Characters, Dialog, and Description with Howard Weinstein
Today, I welcome a guest post from NYT bestselling author Howard Weinstein. Howard was the youngest writer to pen an episode of classic Star Trek when, in 1974, he wrote the animated series episode, 'The Pirates of Orion'. He has written several media tie-in novels in both Star Trek and the original V science fiction television series as well as approximately 60 issues for DC Comics' Star Trek line. Howard also delved into non-fiction with a bio of baseball legend of Mickey Mantle and a wonderful book showcasing his expertise in dog training with
Puppy Kisses Are Good for the Soul
.
Recently, Howard joined forces with Michael Jan Friedman, Bob Greenberger, Peter David, Glenn Hauman, and Aaron Rosenberg to form a small press called Crazy 8 Press to release future works. Howard is currently hard at work on a novel based in the old west. I interviewed him for this blog back in January, which you can read HERE . Mike, Bob, and Aaron have also been interviewed over the past year.
Check Out That Character
OK, so you have your characters DOING and reacting to things, but are you giving the reader a specific sense of who they are and how they see the world?
If you have ever attended one of our con workshops, you've heard us yammer about this. Each character (even minor ones) needs a unique attitude toward the world, which in turn enables you, the writer, to differentiate their actions and their dialog. Without that, it's harder for readers to invest in and root for (or against) the people you're working so hard to create. This isn't easy to do, but it gets easier with practice. And it's something you can retrofit after you've done the bulk of your writing which leads to...
Dialog About...well....Dialog
The above advice on characters will also serve to make your dialog snappier. It's easier to write for characters who have very different POV's from each other. When you don't have enough of that, dialog can become bland and merely informational instead of helping you define your characters and create crackling conflict (or humor) within every conversation.
Also, anyplace where you've got one character speaking for multiple paragraphs of dialog, that's a patch which could be trimmed and tightened. Or if everything this chatty character is saying is truly too important to lose, then make it more "ping-pong-y" with the other character in the conversation interrupting, preferably with questions or disagreement. Back and forth conversations are always more interesting than speeches.
Writing realistic dialog is hard -- lots of best selling novelists have been unable to do it well because it didn't seem like a skill they had cultivated. For me, I think the fact that I started out intending to write scripts, where dialog is so primary, helped me get a feel for writing dialog long before I ever tried writing novels.
Describing Descriptions
When you go to the trouble of including physical and sensory descriptions of places in order to set the scene and location, are those descriptions from a character's POV? Or are they omniscient, author POV? It's almost always better to write descriptions from a specific character POV -- we see what he sees, filtered through his perceptions and history. That allows you to pick and choose specific impressions and details rather than simply describing a room. Think about it as if you're the director choosing camera angles -- which is more interesting, a generic establishing shot, or a shot that picks out details which help define the time and place, the mood, and the characters living and acting within that space?
But even where you ARE specific with something descriptive, does it serve a purpose? To reveal character or enhance atmosphere? Does it add to the scene or is it merely a detail for its own sake? Maybe it's a potentially evocative sensory detail, but is it just sorta there? How might you have used it better?
What if you'd used it as something that filled an uncomfortable silence? Then it becomes a detail -- something a character would notice, and we see through his POV -- that serves to emphasize his experience and bring us inside his head at a key moment.
One of the realizations that scared the crap outta me when I wrote my first novel was this: Pretty much EVERY single word COUNTS! They all have to be carefully chosen and have a reason for being included. That can be very stressful if you think of words as potential enemies waiting to trip you up if you choose the wrong ones. But words are neutral -- they're all just waiting for us to choose the best combination we can (best doesn't mean perfect) in order to tell our story.
I don't want this to paralyze you. Remember that NOBODY gets it all right on the first draft (or even the second, for most of us). Just get the story down, then go back and refine it. It takes practice.
