How To Write Magical Words: A Writer's Companion

by Unknown

  If we look at the traditional fantasy BBUs and urban fantasy BBUs in terms of the original four questions we get:

  1. What makes them work? Traditional fantasy and UF BBUs can literally be big bad uglies—the troll under the bridge, the evil knight, the wicked witch of the west with a cauldron, huge hairy moles, bad attitude, and flying monkeys. (I’m not tossing aspersions on Wicca or goddess worshippers, or others. Some of them are friends, and none of them have hairy moles so far as I know. I am referring to the practitioners of black arts and human sacrifice. None of them are friends!)

  The closest thing I ever wrote to a traditional fantasy was the Thorn St. Croix, Rogue Mage series. These books were a crossover between traditional fantasy and urban fantasy. In the Rogue Mage series, the biggest BBUs were—literally—the dragons of the Revelation. Not the devil (it wasn’t a religious series) but the monsters and the backstories of the monsters were stolen (plagiarized? fanfic?) from the Bible, Apocryphal writings, and other sources, to include the BBUs of many old religions, cultures, and histories, but with twists from both older and modern fantasy work, including vampires (daywalkers in the series). This was a huge change from my mystery/thriller BBUs. It was the mixture of the old and the new that made the BBUs work. So, for traditional fantasy to work, the BBUs need motivation or dependable (evolving is okay as long as the reader knows it might happen) characteristics. When the BBU is a sentient being, the writer should make clear that the BBU has (several?) motivations, even if the reader doesn’t know what they are at first.

  2. How do we keep them from becoming formulaic? It is the motivation that is necessary—and often missing from traditional fantasy—to keep the BBU fresh and believable. Why does the evil overlord want to lay waste to the land? Why does he want to kill all the inhabitants? What parts about a dark, lifeless, gloomy world where only the rats and buzzards are happy could possibly make him happy? If he wanted a lifeless habitat, why not just take over the moon? His motivations for his evil deeds matter. They make the BBU work in a genre of fiction that often forgets he needs this motivation. Older fantasy-BBUs were seldom described in terms of motivation but that won’t work as well in today’s market. Today’s reader is market savvy. This is why the human-like BBU/antagonist is so successful. He is an equal to the MC. They want the same things, they fight an equal battle with equal weapons. In urban fantasy we edge back over to the thriller description of BBUs. In fact, you can go back and reread the thriller BBUs, add in magic or uber-paranormal, and you have the UF BBU.

  3. What mistakes do we writers make that allow them to become formulaic? I think there are several common mistakes. We copy bits and parts from other BBUs, parts that make them identifiable and closely associated with existing work. Or we make the BBU so foreign to our culture that he is either silly (Attack of the Killer Tomatoes comes to mind, though that was scifi) or incomprehensible. Or we don’t describe him well enough for the reader to picture him. (The big dark cloud is on the horizon! Run for your lives!) Or, most important, we forget that unless the conflict is man against nature, the BBU needs motivation. The well defined sentient-being-BBU must have weaknesses and strengths, just like the MC. He needs to grow through problems, find new strengths, and evolve. Even in the Pern books, Anne McCaffrey gave the fire-fall BBU an elliptic orbit, so it was dependably undependable.

  Today’s traditional fantasy and UF BBU must fit into the story like any other character. It helps for the BBU to be on a timetable, one that makes sense to the reader, just like the thriller BBU. A short time-frame means the MC must act now or fail utterly. In the Pern books, the world, the crops, the people, everything, will be destroyed unless the humans and the dragons unite and fight together. It is man against nature and man against man. Even if the BBU is a dragon, he must want something. Writers need to balance on the blade of a sword in terms of creating non-formulaic BBUs, yet let them be culturally recognizable, bringing a level of uniqueness with an identifiable element that makes the BBU feel culturally familiar.

