…
* Gonna write it anyway. Just bitter about having to come up with names
** Despite the picture accompanying this blog post, there will be no elves in my book. Elves are arseholes.
In between blowing bubbles with the boys (who are off school for the Easter break) and cutting the hedge at last (gardening is not my strong suit), I’ve been thinking about the sense of place in fantasy writing.
The reason I’ve been thinking about it is that I recently read the third book in an epic fantasy trilogy. I’d read the first two about six months before, but when I opened the third one, I didn’t recognise any of the locations. I had to go back and start searching through the first two books to figure out where all these places were and what their significance was.
Now, part of this is my fault. I tend to read late at night when I’m tired and I’m sure my brain doesn’t remember everything that goes into it. Hell, even when I’m at my most awake and alert, my brain is a colander with giant holes. But it’s also true that the real sense of place for a reader is kind of lacking in many fantasy novels. Part of it is because the names are often generically fantasy and so aren’t that easy to remember or distinguish. Part of it is because there’s nothing particularly memorable about the places.
I’m not going to say what the trilogy I was reading was, because there are many other wonderful things about the series and I don’t want to pick on one author in particular, but I’m sure you can think of books that are much the same.
It made me realise that one of the things George RR Martin does superbly well is give a sense of place. The last time I read any of the A Song of Ice and Fire books was when A Dance With Dragons came out in 2011. Yet I have no problem remembering the locations in the books. Ask any fan, and they’ll easily distinguish Winterfell from Kings Landing, Slavers Bay from Riverrun, Harrenhall from The Eyrie, The Wall from Sunspear. And so on.
There are literally hundreds of named locations in Martin’s series, and dozens which are major locations. But every one is readily distinguishable from the others. This is because all the locations are iconic in some way and their names tend to give hints as to what the location is. You’re not going to mix up Dragonstone and the Summer Isles, even if the books never visit the Summer Isles.
Another author who gives a wonderful sense of place in a much smaller setting is Ben Aaronovitch in his Rivers of London series. All of these books are set in and around London, but even for those of us who only occasionally visit the touristy bits of the city, he gives an amazing feeling for even the most out-of-the-way location. He does this through series of anecdotes about each location and its history, accompanied by ironic commentary on them which gives a sharp fix on each. The locations may be more mundane, suburban, even, at times, but they are every bit as vivid as the wilder, more spectacular locations of Martin’s world.
The Emperor of Mars is on his way. He’s been planning this for a long time, plotting, scheming. And now he is one step closer.
Yes, he has made it to Advance Reader Copy (ARC) status and First Pass Pages.
Here are *my* ARCs looking excessively handsome.
And here is our new cat, Pebbles, tolerating (just) being put in charge of a copy.
So what does it look like inside? Well, I’m glad you asked! Here it is. This is the first page, along with a new character, George Rackham.
If you can’t read that first page, this is what it says:
Chapter 1: The Trouble with Vine-Mining
I was twenty feet underground, surrounded by glowing blue sandfish crystals, with my head jammed in a beetle-vine warren, when I realized that vine-mining wasn’t for me.
I had seen the notice pinned up outside the local office of the Imperial Martian Airship Company:
VOLUNTEERS NEEDED!
ROOT OUT BEETLE-VINES!
SAVE LUNAE CITY!
SIGN UP TODAY!
BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
Perfect, I’d thought. What a great idea.
I had never been so wrong.
You might have thought that living in the middle of Mars’s biggest desert would mean that you never got wet…
* * *
I’ll post the rest of the first chapter closer to publication day (which is on July 18, 2017, since you asked).
I’ve been working on the First Pass Pages (basically, a printout of the ARC), fixing up any last errors, tweaking the odd bit, smoothing things a little, but the ARC is pretty close to what the published book will be. There are typos and a few other minor errors, but the story is the same.
While we’re all waiting for the final, finished book, if you want a chance to win a signed ARC, keep an eye open. I’ll be posting a giveaway in a few weeks time.
Until then!
(Note: cover and the internal illustration above are by Jeremy Holmes.)
I’m in the middle of revising my second book, THE EMPEROR OF MARS, which is the sequel to SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB. Because this is my second time through the process of getting an editorial letter and having to work to it, I’m starting to get a pretty good idea of what my writing and editing process is like.
I’ve come to the conclusion that my first drafts have:
Too many words
Too many characters
Too many plot strands
Too much detail and worldbuilding
Too much description
Basically, I put in far too much of everything in my first drafts. And I’ve decided I’m okay with this.
Yeah, it makes the editing process difficult. Right now I’m having to unpick a whole bunch of interweaving plot and character strands, remove some of them, and reweave it all into a tighter book.
This is often not easy. I work pretty hard to make everything depend on everything else, and then I have to take huge chunks out, and it all has to still work.
But that’s how I work, apparently. I think in complicated stories. I write too much in a book. That’s just the way my mind works.
And I need an editor. Readers don’t think much about editors. (I don’t when I’m reading a book.) But I would be terrible at this without an editor.
I don’t actually need an editor to tell me *what* to do. I generally know what I need to do. But I need an editor to tell me that I *have* to do it.
I’ve just read a self-published book (I won’t tell you which one) which sounded interesting. And it was interesting. But it needed an editor. It needed to have someone who could tell the author that what they had written wasn’t good enough, that they could do better (and I genuinely believe they could do better), and they’d better get on with *doing better* before they hit “publish”.
My writing process is likely to stay the same for a while, I think, with me writing much too much and then having to cut great chunks of it, but that works for me, so that’s the way I’m going to keep doing it.
Wish me luck.
