On balancing dialogue, descriptions, action and the rest

I have blogged before on balancing pairs of these wonderful things, like descriptions versus commentary and transitions from dialogue to descriptions and back. I even blogged about the danger of long descriptions, but I haven't yet written on the subject of all three, or however many elements there are. And now that I think about it, there really are only three things. People talk shit - dialogue. People look like shit (or not like shit, if you're writing romance) - descriptions. People do shit - action. There are other fancy names for fancy things like exposition (still don't really understand what that means), backstory, flashbacks, theme, bla-bla-bla (I've been actually Googling these terms to refresh my memory). I don't think about any of that when I write, I just write the story. And so far 3 elements have been plenty. Like Kurt Vonnegut said, "Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action."  You can look at it in many different ways, it's still the same. This happened. This dude said this. This gal said this. This happened. That happened. Oh, and it happened in this town looking like this, and they looked like this. You get the drill. So, for the sake of this blog post, we shall cover three things.

Dialogue is never perfect. There are books with excessive dialogue, and there are books with almost no dialogue at all. What exactly does this mean and how should you take it on, especially if you're a beginning writer like me? You don't. Don't copy anyone, just because they're a famous writer, or your favorite writer, be yourself. If you talk a lot, write a lot of dialogue. If you don't talk a lot, don't write a lot of dialogue. Write what naturally comes to you. But once you do start writing, in case of dialogue specifically, break it up. As in, when people talk, they start talking from the middle of the thought, and they get interrupted a lot. Remember the movie Up, "Squirrel!" Yeah, like that. Also, people interrupt people. People leave half of a sentence hanging, without finishing it. It's all very fluid and not perfect. When writing, it's easy to slide into this perfection of writing dialogue in complete sentences. Hey, that's what teachers taught us in school, write complete sentences, with fucking structure and whatnot! Well, they were wrong. Throw it out the window and forget about structure. When people talk, they have no structure, they have feelings, emotions. They try to structure them, yes, but they always fail horribly. And we read for those nuggets of failure, trying to guess what this or that characters feels inside. That's the fun of reading.  Now, I will get at the bottom of this post on how to balance all three things, dialogue, descriptions, and action, so don't despair.

Descriptions only begin on the page, but end in a reader's mind. Yeah, right, I wish I was the one who said it. I didn't, I only paraphrased it. Stephen King was the one who said it, here is the quote: " Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” With this in mind, all you have to do is paint one or two sentences and get on the way with telling the story. I had to learn it the hard way, over-describing practically everything in SIREN SUICIDES. I did learn my lesson, and I moved on. I'm very sparse with descriptions in ROSEHEAD now, only giving enough to paint the picture, and embellishing only the important elements. And here is where the balance comes from. You have to describe things for the reader to see the story, to orient herself or himself, but that's all you gotta do. Now, because your story is about something very important, those important parts you can embellish more than usual, to draw reader's attention to them. Also, one more thing I do. Somebody said it, can't remember who, but it goes like this. Everything that the reader already saw, describe briefly. For example, "It was a hot summer afternoon." We all know what a hot summer afternoon looks like, we all have our own idea about it, but it's basically the same. So say that one sentence and move on to the action or the dialogue. But if you're describing a new alien weapon that the reader has never seen before, indulge in description, make it real. I primarily use allegories to not get carried away, like "his gun looked like two cucumbers glued together by intergalactic saliva" or some shit like that. In general, don't do more than 3 sentences, otherwise it can get boring pretty fast.

