The thrill in your quill! The prose to impose! Impress your printing press! Literal literary alliteration!
...Um. Scratch that last. Afraid I got a bit carried away. Anyhoo, my point. Every writer has a weakness (and I'm not talking like a job interview type weakness, where you're "just too much of a perfectionist" or some crap like that). Maybe you can't make believable situations. Maybe you can't structure sentences. Maybe you can't bring yourself to edit your glorious genius. Maybe you over-edit because you're just too much of a perfectionist (ok, I guess that actually can be a shortcoming). In my case, I have problems with narrative and dialogue. Not dialogue on its own. And not necessarily narrative on its own, although that does give me issues. It's when the twain meet, as it were. The interspersal. The merging of the lanes, where there's always that one jerk who zooms up the side to try to get in front of everyone. THAT. I like writing dialogue. I like to think I'm rather good at it, and have been told that I "write how people talk", which is a very big compliment indeed. This is why I'm drawn to playwriting above any other form. For me, it comes naturally. Combining narrative and dialogue in a play is relatively easy. A character says something; if they then do something worthy of mention, you then make the necessary stage note. If it's important that they do a certain thing during the line, or say the line in a certain way that isn't obvious through the dialogue, you slip in an adverb or super brief description, as per the following example from the play I'm currently working on (it's a first draft, be kind): Paisley: You figured it out yet? Cole is obviously thrown off by her entrance, but is quick to plaster on his usual grin. Cole: Paiz! Wow, you took me by surprise. Paisley: (shrugs) That’s what I do. You figured out who the mole is yet? Cole: Not yet, not yet. Working on it. Paisley: What’s on the flash drive? Cole: (jumps slightly) Flash drive? (she looks at him; he holds it up) Oh, this flash drive. Paisley: …Yeeeah. That’s the one I meant. And yes, that does say Paisley. Straight narrative, although harder for me personally, is also not completely tricky. I'm doing it right now. The blog format is a bit easier than a fiction narrative, I think, because a blog, in the style I'm presenting, is basically a diary you don't mind other people reading. Not that I've ever been very good at keeping a diary; but I do tend to think about things a lot (probably too much), and I don't believe I do too badly at presenting my thoughts. In other words, I'm really good at talking about myself! Nope, the difficulty is definitely where the rubber of the dialogue meets the road of narrative. It's not so easy to add in those little asides in a straight novel-style fiction story. How many do you add? And when? Do you have to add them at all, or can you forgo them? (Probably not, but it's still a valid question). How long should they be? What details are important and what aren't? And if they are important, are they already shown through the dialogue, so that you don't have to worry about any extras? And so on, and so forth. Here's another excerpt. I do try fiction fiction from time to time, by which I mean the aforementioned novel-style fiction story, and not a play. A continuing personal project is a novelization of a massively epic steampunk radio show I've written (and haven't kept up on the recording of episodes because I'm a lazy bastard); I release a new part every week on my site Tales of the Seamstress (shown on the sidebar). The adaption isn't going too badly, in part because the thing is, after all, already written, so all I have to do is change it into a different style. That's all. But, as I also may have mentioned, this is not as easy as it sounds: Miss Vene paused. For the first time, a cautious interest sparkled on her face. “A message?” “That's right. A message.” Hugh spoke up importantly. He cleared his throat and delivered the phrase with all the accentuation and eyebrow-waggling suitable for such covert dealings. “The… rooster…” The Captain interjected hastily. “Pelican.” “Pelican.” Clearly, that was what Hugh had said. “The Pelican dies at dawn…” “Is ready for winter.” “Right.” Why were his words constantly being repeated? If anyone was going to do the repeating, it would be Hugh, and with the necessary drama to boot. “The Pelican is…ready for winter!” Whatever they were expecting as a reaction, it wasn’t what came next. Miss Vene looked white, shaken. She let out a long breath, her eyes darting around the perimeter. Then she drew herself up firmly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You can keep your money.” She raised her voice. “Take your ship and get off my property!” And the door slammed shut behind her. I'll admit it, this is actually an excerpt I'm decently proud of; just can't seem to bring myself to post something less so. But I have noticed something in going through the whole story: there's an aside, a description or suchlike, in nearly every sentence. I don't usually just have "Something or other," said Someone. Or even, "something someone is currently saying", with no other additive. There is a good reason for the latter: the above story rarely if ever has less than three people in the same scene at once, so I have to at least keep mention of who is talking when. But even in this case, I nearly always just have to add that extra little embellishment. Where I get uncertain is in trying to figure out if that's okay and just my personal style; or if it's just too much and I should cut it down, as a crutch I should be aware of and be ready to throw away... Maybe it's just that I don't have enough experience as a writer yet; maybe the answer will become clear as I keep going. Maybe.
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Rebecca FrohlingWriter, dancer, actress, mother, me. Archives
February 2019
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