  4. And how do we as readers contribute to the success or failure of the BBU? That suspension of belief required by the simple mystery has its place here. Maybe more so! We have to believe in (or want to believe in) magic, otherworldly power, cosmic war, the bigger-than-life battle between good and evil. We have to believe that right wins in the end, when we know it doesn’t always. We have to be willing to root for the underdog, a character often lacking in training, ability, and power. We have to believe in the main character as a human being, associate with him on some human level. And we have to believe he can win.

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  Sarah Adams

  Thank you for the discussion, it’s very helpful.

  I’m running up against the lazy author issue (me) in my WIP. At bottom my BBU is just a petty jerk. He’s bad because he chooses to care more about himself and his power/ego than anything else and so he’s blown up a series of minor sibling grievances into a sense of massive grievance. It’s an "Everybody wants to rule the world" sort of situation, except that the "world" he wants to rule is just his own little corner of Buffalo, NY. And he’ll kill his own sister and unleash a new Ice Age to do it.

  When I put it that way he sounds rather interesting, at least to me. But on the page I find him very flat. His motives seem obscure and insufficient for what he’s doing. He’s not insane—I’m not using that cop out. In real life, people will do idiotically destructive things over an exaggerated sense of offended rights. But I’m having a very difficult time making that work on the page in an emotionally satisfying, cohesive way.

  Faith Hunter

  Sarah, that is exactly what I am talking about! The BBU has to make sense to the reader on an emotional plane and, if possible, on a reasonable (logical) plane within the confines of the conflict you have set up.

  You have described a selfish bastard as BBU. Selfish bastards only make sense to themselves, but they work in family sagas, especially as you track back to the seminal event or originating events, which is what you need to do—give the backstory in small chunks so the reader accepts the development of the child-to-selfish-bastard character.

  Selfish bastards don’t work so well in bigger-than-life scenarios.

  It sounds as if you are writing a family saga that goes wildly out of control (assuming that the Ice Age comment was for real and applied to the plot). If the premeditated murder and the Ice Age comment are real, then your bigger-than-life scenario needs motivations and thinking that are bigger than life too. Your BBU has to have the skills to pull off the Ice Age, the will to do so, and the motivation.

  On Writing Dialogue

  C.E. Murphy

  Dialogue Introduction

  There are constraints on fiction that real life doesn’t have to hold to. Wild coincidences have to be explained in fiction, whereas in real life, coincidences happen all the time, without apology or rationality.

  Dialogue in prose is a great deal like that, really: it has to sound real, without actually being real. The truth is that if we record ourselves holding a conversation, there are an appalling number of half-finished sentences, our speech is littered with "Um" and "well" and "but-but-but." But we all know we do that, right? That we use filler words—um and uh and well—pretty much constantly. It’s a natural assumption to believe that if our writing reflects those vocal idiosyncrasies, that it’s going to sound authentic.

  Unfortunately, it’s not true. Writing dialogue that sounds like we actually speak comes across as awkward at best, because we sound awkward when our speech patterns are analyzed. Are any of you familiar with David Mamet?

  Mamet, for those who aren’t familiar with him, is a playwright whose thing, his gig, is writing natural speech. I think people essentially either love or hate Mamet. I personally find his plays excruciating to watch, because to my ear the language is so incredibly inept. It’s unquestionably how we really speak, but listening to lines scripted that way sets me on edge.

  However, having said that, I’d huge
ly recommend actually watching one of his plays—several have been made into films, including one that Steve Martin starred in several years ago, called The Spanish Prisoner. I think every writer should watch at least some Mamet—and it’s more important to watch than to read, because watching and hearing those deliberately scripted lines really helps the ear to understand how we talk, and how inept it is. It’s an object lesson in how not to write dialogue.

  (Yeah, it’s worked for Mamet, but the problem is that once one person makes a name with that kind of dialogue scripting, for the rest of eternity anybody else who tries it is going to be referred to as "Mamet-esque." You can’t win.)

  Generally, what we as writers want to do is write dialogue that mimics reality. We want to actually impart information, to show emotion, and to do it in a way that tricks the reader into accepting it as natural speech. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to do this.