Action is where the story happens. This is the most important element of any story. Basically, you have to answer the reader's question: WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENS? She ran to the Moon. He caught her with a fish hook. They fell into the bog of misery. Twenty tentacles of a mutant giant cockroach sucked them into another dimension. A kangaroo shrieked, because a herd of flying giraffes opened fire on... well, I'm getting carried away here. But this is it, really. Noun, verb. Verb, noun. Use adjectives sporadically, refrain from using adverbs, and do not use exclamations marks!!!!! Yeah, I'm so guilty of that. Anyway. Action should really dominate your pages, with a few lines of description here and there, and occasional blocks or lines of dialogue. But, again, remember, this is all up to you, up to what kind of storyteller you are. There is no golden rule for everybody. Everybody is different. You might be able to tell your story through dialogue, by writing something like this: "Get that green thing away from me!" "Trying! That fucking kangaroo got my gun!" "Watch out! I think that's a--" "--it's a bomb!" BAM! "Is that you? Are you breathing?" "No, you are mistaken, maiden. I am a panda overlord, ruling the entire universe." Demonic laughter. Okay, this is totally off the wall and very bad, but I just wanted to throw something out there to show how you can do action through dialogue. You can also do dialogue through action, as in: "They talked about the weather. She mentioned that fact that it wasn't sunny today, studying her nails. He said that it looks like it's going to rain, his hand accidentally brushing hers. They both looked up at the sky at the same time, wondering exactly when it's going to rain.  He breathed into her ear that it might start raining any minute, and they better..." All right, I'll stop right here, before I get too carried away.

Balance your writing they way it feels natural. This is the closing thingy, about all three things, dialogue, descriptions, and action. And whatever else it is you want to balance. The basic thing is, trust your gut. If your gut gleefully enjoys you writing page after page of dialogue, excellent. Keep writing it. If your gut cringes at the thought of writing dialogue, don't. In fact, read Nabokov's LOLITA. Do you see any dialogue there? Yeah, very very little. You can think of the three things this way. There is dialogue, and there is description, but they are both like these transparent layers over action, which is really the meat of the story. As much as you can, try for every sentence to move your story forward. Even if you're describing something, try to make it so that it moves the story forward. Remember, you have to make the reader turn the page. Every page the reader has to be glued to your story. Because at any moment the reader can be interrupted by life, and if your reader happens to be interrupted on the page of a long long description, guess what will happen? The reader might not get back to your story, abandoning your book. The only way to not let that happen is to keep the action moving the story forward. This is how books end up on the best-seller lists. People can't stop reading them (says she who hasn't made it to any best-selling lists, so feel free to scoff at me, I'm still learning!). 

There. I think this should do. Let's try something new here. How about you tell me in the comments what you want me to blog about next? I was thinking about the topic of beginning and ending chapters. Yes? No? Any other ideas? Let me know. Happy writing! 

Descriptions vs commentary, or what to edit and what to leave

I have recently come across this very curious realization, while editing 2nd draft of Rosehead and reading every day, such books as Discworld series and The Cuckoo's Calling and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, as well as honestly trying to read a few indie books (just poked around on Amazon, reading first pages to see if the stories would grab me). One of my pet peeves is excessive descriptions, and most of my editing consists of cutting these, but what I discovered, with glee and glum, is that those indie writers whose books I tried reading suffer from the same! There is this incessant need to describe everything that happens, and, on top of it, this tendency to use same words within a paragraph, instead of varying the vocabulary. But when I read the above mentioned books, even The Cuckoo's Calling's descriptions (and there were many of them) didn't feel excessive. So I was like, WTF? What's the deal here? I think I got what the deal is, this week. I say, I think I got it, because I hope I did, maybe I'm totally wrong, but I have applied it to my editing and it seems to be working, so I will share here with you.

Cut descriptions, replace with commentary. So I'm probably not being very clear by what I mean with this word, commentary, but I will try my best to explain. What I mean is, it's one thing describing the facts about what is happening, how did the scene look, smelled, sounded, etc, and it's a completely another thing commenting on it, as in, injecting into it your own opinion, so suddenly the sky doesn't just look blue, it looks blue like the sea, or a forgotten memory blue, or blue that's the color of your neighbor's undies. You see where I'm going with this, right? When you just say blue, and you can also say cobalt and whatever other word you find in a thesaurus, it's just a fact, it's boring, and when there is a lot of it, OMG, it's double-boring (yeah, I know, I needed to cut out more of water descriptions from Siren Suicides, oh well, I learned my lesson). Anyway, this is part of this meat that people love about writers, it's that style, or that tempo, or that characteristic way of writing that we fall in love with and come back to, to read more and more. When you read your own draft and go through descriptions, ask yourself a question, do I really need it here? If you doubt it even for a fraction of a second, cut it. I'm serious, cut it. Make it gone. But if you want to keep it, consider switching to commentary and injecting your own opinion, within the tone of your book (like, you wouldn't call a car blue like your neighbor's panties if it's a YA book, right?).