A Final Note About Characters
Tom Fontana, writer-producer and creator of the great Homicide, once talked about the importance of characters, and he outlined a simple 3-level method for creating good characters:
1- Head: How does a character think, what's his education level?
2- Heart: What does a character believe, what makes them laugh or cry?
3- "Nether" zone: Who does this character want to sleep with?
I kinda liked that!
Recently, Howard joined forces with Michael Jan Friedman, Bob Greenberger, Peter David, Glenn Hauman, and Aaron Rosenberg to form a small press called Crazy 8 Press to release future works. Howard is currently hard at work on a novel based in the old west. I interviewed him for this blog back in January, which you can read HERE . Mike, Bob, and Aaron have also been interviewed over the past year.
Check Out That Character
OK, so you have your characters DOING and reacting to things, but are you giving the reader a specific sense of who they are and how they see the world?
If you have ever attended one of our con workshops, you've heard us yammer about this. Each character (even minor ones) needs a unique attitude toward the world, which in turn enables you, the writer, to differentiate their actions and their dialog. Without that, it's harder for readers to invest in and root for (or against) the people you're working so hard to create. This isn't easy to do, but it gets easier with practice. And it's something you can retrofit after you've done the bulk of your writing which leads to...
Dialog About...well....Dialog
The above advice on characters will also serve to make your dialog snappier. It's easier to write for characters who have very different POV's from each other. When you don't have enough of that, dialog can become bland and merely informational instead of helping you define your characters and create crackling conflict (or humor) within every conversation.
Also, anyplace where you've got one character speaking for multiple paragraphs of dialog, that's a patch which could be trimmed and tightened. Or if everything this chatty character is saying is truly too important to lose, then make it more "ping-pong-y" with the other character in the conversation interrupting, preferably with questions or disagreement. Back and forth conversations are always more interesting than speeches.
Writing realistic dialog is hard -- lots of best selling novelists have been unable to do it well because it didn't seem like a skill they had cultivated. For me, I think the fact that I started out intending to write scripts, where dialog is so primary, helped me get a feel for writing dialog long before I ever tried writing novels.
Describing Descriptions
When you go to the trouble of including physical and sensory descriptions of places in order to set the scene and location, are those descriptions from a character's POV? Or are they omniscient, author POV? It's almost always better to write descriptions from a specific character POV -- we see what he sees, filtered through his perceptions and history. That allows you to pick and choose specific impressions and details rather than simply describing a room. Think about it as if you're the director choosing camera angles -- which is more interesting, a generic establishing shot, or a shot that picks out details which help define the time and place, the mood, and the characters living and acting within that space?
But even where you ARE specific with something descriptive, does it serve a purpose? To reveal character or enhance atmosphere? Does it add to the scene or is it merely a detail for its own sake? Maybe it's a potentially evocative sensory detail, but is it just sorta there? How might you have used it better?
What if you'd used it as something that filled an uncomfortable silence? Then it becomes a detail -- something a character would notice, and we see through his POV -- that serves to emphasize his experience and bring us inside his head at a key moment.
One of the realizations that scared the crap outta me when I wrote my first novel was this: Pretty much EVERY single word COUNTS! They all have to be carefully chosen and have a reason for being included. That can be very stressful if you think of words as potential enemies waiting to trip you up if you choose the wrong ones. But words are neutral -- they're all just waiting for us to choose the best combination we can (best doesn't mean perfect) in order to tell our story.
I don't want this to paralyze you. Remember that NOBODY gets it all right on the first draft (or even the second, for most of us). Just get the story down, then go back and refine it. It takes practice.
A Final Note About Characters
Tom Fontana, writer-producer and creator of the great Homicide, once talked about the importance of characters, and he outlined a simple 3-level method for creating good characters:
1- Head: How does a character think, what's his education level?
2- Heart: What does a character believe, what makes them laugh or cry?
3- "Nether" zone: Who does this character want to sleep with?
I kinda liked that!
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