How To Write Magical Words: A Writer's Companion

by Unknown

  Names: Most people know their name and don’t need to be reminded of it. If you find your characters addressing each other by name over and over, you’ve found a place to do some cutting.

  Pauses: This is one I worked hard to stop in my own writing. A typical dramatic quote of mine from the past would read "I . . . won’t . . . let you . . . do that." I got in this habit, I think, from my theater days. I could hear the actor in my head and wanted to recreate the speech pattern on the page. The problem is this—it doesn’t work. Readers tend to ignore all those ellipses and just read the sentence straight. Those that do have the ear for the pauses suffer through every . . . single . . . pause . . . thus . . . slowing . . . down . . . the . . . story. Nowadays, I write these things straight—"I won’t let you do that." I still use the ellipses for pauses, but only in rare instances and usually to show somebody out of breath, injured, incoherent, or such.

  So, these are a few thoughts to get you started. Unfortunately, the ability to write good dialogue is mostly developed over time. You get an ear for it. The better your ear, the easier it is to revise dialogue. Hopefully, these little suggestions will help you on that journey.

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  David B. Coe

  "This," he said, "is a terrific post." Really. Wonderful stuff. One of the things I do too much is have my characters use the names of those they address. Particularly my villains. I love the way it sounds, but I think I overdo it, particularly in early drafts. This is why revisions are so important. But that’s another post.

  Having an ear for dialogue is something that writers can develop through simple observation and, I hate to say it, eavesdropping. That said, Stuart is spot on: we want to be authentic in our writing, but not too authentic. Characters in a book need to be more directed in what they say and more articulate in how they say it.

  Stuart Jaffe

  David, I find all authors have at least one bad dialogue habit. I almost wrote "crutch," but they really don’t help us as much as muck up the works. As long as you recognize what your habit is, then it’s just a matter of revisions.

  Faith Hunter

  Stuart, I needed this post fifteen years ago, (where were you then???) and will keep it bookmarked to share with other writers. Excellent advice!

  I totally overused ellipses in my earlier books. When they come back into print as backlist it gives me a chance to take out about 70% of them. And it makes me cringe to see the numbers. Why didn’t some editor, somewhere, tell me to stop with the dots, sweetie!? Arrg.

  I love to eavesdrop. For a writer it seems as important as people watching. And a lot more fun. Not too long ago, Misty and I were having tea at Starbucks and we realized that someone was listening to us. Really hard! Wonder if she was a writer? (grins)

  Stuart Jaffe

  Faith, fifteen years ago I was drowning in my own sea of ellipses! :-) It’s only now, after enough rejections, that I’ve figured this stuff out. Of course, fifteen years from now I’ll be pounding my head against the stupidity of whatever I’m currently doing wrong in my writing. I don’t think it ever ends.

  Revisions: A How-To Guide

  C.E. Murphy

  A reader emailed me a writing question a few days ago, and gave me the all-clear to use its answer as a blog post, so I’m going to give it a shot. The question (and its surrounding commentary, which I thought was relevant) follows:

  "I know that some authors find rewriting easier (in some ways) than the initial creative process. Me, I can whip something out of nothing without breaking a sweat. But whenever I try to approach the highly necessary rewrite, I almost immediately get overwhelmed by the minutiae of things that need tending to. I am pulled this way and that, trying to keep track of the myriad of details that need to hover simultaneously in my forebrain—and I end up just fiddling with the niggling little grammar nits, polishing word choice, questioning whether that adverb is really necessary, and reassuring myself that all the independent clauses are safely sequestered within their parenthetical commas.

  "Consequently, the real work—that is, deleting scenes and rewriting the whole cloth of large sections—goes undone because of these distractions of questionable value. Sometimes, I think I might be better off deleting the damned thing and starting over from scratch.

  "So, my question: In your subsequent drafts, how do you keep the story from getting in the way of your rewriting?"

  I know writers who do, in fact, just start their second draft from scratch. I don’t personally, but sometimes I can see the appeal. I also am not one of those writers who finds the revision process vastly more rewarding than the initial writing process, although I do like the end result of all that work. But the actual revisions are exhausting, because I’m trying to hold three different versions of the story in my head at once: the story as it was, the story as it is in process of being revised, and the story as it needs to be.

  From the lead-in to the question, it sounds like it’s the second stage where it’s falling apart for the writer. This makes sense to me, because it’s the second part I find to be really headache-inducing. Knowing what you have to do, knowing what the story should look like on the other end, is a lot easier than figuring out how to do it. And I hate to say it, but on one level it’s just a matter of practice. It’s also a lot easier if a third party (like an editor) has said, "This is a part that doesn’t work. Make it work," or, "I need to see some motivation for this action," or "I need more sense of setting here," because that gives me some-thing to work off of.