(By the way, THE EMPEROR OF MARS will be published on January 10th, 2017. Put the date in your diary. You’re going to want to book the week off. ;) )
Well, it’s been just over a week since SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB was published, so I reckon it’s time for another blog entry. I think I completely exhausted us all by blogging for ten days in a row leading up to publication. I don’t know how those of you who blog every single day manage it…
ANYWAY, I’ve been doing a few interviews around the webs about writing, my book, and stuff, and because I know you all want to hear my every at-length utterance (ahem), here’s links to them.
Your book sounds like an epic adventure. Where did the idea for SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB come from?
Man, I wish I had a cool answer for this, where it all came flashing into my brain like accidentally sticking my finger into a live socket (been there, done that, don’t recommend it), but that’s not how books tend to come to me. I always have hundreds of ideas bouncing around in my brain, like a swarm of slightly sticky bees, and sometimes they bump into each other and stick together to become, er, a super-giant bee or something (I think this analogy is falling to bits here. Unlike the super-bees which are definitely stuck together).
Basically, ideas coalesce until a story starts to shape itself. Some bits get added, others get shaved off or reshaped, until I can see a story. SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB came from dozens of places, like old pulp science fiction and Jane Austen and this illustration I saw from the nineteenth century which showed Napoleon’s armies invading Britain using hot air balloons and looking at Google Mars and Indiana Jones movies and so many other things.
What tips can you share in writing a believable world/background?
Detail. The key is, you need to know how everything works, even if you don’t put it in the book. In fact, as the writer you should know many, many times more than you put in your book. It has to be there in your head. You need to know the whole of your world. Then you can write the story within it.
In three days, on January 12th, 2016, SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB will be published. Publishing your first book can be a pretty stressful experience. Trust me on this. You’ve worked for ages — not just the years you’ve spent on writing, rewriting, and revising this particular book, but all the writing you did before this book that wasn’t quite good enough. And now your book is finally, finally coming out. It’s going out into the world. Maybe it’ll be ignored. Maybe it’ll be hated. Maybe no one will even know it ever existed.
Yeah, boy, this is stressful.
So, if you’ve got a book being published and it’s stressing you out, here are some thoughts of comfort.
1. Someone is always doing better than you
It’s very easy to look at everyone else with a book out and to see how much better their book is doing than yours. They’re getting starred reviews from Kirkus. They have a front table display at Barnes and Noble. They are on every blogger’s list of books to be excited about. Their debut is on the bestseller lists. They have adverts in the national press. They have a thousand five star reviews on Goodreads. Their advance is twenty times what yours is.
What a failure you are. What a loser. Maybe your book wasn’t that good after all.
Yeah, but no.
Someone will always be doing better than you. Even if you’re outselling JK Rowling, someone else might be getting all the award nominations. Even if you’re getting all the award nominations, someone else is on the top of the New York Times bestseller list and you’re not.
You can’t win.
The truth is it is basic human nature to compare ourselves to those doing better than we are and not with those who are doing less well. The ones we see are the ones with the great success. But they are the exceptions. There are far more people whose success is on a par with yours and plenty who are not doing as well. Except you’re not noticing them. You’re comparing yourself with those very few who, by luck or timing or national mood, just happen to be hitting a freakish level of success.
Don’t compare yourself to them. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else. There is no win in comparing. It’s a lose every time.
2. There’s nothing you can do, so don’t stress it
It’s a horrible truth, but nothing you can do will really make much difference. Yes, a signing or a school visit might sell some extra copies. Yes, a blog tour might get a few people interested. Yes, putting vast amounts of effort into social media might shift a hundred more books. Attending conferences and conventions and producing lots of swag and doing dozens of giveaways, all these can add some sales.
But they are insignificant. Compared to the number of sales that will be generated just by sitting on bookstore shelves or being ordered by libraries, what you can achieve through your own efforts is statistically small and isn’t going to make much difference to your success.
How is that comforting?
Well, I don’t know about you, but I get a certain amount zen-like calm from the idea that I have no real power over whether my book sells or not. You can fall quite easily into thinking that you’re not doing enough, that if you could just do a bit more, that would make all the difference.
It wouldn’t.
If you enjoy blogging or giveaways or social media or school visits or conventions, do them by all means! But don’t do them because you think you have to. You’re not losing out by not doing them.
Actually, I’m lying. There is one thing you can do that will make a difference. You can write the absolute best book you can. And you’ve already done that.
3. This is not the end
If the worst happens and your book isn’t a success it’s not the end.
Every writer who has a career lasting more than a few years will hit that point where a book flops and they are dropped by their publisher. I know a lot of writers who have gone out of contract. Sometimes it was their first book or first series. And every one of them has come back again after a few years and sold again. Some of them have gone on to enormous success after that commercial failure earlier in their career. Hell, even George R.R. Martin was dropped by his publisher because his book didn’t perform as expected, and he’s doing all right now.
4. Someone, somewhere bought and loved your book
Maybe none of these things help. Maybe you’re still feeling down. Maybe you didn’t get any reviews and only sold 500 copies and no one seemed to notice your book came out at all, except your family, and even they didn’t seem terribly excited.
Well, it’s not true.
Someone bought your book or checked it out from a library. Someone loved it. It spoke to someone. It mattered to someone. That is true for every book ever published. We all hope that thousands of readers will adore our books, but it’s not a failure if only one person loved it, because by giving them something they loved, you’ve changed their life for the better. If you can do that for one person, there’s no way your book failed.
5. You did it!
Yep, you did. You wrote a book and you got it published. Have you any idea how rare that is, how unlikely? Millions upon millions of people want to write a book. Millions actually do. The vast majority will never get those books published. Writing a book good enough to be published is an incredible achievement all by itself.
In all the pressure of the process of publication, we forget all too often what an amazing thing we have done.
Take time to be immensely proud. What you’ve done is special. You did it!