Whenever you can, comment, comment, comment. I guess this is what makes writers writers. We have this ability to take stuff in, process it, and then spit it out in the form of the stories. Those stories become ours, and because we have to visualize the stories, along with action and dialogue, we have description, to show the reader how everything looks and feels. We can be very literal about it, but nobody wants to read literal stuff, that's what dictionaries are for, or boring text books. Stories, short stories, or long stories like novels, are meant to be interesting, enthralling, enlightening. And how to do that? Well, by creating this alternate world, of course. And how to do that? Oh, simple, make it yours, inject yourself into it, and that means, show the reader how you see that world. This is separate from plots and character development and all that other smart literary stuff, by the way. This is purely about painting the world, about descriptions. For example, I just got done reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, and I'm in love with his descriptions. Why? They have his flavor. He describes sudden sinking into water as if one stumbled into the pool backwards, experiencing that feeling of surprise. What exactly is this? Commentary. You could describe the facts, as in, his clothes got wet, his skin felt cold, water gurgled in his ears. That's boring and long (another problem with descriptions, namely, their overwhelming length, stems from this). But with one commentary you can make us feel how it feels, and it's not boring and not long and awesome.

Cut out repetitive words from descriptions. I don't know if this is just me, but I noticed it in other indie books too. For whatever reason we tend to use same words in one paragraph, as in, "The trees swayed in the wind." Imagine you have a character waiting under those trees, you might say, "She swayed in the wind, waiting." I'm not kidding, I've seen it over and over and over again. Why do we do this? No idea. But when editing, I am now watching closely for these guys and make sure to replace them with similar words in meaning, or even restructure sentences altogether to avoid repetitions. For example, this is my favorite, "She stood up." You can only say "stood up" so many times, so you can say "she straightened" or "she got to her feet" or other variations. I'm curious, do you have the same problem? I find that I mostly do this in my descriptions, struggling with common verbs that are used a lot, just picking one word and milking it until it becomes annoying because I have used it so much. 

Keep them short, stupid. Okay, this is more of a reminder for myself. I have stolen this from "keep it simple, stupid" phrase, but it's true. You don't need long descriptions, unless they are paramount to the story. Short and simple beats long and complicated. You don't even need some amazing vocabulary. All you need is, your own commentary in it, something that rings true for you. Because if it rings true for you, it will ring true for your reader. Think of it this way, instead of showing the reader the scene, make the reader feel the scene. It's kind of like going a layer deeper underneath the famous rule of "show don't tell", it's like "make them feel, don't just show". You of course need to apply the usual 5 senses in all descriptions, like seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting and touching, but now you know how to pick between them (I mean, you can't keep describing everything with all 5 senses, otherwise your book will be one endless description). Make a strong commentary in the description, make it connect in the reader's mind with a strong emotion. Maybe it's the way the sound sounds? Or the way taste tastes? Or the way smell smells? For example, you can say, "his room smelled like cigarettes and stale beer and unwashed laundry" (see how long this is?), or you can say, "his room smelled like a cheap motel". Boom. It makes you feel it, doesn't it? It makes me feel it too, ewww, I think I even smell it now.   

Well, this is the highlight of my epiphany. Whaddya think? Have similar experiences? 

Transitions, from dialogue to descriptions and back

I've been asked to write about this, and at first I didn't even know where to begin, never having given much thought about this particular topic when I'm writing. And then I thought, no, not true, I have, it's just that now it seems to flow and I forgot to think about it, but I did think about it when I first started, and I hated how my dialogue was clumsy, how it seemed like I jumped from people talking to describing the setting, to wondering when it was appropriate again to jump to people talking. You get the drift. So how come I don't think about it anymore? Because I seem to have found a certain rhythm. I think. Let me share what works for me, and hopefully it will help you too, because for me writing started having a certain beat, a pulse, almost, like in music. 

