Adam Martin's Blog - Posts Tagged "dialogue"
WRITING LIST-O-METER
For amusement, improvement, or a good laugh
Speed Notes on Adam Martin's Xenoman
A list of things that bug me in self published and professionally published novels, print and online articles. It's not just the self-publishing industry. It's everywhere.
I care about story, pace, and flow. I don't care about your typos, or that your novel is a work in progress. True, too many typos can be distracting, but I'm not the kind of author who witchhunts for those things. That can all be fixed later. None of that will prevent me from figuring out what you're talking about, or not talking about that should be talked about. If I went back in time and corrected all the typos in the best live conversations I've ever had, I'd spend more time fixing speech errors than having the actual conversation. As for authors who bag on grammar and the like and pay for professional editing services, there are those who might consider paying someone to write the plot of their novel as well. I might get an edit lift later on, but I'm not in a rush.
You wrote 30 chapters of about something and put a cover on it. It reads like James Joyce's Ulysses, but it's accidental, not intentional.
You're cover is just, how can I say it, ugly. It has a picture of your face, but it looks like a photo you peeled off your expired passport, and you cut and pasted it on crooked.
Your cover looks like it was done on Poser. Just like my novel! I also used Photoshop as well. Personally, I don't care what software the novel was done with as long as it looks decent. I don't buy books so much for the cover, just like I learned not to buy records for the same reason at Tower Records, when there was a Tower Records.
Your cover rocks. That's it. The novel inside is worse than a colonoscopy, because you have to go through with it while you're conscious.
You write for fun and think it's the reader's job to figure out the plot. The next time you think about writing for fun, consider this: serial killers kill for fun and think it's your job to figure out why it's reprehensible. Does this bother you? Then why do it with your writing? Think it through the way you would think through, say, building a house or shelter you would want to live in. When you go to Disneyland, it's not Walt Disney's job to figure out how to find parking, or why you like to go on the rides.
Your relatives in real life are boring to readers, because they don't have any conversations that are interesting, or are integral to the plot. It's your fault for not recalling the one's that were, and your mother doesn't make the best apple pie. Mine does.
You write about what you know, but it isn't interesting. Granny makes the weirdest quilts out of old blue jeans and Uncle Joe paints duck decoys in the garage, but it has nothing to do with the plot or anyone's growth otherwise.
You're dialogue is good but it isn't clear what we should pay attention to and what is just filler. Throw out the filler. When you get together with people you like, consider that once you begin to gossip, the bulk of the time is spent cutting to the chase. Imagine others watching that discussion and consider why that may be interesting in a story, and make it part of the story, not just throw away gobbly-gook.
You don't understand that dialogue is fake. It's a movie told with words, containing a verbal haystack: setup (inciting incident), a midpoint (revelation), and a payoff (change of plans), leading to the next scene/cliffhanger. The best dialogue is like reading a great interview with your favorite artists, which is probably a whittled down version of a long conversation made to fit on a few pages. Cliffs Notes are written the same way. They're fun to read because they contain only the story information that you need to know.
Sex scenes: You think because making out with someone on a couch is fun, people sitting in a row of seats watching you would feel the same way. There's nothing wrong with people sleeping together, but if you're writing for both men and women, as a straight male, I really don't need to see in print what your boyfriend's dick starts doing once he gets aroused.
You think you wrote a ghost story because your novel has a ghost, or someone mentions one, or thinks they saw one, or likes to talk about them a lot, or thinks one of the locations is haunted, or they were "ghosted" by someone at work, and we're constantly reminded of how creepy that old mansion is.
You wrote 20 novels just so you could say you wrote 20 novels, when in fact what you wrote was a blueprint for 20 wind tunnels.
You turn everything into a covert dick joke. You're convinced that your penis is so darn funny, it can't hurt to remind everyone else. At least your doing it in print for god sake.
Exposition porn: You spend 20 pages telling us what Batman can do, instead of 20 pages with Batman showing us what he can do, while he's doing it. You write a mystery where your Holmes and Watson characters spend 20 pages talking about what all those hounds in the Baskervilles keep barking about, instead of forcing them to actually investigate the streets of London and find out.
Exposition porn II: You confuse typing with writing. You think that repetition equals character.
Gods on vacation: You write novels about gods and deities that resemble people who go on vacation: they spend tons of money to go to another part of the world, and behave exactly like they do at home, while sipping what amounts to a two-hundred dollar Margarita.
GOT porn: Game of Thrones is already it's own source of self-saturation. Why do you want to be the next George R.R. Martin? We already have like a hundred other long-winded authors doing the same thing. Ask yourself, do we need twelve Shakespeare's? Do something unique, or at least strive to.
You copy famous author's just to look cool. Your novels include multiple GOT viewpoints... just because. There's no thought experiment behind it, no big reveal, no wow, no reason to take the day off from work to read through a bunch of nonsense. Get the party started and keep it moving.
Airlock porn: You wrote a science fiction novel, and so it follows that you should have spaceships, and hence, airlocks. The problem is, your novel contains so many airlocks, the reader begins to feel like the whole novel takes place in, well, an airlock. Are there any other locations you can break this up with?
You write female characters that say "fuck" a lot, without any real motivation. After the first few instances of this, we get it: She's a chick who acts like a guy. Now go have her do or say something interesting.
Swiss Army Guards: your character gets in a fight with a bunch of guards who resemble a bunch of guards, and because they're a bunch of guards that's all they ever are. They're so generic and hard to tell apart that when one of the guards answers the phone, he greets the caller not with his name but with "Bunch of guards. What can I do for you?"
And then this happens porn: Your basic understanding of plot is... and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens... The second half of the novel doesn't conclude what the first half of the novel presumes. If it's a series and we don't know what happens to the wizard and his girlfriend, I'm OK with that. Think about it: if you can't stand reading electronics manuals, why are you turning around and writing one?
You say your a voracious reader, but you clearly borrow from television. Roughly speaking, TV evolved from film, film from literature, literature from theatre. Cave people had no choice but to act out what they were thinking or feeling. There was no Samuel French in those days. It's important to know what was done in antiquity, not because it is better or worse, but because you don't want to spend 10 years of your life writing a love story, only to find you just rewrote a lesser version of Pride and Prejudice.
Your love stories are boring. Having to choose between two people isn't interesting, nor is having a crush on someone else while your married or in another relationship. You might as well have the reader choose between shopping at Ralph's or Vons. It only becomes interesting when the situations preventing the union are interesting or thought provoking.
You don't understand that all great characters are dramatized composites or types. Marvel and DC comics has been doing in front of you for years. Even people in real life are types to the degree that they follow patterns of behavior. Everyone in Citizen Kane and Casablanca is a type, a dramatized composite of other people in real life that exist anywhere.