  Dialect: A Useful and Dangerous Tool

  Listen to people. Listen to young people, to old people, to immigrants, to attorneys and to surfer boys. Listen to word choice and sentence cadence. Strip away the filler words—"um" and "oh" and "well"—and pay attention to the rhythm of their speech. It’s all going to sound different: a 75-year-old man is not going to sound like a 17-year-old girl, and an upper-crust British woman isn’t going to sound like a New York stock broker.

  Go to Starbucks and just sit and listen. Go to Starbucks in every city you can visit, and just sit and listen. Write down phrases that catch your ear. Study how people speak. You’re going to have to strip a lot of it away when you use it in your actual writing, but listening will help you develop an ear for dialogue.

  A few years ago I saw an interview with Ben Kingsley, who is of Indian heritage, but he changed his name from a traditional Indian name to a recognizably English one so he could get work as an actor. Quite some time after that, he was cast as Gandhi in the Richard Atwood film, and he said the response from the Indian government and people was, "Who is this English man, this Ben Kingsley, who is playing our beloved Mahatma Gandhi?"

  It’s almost impossible to get that down phonetically. It’s easier to evoke Texas by having a character say "Y’all" than it is to invoke India with dialogue alone. As a writer, what you’re reaching for in trying to capture an Indian accent is the way all the words are spoken: the breaks between words and phrases shown by punctuation, and you may be counting, a little, on the reader being familiar with the Indian accent.

  An American asking that same question might say, "Ben King—who’s Ben Kingsley, and why’s he playing Gandhi?" or even just, "Who is this guy?" It’s a completely different sentence structure.

  You can do this with nearly any language or dialect. It takes work. You’ve got to develop a fundamental grasp of the differences in sentence structure. We all know Russian accents, right? We know that it has heavy sound, with round words in your mouth. And we know if you are Russian and you are speaking English, there are words you drop, words you add: you say, "I am thinking that we should do this," not "I think we should do this."

  These changes have to do with the speaker’s original language. I’ve been living in Ireland the past three years, and it’s grand fun listening to the way they use words. Order a piece of apple pie, and they’ll say, "Will I be heatin’ it up for ye?" Twist a kid’s arm and he cries, "It’s me arm yer breakin’!" One that I cannot quite get the cadence of is a filler word that they put at the end of sentences: "so," so the sentence is something like, "I’m after visitin’ me mother so."

  All of those idiosyncrasies are born from the fact that the Irish version of English is basically structured on Irish-language sentence structure. They don’t have a word for "yes" or "no" in Irish, so if you say, "Are you going to the store," the answer is almost always, "I am," or "I am not." Now, as a writer, you don’t have to know the base languages. You just need to learn to listen for the differences in how a sentence is put together, and then learn to apply it in your writing. You can do the same thing with American regional accents, from Southern accents to upper peninsula Michigan, to California golden boys and to New York City socialites.

  Here’s where it gets dangerous: over-using dialect. Sometimes as a writer, you’re going to want to spell out the phonetic sound of the words used when it’s a different accent. Done sparingly, that can work really well. It can remind a Pacific Northwest reader that the story is set in Atlanta, or set in the highlands of Scotland. But I really truly believe it should be done sparingly: I’ve read stories in which all the dialogue was dialect, and . . . okay, "read" is an overstatement, because I couldn’t get through them. It’s easy to do too much. Dialect, par-ticularly if you’re writing out the sound of an accent, should be a spice, not the flavor.

  Punctuation

  I cannot emphasize enough how important punctuation is in dialogue. Actually, in general, but since we’re talking about dialogue . . . :-)

  I could do an entire class on punctuation alone, but that’s not what we’re doing here. I’d mostly like to say that if you have even the slightest suspicion that you might not be absolutely solid on the rules of punctuation, please consider taking an English 101 writing class, either at a local college or online, in order to study that.