  Okay. *Rubs brain* This is hard to think about, actually, or at least hard to explain, because so much of it for me is just grim determination to get it done. But one thing I do is start with a hard copy. I have to start with a hard-copy. If I just try to work on screen my brain dribbles out my ear and I lose all will to live. More importantly, my brain is extremely consistent: if I start doing revisions on screen, I think, "Oh! This is a place to insert a clever line!" and I revise to insert it, then discover that a page and a half later, I already had that clever line in place. Hard-copy prevents me from doing that, and believe me, after doing it for the fifteenth time, I’m very happy to have read the bloody book all the way through and make myself aware of where my brain is likely to come up with clever lines that it has already come up with. :-)

  Having a hard-copy also means I can physically strike sections out, even if all I leave myself with is a note saying "MAKE THIS MORE BETTER" (which, yes, is usually exactly what I write). It is, one way or another, a visual cue that this part needs work.

  I usually start at the beginning of the story, but I don’t think there’s any compelling reason to do it that way. Another advantage of hard-copy for me is that when I’m further into the book and I’ve found something that needs setup earlier on, I can go back and leave myself a note on the paper that says "Joanne’s facing Wile E. Coyote on page 235, there needs to be some kind of foreshadowing here, in this scene where I can stuff in a Looney Toons reference without it being too gratuitous." Then when I get to that in the on-screen revisions I can go "oh yeah" and take care of it immediately instead of having to flip back and forth.

  Trust yourself—and when I say "trust yourself," I mostly mean "forbid yourself to nitpick"—on the sentence-structure level. There will, yes, be times and places where the sentences need work, but put that into a different mental space. That’s copy-editing, not revising. It comes after revisions.

  I frequently cut-and-paste the sections that need work out of the manuscript. So if I need to strike seven pages out of chapter three and just rewrite them wholesale, I’ll take a version of chapter three, save it into the Second Draft folder, and then delete everything that needs to go in one big chunk. It’s completely psychological for me: somehow it’s less awful to gut chapter three by itself than it is to take it out of the manuscript and watch the whole page count of the manuscript collapse by eight pages. It also gives me a place (or usually more than one) where the original version of the chapter or scene is saved, s
o if I need to go back and rescue a sentence, I can snag it out of the original.

  I use a lot of white space when I’m working on screen. If I’m working on a specific part of a scene and I know there’s still lots to do further down, I just hit carriage return until I can’t see the later material. Again, it’s pure psychology. It’s a matter of being able to face one page at a time; having new text that needs work continually scrolling up to face me is just disheartening.

  Focus on one major problem/storyline/thread/whatever at a time. This year an editor asked me to do a major revision on a book. M.A.J.O.R. revision. What ended up happening was I rewrote the first half of the book heavily and the second half less so, and then in the second round of revisions, ended up rewriting the second half of the book heavily. I knew, when I submitted it the second time, that there were still problems facing the manuscript, but I had just run out of steam. I needed someone else’s feedback to say "these are the things that can be punched up." Basically what I did was face one set of problems the first time through, and an almost completely different set the second time around (they had been touched on in the first revision, but it was sort of an emotional storyline revision vs. an action storyline revision, and I didn’t have the mental capacity to manage both at once to the degree they both needed it).

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  David B. Coe

  I like to revise on hard-copy, too, but I don’t always do it. When I revise on screen, I employ some of the tricks Catie describes here. I’ll copy a chapter into a different file and then revise, or I’ll make a copy of the book and only fiddle with the new version, leaving the old one intact, in case I screw things up beyond repair. And I’ll create that white space Catie mentioned, too. And yes, it’s all psychological—creating a computer-based work space where I can feel free to tear stuff down and rebuild. Ultimately, that’s the point for me. When I have trouble moving past the little stuff, it’s usually because I’m afraid to make that first huge change. It gets easier for me after I’ve started the process.

  You Know What I Mean?

  Misty Massey

  This morning I was watching the news and saw a story about a small-town mayor who was insisting that the police engage in no more foot chases after suspects. The cost of their injuries was driving the city’s insurance rates sky-high, so she’d sent a memo to the department, saying "no foot chases, under any circumstances whatsoever." A reporter asked her what she expected the police to do if they witnessed a crime a short distance away and could easily overtake the suspect. Shouldn’t they run over and intervene? But if they did, weren’t they breaking the rule she wanted to lay down? She waved a hand and said, "They know what I mean."

  Many writers do exactly the same thing. The world is so clear in their heads that they forget to tell the reader what they see, what they hear, and what precisely is going on. They assume the reader will just know what they mean. That’s a dangerous thing to do. It’s a little like traveling to another country and being certain you’ll be able to find someone who speaks your language. Suddenly you’re wandering the streets unable to even ask for directions. You’re lost.

