What Are You Doing!?
I think a lot of writers (guilty) fall into the trap of having two characters 'talking in a white room.' Meaning, there's no sense of place or their surroundings, it's just us showing off how good our dialogue is. I try to be mindful of this, and give some sense of where this scintillating conversation is being had. I try to mix up locations, too. This is a bit difficult sometimes, because I don't have a lot of locations in my books, but there's always an extra room or a cafe or something.
One of the big bugbears for me personally, however, is what the characters are doing while they're talking. My first drafts are horrific in this regard, just huge blocks of dialogue with no stage direction or anything.
In movies/TV there's what's called a 'walk and talk', making conversations happen while the characters are, get this, walking, just to give it some sort of dynamism, and make it visually interesting. Period pieces always have a stroll through a garden, sci-fi down the corridors of a starship, fantasy has a whooollle lotta walking (sometimes the entire quest!), that kind of thing.
This isn't always easy. The Ashes books have some intensely emotional conversations about the most intimate subjects, and I set the tone by having them in small, intimate places. A hotel room, a tiny kitchen. It's hard to make it dynamic physically, mostly moving hands and shifting expressions.
In these cases I end up using a lot of internal dynamism like heart rate, sweating, emotional walls crumbling, etc. but that's really more limited to the POV character. I do a lot of glances and looks too, but if you've read a lot of my work, you might have noticed I have a thing with eyes. I don't know why, I just always have in my writing.
It usually ends up being one of the last things I add to a scene, breaking up dialogue and giving a sense of motion to it. Midnight Magic, my last (and therefore freshest in my memory) book, had this happen a few times. There's parts, especially with Aurelai, where there's things being explained, but she's not doing anything. Just talking. I had to consciously go in and have her move around, pick things up, look at a tree, anything to make it less static. I just did this to a scene for Book IV as well, but I also found a way to make it more poignant, which is nice.
For good examples from the Ashes series, go find scenes between Millie and Ivy in a greenhouse and you'll see what I mean. There's all sorts of interesting (and weird) plants that Ivy grows that were a joy to think up. It populated the scene, made it memorable, and Millie's little WTF moments punctuated what would have otherwise just been some advice-giving with tiny bits of world-building by showing that Ivy doesn't have to stop bullets for us to see how powerful she is.
Blocking, stage direction, DO SOMETHING, whatever you want to call it, you gotta keep your characters moving.
One of the big bugbears for me personally, however, is what the characters are doing while they're talking. My first drafts are horrific in this regard, just huge blocks of dialogue with no stage direction or anything.
In movies/TV there's what's called a 'walk and talk', making conversations happen while the characters are, get this, walking, just to give it some sort of dynamism, and make it visually interesting. Period pieces always have a stroll through a garden, sci-fi down the corridors of a starship, fantasy has a whooollle lotta walking (sometimes the entire quest!), that kind of thing.
This isn't always easy. The Ashes books have some intensely emotional conversations about the most intimate subjects, and I set the tone by having them in small, intimate places. A hotel room, a tiny kitchen. It's hard to make it dynamic physically, mostly moving hands and shifting expressions.
In these cases I end up using a lot of internal dynamism like heart rate, sweating, emotional walls crumbling, etc. but that's really more limited to the POV character. I do a lot of glances and looks too, but if you've read a lot of my work, you might have noticed I have a thing with eyes. I don't know why, I just always have in my writing.
It usually ends up being one of the last things I add to a scene, breaking up dialogue and giving a sense of motion to it. Midnight Magic, my last (and therefore freshest in my memory) book, had this happen a few times. There's parts, especially with Aurelai, where there's things being explained, but she's not doing anything. Just talking. I had to consciously go in and have her move around, pick things up, look at a tree, anything to make it less static. I just did this to a scene for Book IV as well, but I also found a way to make it more poignant, which is nice.
For good examples from the Ashes series, go find scenes between Millie and Ivy in a greenhouse and you'll see what I mean. There's all sorts of interesting (and weird) plants that Ivy grows that were a joy to think up. It populated the scene, made it memorable, and Millie's little WTF moments punctuated what would have otherwise just been some advice-giving with tiny bits of world-building by showing that Ivy doesn't have to stop bullets for us to see how powerful she is.
Blocking, stage direction, DO SOMETHING, whatever you want to call it, you gotta keep your characters moving.
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