  You just don’t want an editor running up against that kind of mental block when she’s reading your writing. Learn punctuation. It’s worth it.

  Dialogue Tags

  Dialogue tags are a bugbear for most writers. I want to tell you what may be the most important thing:

  "Said" is an invisible word. Like "the" and "and," readers do not notice "said." This means that ninety percent of the time, if "said" will do as the dia-logue tag, then "said" is the word you should use. The reader will notice if you use "stated" or "declared" or "observed" or "noted", and again, ninety percent of the time, you don’t want the reader to be noticing those words.

  A story along those lines: a writer of whom I was quite fond put out a new book a while ago, something co-authored with another writer. It had an introduction, in which it mentioned that the author’s idiosyncrasies had been kept intact, including the fact that he never used the word "said" when another word would do.

  Now, I’d read about fifteen books by this guy. I’d noticed that he often used other words when "said" would do, and I found it vaguely annoying. I had not noticed that he always used another word if it was at all possible.

  Having had it pointed out to me, I was so distracted and annoyed by it that I got maybe forty pages into the book and put it down and not only never picked it up again, but will never pick any of that writer’s books up again.

  This is not the end result you’re after. :-)

  This isn’t to say you can’t use other words to great effect. Just bear in mind, as writers, that "said" will essentially never offend.

  One Thing At A Time

  One of the things we do in real life is let conversations flow back and forth over each other. In prose, you almost always have to keep your dialogue to one topic at a time. What works for our ears doesn’t necessarily work for our eyes. In dialogue, a conversation can flow from one topic to a second to a third and then back to the first, but most of the time you don’t want to have all three threads going on at once. If you can pull it off as a writer, more power to you, but even so, don’t overdo it.

  "As You Know, Bob"

  Dialogue is often used as an "As you know, Bob". What that means is Scotty suddenly stands up and begins lecturing to Engineer Bob: "As you know, Bob, the dilithium crystals store energy which permits our warp engines to carry us beyond the speed of light. Without these engines and those crystals, we would be stuck in low Earth orbit, waving wistfully at the Vulcans as they zoomed by."

  Bob already knows this. If the reader needs to know it, then the last way you should want to inform the reader is by having Scotty tell Bob something he already knows. It’s far better to have an action scene where the dilithium crystals are suddenly drained and the Enterprise drops out of war
p, thus showing us the crystals’ importance rather than telling us about them.

  Virtually any time there’s an "As you know, Bob" or an information dump—and, in fact, whether it’s in dialogue or in the text—as a writer you should want to have a look at that and see if you can’t work it into the story.

  §§§

  David B. Coe

  Last year I did a dialogue workshop and hit many of the same points, particularly with respect to said-bookisms. I had my group do an exercise: write a scene/conversation between two people without using "said," "asked," "stated," or any other direct form of attribution. It was a challenge for the people in the workshop. I made myself do it at the same time as my "students," and I found it challenging, too. But that little scene wound up being one of the best things I’ve ever written. I need to work it into a story.

  He Said, She Said: Thoughts On Dialogue

  A.J. Hartley

  Dialogue is where a book comes to life, where its characters seem to breathe, where we can feel the basic human reality beneath the most outrageous or fantastical storyline or setting. It’s not surprising, then, that few things knock me out of a story more completely than poorly executed conversation, and though these aren’t exhaustive by any means, I’d like to offer a few observations on why some dialogue doesn’t work, with the usual caveat that this is a personal opinion.

  1. Too often the characters don’t have distinctive voices. They all sound the same, so that if you covered the name, you couldn’t possibly guess who was speaking. I’m not suggesting that every single utterance should be stamped with the individual character’s personality (that can quickly get irritating), but as a rule, all the characters should have slightly different ways of speaking, not in terms of dialect necessarily (another thing which quickly feels hokey) but in terms of those things which mark out all speakers: word choice, rhythm, whether they speak in complete sentences, what kinds of metaphors they use. You can describe a character’s eyes a thousand times, but nothing will communicate him better than his own words.