  Readers can get lost easily. When they do, they stop reading. It’s up to the writer to provide signposts and clues so the reader stays involved. The writer has to be certain he’s saying exactly what he means on the page. Never assume the reader will get it. I’ve been guilty of it myself—reading out loud at critique groups, only to discover that the brilliant prose wasn’t making any sense because I was writing so fast I forgot to let the reader keep up with my thoughts. Be brilliant, be thrilling, but be clear. Your reader will thank you.

  Speaking of that, know the words you’re using before you type them. Vocabulary is a joyful treasure, but only when you’re using it correctly. If you’re not sure what a word means, use the dictionary to look it up before you type it. And don’t trust the SpellCheck. It can be a handy tool, granted, but it can lead you astray when it suggests other words for you to use instead of the one you misspelled. Once upon a time, a woman in my writing group was describing a murderer’s living room. She mentioned the color of the walls, the soft carpet, the way the sunlight warmed the room, and then she wrote about the Nubian laid across the back of the sofa. I burst into giggles, and nearly choked on my soda. The writer stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. "It’s just another word for a blanket. What’s so funny about that?" she asked. She’d used the SpellCheck, which indicated that she could choose a different word than the one she initially typed, "afghan."

  Trouble was, an afghan is a blanket. A Nubian is a person.

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  Daniel R. Davis

  Yeah, I have dictionary.com bookmarked. It has thesaurus.com as part of it. Both handy tools when you’re trying to keep from repeating a word too often or when you’re trying to figure out whether a word means what you really think it does.

  http://dictionary.reference.com/

  One of the things I asked my proofers for are any places that I need to expand or any places that didn’t make sense or lost them.

  David B. Coe

  This is another issue I’ve encountered recently working with a student. As you say, the story and setting and magic system are all quite clear in this person’s head, but the explanations are too rushed and too vague to convey much to the reader. The end result is that none of the cool stuff this person is writing about reaches its intended audience. All the character development and worldbuilding in the world can’t make up for unclear prose.

  C.E. Murphy

  *laughs out loud* Oh dear. The poor woman. :-)

  I look up words even when I’m sure I know what they mean. I’m almost always right, but occasionally I do not look up words when I’m sure I know what they mean, and that way, surprisingly often, lies disaster. Or it’ll be a word that I’m sure I know what it means, and it turns out I’ve got one letter wrong, and it makes it into a whole different word. Dictionaries are our friends.

  BIC and Rewrite Tips

  Faith Hunter

  I have always believed that everyone is driven to tell stories, and that the need to do so is hardwired into our genetic structure. Early tribal survival depended on keeping the knowledge gained through pain and suffering available to future generations. Hence, humans stored knowledge in stories, which were easy to remember and offered wisdom, information, tactics, and strategy on many levels at once. Therefore, when someone tells me that he wants to, needs to, must write a book, I totally believe him. I completely understand that natural, deeply driven desire.

  My usual reply to the quest for writing a book is this: The only way to learn to write a book is to write a book. That said, there are things a published writer can share that can make a difference. First, very basic stuff . . .

  1. BIC. Those of you who have been here a while know that BIC stands for "Butt in Chair." If you don’t keep the old keister in a chair in front of the keyboard (pad and pen work, too), you will never, never, never write. It doesn’t matter what comes out of your fingertips at first. And trust me, you will look back at the early stuff and cringe, maybe weep.

  2. Study everything you can find on writing. Read books about writing so that you will have an understanding of POV, narrative voice, character voice, dialogue, and all the other stuff you have to know, intellectually, in order to be a commercially-published writer. And read your favorite authors. Buy the books, don’t borrow them, because you should read with multicolor highlighters, and highlight things that work and things that don’t. This teaches your brain to recognize and be able to reproduce the techniques.

  3. Go to conferences. Yeah, it’s pricy. But if you can swing it, conferences give you a chance to do the one-on-one thing with editors and agents.

  4. Stop agonizing over the editing. Write that first book all the way through. Push through the barriers. Just do it!

  5. And, um . . . BIC.

  Now for the less basic stuff that you need to have when you actually finish that first book. It’s
called rewrites. There are several things that writers (old hands and newbies) have to do in a rewrite. BTW, I have used sticky notes, colored pencils, and highlighters to track things on hardcopy. Track what? Let’s start with the Macro Rewrites:

  1. Track the plot arcs. Make sure you keep on track with the primary conflict story-line. Plot-lines need to be the foundation of every scene, every character interaction. When you find anything that is not part of one of the storylines, cut it and put it in a different file. That way you can pull it back out if you need it later. If you are thinking about future books in a series, be careful to not loose sight of the current conflict-line in this book. David B. Coe and C.E. Murphy (waves to David and Catie) are great at this! I haven’t read Misty Massey’s second series book (waves to Misty) so I don’t know but I am sure she will nail it because she did so well at leaving hints and clues in Mad Kestrel.

  2. Track every single character. Make sure no one disappears, never to be seen again.

  3. Track your own voice. Find a hilarious scene in the middle of the book? You love it? But it’s a drama and the scene doesn’t fit? Cut it.