Listen for a tempo. This is probably the best I can describe it. It all comes down to listening for a tempo in your own writing and then comparing it with the tempo of the books you are reading. So, at first, don't worry about transitions at all, simply write, but after you are done, every day, read. Read some really good stuff, read books that you love. The next day write again, and read again. Keep doing this and allow yourself to be horrible, be okay with sounding very choppy or unnatural in your writing. The most important thing is to keep writing and reading every day, even if it's only 30 minutes each. Soon you will start seeing patterns, you will notice how some authors rely heavily on dialogue, while others hardly use it at all (just read Nabokov's Lolita, you'll see what I mean). Please, don't throw rotten tomatoes at me here, but my prediction is, it will take you at least 1 year to get it, you will start seeing distinctive patterns. It will take you another 4 years to get really good at it, if you are writing full time. I'm not there yet, and it's not me who calculated it. Malcolm Gladwell said in his book Outliers that it takes 10K hours to become good at anything. So, the main thing you can do for your writing to flow smoothly is simply to... keep writing and reading!

Measure it in paragraphs.  Until I developed a certain tempo, which my beta readers told me I have (I lean more heavily on descriptions rather than dialogue), I used the rule of paragraphs. I didn't read about it in a book, it was simply easy to visually remember and I have glimpsed it in other books too. So, it went like this. I would always open each chapter with one paragraph of description, no more (still do), and then would open the next paragraph with dialogue, go for a while, then do a paragraph of description again. I did it like in a song, alternating between the main verse and the chorus, if you will. It wasn't beautiful, but at least it was organized and it kept me on track. And that's all a beginning rookie writer like me needs, some kind of organizational system to hold on to when everything else seems to be falling apart.

Highlight important stuff for the story. Another way of thinking about transitions is to only highlight what the reader absolutely needs to know and not mention the rest. For example, if your main character is wearing a pink panda costume, make sure you describe said costume in minute detail, because it's an out of ordinary thing to do. If, on the other hand, your character buys a pink panda costume every day in a town where everyone wears pink panda costumes, then it's not something out of the ordinary, and you only need to mention the pink panda costume once in a sentence, no more. This is where the idea of the rhythm comes in. You write about unusual interesting stuff that is new, and you leave out the boring stuff. Now, in my experience, this really comes together in the rewrites, when you start seeing what is fluff and what is solid. Until then, especially in your first draft, don't worry about being choppy. The goal is not to be perfect, the goal is to get the story down on paper.

Read it aloud. This is the simplest exercise you can do for your transitions. Read your own writing yourself aloud, and, if at all possible, ask a friend to read to you several pages of your writing. Where you will stutter, where your friend will stutter, that's where it's rough and you have to smooth it out.  How? Simple. Cut to the next piece of action. The most important thing for your story is to make the reader turn the pages, and you have to ask yourself a question. That line of description, will it make my reader want to know more? That line of dialogue, will it make my reader sit on the edge of the seat, dying to know what happens next? Yes? Great! No? Cut it. The more you do this, the more you will start feeling a certain tempo that is unique to your own writing. It might be fast and choppy, or it might be slow and lyrical. Whatever it is, without doing a lot of it you won't find it, and once you do find it, you will feel it, and you writing will star flowing smoothly. It's the best feeling in the world.

I honestly hope I wrote here something that made sense to you and that you could put to practical use, because never specifically studied transitions, I don't even know if I'm supposed to use some big important words that people use when they talk about transitions. All I do is feel, and transitions in writing are like transitions in music, they are fluid, they are hard to catch and put in a box, but if you really listen for them, listen for them in your own writing and in the writing of others, one day a veil will fall off your eyes and you will see them. And, once you do, your own writing will start singing in accordance to that certain rhythm that's yours and yours alone.