Writing Skill: They Both Know

When we're writing dialogue, we want it to sound natural – but actual natural speech, in real life, is freighted down with tangents, filler words, dead-end sentences, and an astonishing amount of general burble. If you've ever transcribed real-life conversation, like I had to do at uni in Linguistics, you'll know what I'm talking about! It makes for a dreadful read. So in stories, we want to give the flavour of natural speech, without quite as much clutter. 

We also want to give a sense of the relationship between the characters: dialogue's a dynamic between people. And a sense of their individual points of view, what they know or don't about each other and what's happening, how they feel about it.

This Writing Skill is perfect for practising all of that, and you can use it with your story in progress OR with fresh characters, plus I've got a suggestion for writing groups / buddies. So give yourself the gift of ten minutes' writing time, grab your pen, notebook, and cuppa, and scribble away!

To start with, you need two people who know each other well, and are equals. They can be best friends, partners, siblings, whatever works for you. You can pick two from your story in progress, or whisk up two new characters with this quick character generator.

Something seismic has happened for Character A. How seismic you want to go depends on their age. It could be that they got / lost a job, the person they liked asked them out, they discovered their parent isn't their bio parent, they're moving city, etc.

• If you're using your story in progress, see if you've got anything like that already to use; if not, just make up a scenario that fits them, as a way to play with their voices – you don't have to put this bit in the actual story.
• If you're not using a work in progress, you can pick any of my suggestions above or anything else that appeals to you.

For the actual writing, assume that the reader already read the scene when the Seismic Thing happened, so there's no need to recap. Character B doesn't know it's now happened, but does already know all Character A's hopes / fears about the whole situation.

Write their dialogue / any physical reactions (eg whistling, etc) as elliptically as possible. Some possible starting lines could be…

• "So… I got it."
• "It's happening."
• "She asked."
• "It's time."
• "They admitted it."

A tells B it's happened, but super elliptically, because B already knows so much. They're both reacting to the news / each other, they're discussing repercussions / next plans, etc. 

Some tips for writing super natural dialogue here:

• Give as little extra explanation as humanly possible.
• Sentence fragments are great.
• Casual language / slang are great.
• Opaque references are great.

Writing groups / buddies: If you want to do this exercise together, each do your own then swap. See what you can work out about what's happened without the scene before. If you're working in a group, each write down your guesses for everyone before you confer. It's always amazing to see how little exposition readers actually need!

Have fun!

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Writing Skill: Voice Argument

If you want to practise writing dialogue, here's a lovely free-form way to approach it, which also helps you separate out their voices, and explore the effects on their characterisation: Voice Argument.

So give yourself the writing-gift of ten minutes, grab a cuppa, your pen, and notebook, and curl up to scribble.

To start with, you have two people arguing. You don’t need to worry about who they are; you’ll find out as much you need to from what position they take in the argument. Pick something light for them to argue about, so it’s not too stressful. (Especially if you’re a non-confrontational bunny like me!) For example...

• whether one of them saw a fairy
• when blackberries are best
• the ideal route between point A and point B

or what you will.

Once you’ve chosen the topic, spend five minutes speedwriting just their dialogue: the actual words they speak, not all the "he said / she said" and other bits that go around it. Make it up as you go along and allow their disagreement to generate the content. That’s the wonderful thing about arguments, in writing: once you’ve set up the disagreement, they pretty much write themselves!

Then, once you’ve written for five minutes, pick one voice to make super formal, and the other very casual. If you already have distinctive voices, I’d suggest you change the more formal one to a casual one and vice versa. It’s fascinating to see what happens when we reverse our instinctive choices! Spend the next five minutes rewriting their dialogue, into the two extremes.

For example, my speaker A said:

“No ways! They have to just fall off in your hand or they’re shit!”

Now I need to make that super formal. So…

“Nonsense! If they don’t come away quite easily, they’re simply not edible."

Or I could go right up into the rafters to make it super-super formal:

“I must disagree in the strongest possible terms. The blackberry must yield with not the least particle of force, or it will be entirely unpalatable.”

My speaker B, meanwhile, needs to become super casual. They said:

“But you want some firmness, or they’ll just turn to mush.”

So to make that way more casual...

“Ah, c’mon, they're crap if they’re all squishy like that!”

When you’re done, sit back and reread it. Aloud, if you like: that’s always a great way to hear dialogue. Look at how distinctive they now are. At how the change in register (formality) changes how they come across.

Have fun! 

Why this skill?

This is a great exercise for several things:

• Writing dialogue: It's often helpful to stick to just the spoken words, in the first draft, and add the other stuff in later. That way we can really hear the flow in conversation.
• Separating voices: It's common, when we're writing first draft, to start using similar voices for both characters in a conversation. Afterwards, you can separate them out more consciously.
• The effect of voice on characterisation: As well as making the voices distinctive, it makes such a difference to how we see them! Are you more sympathetic to the formal voice's argument, now, because they sound more educated? Or less so, because they sound pompous? And so on.

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Writing Skill: A Fond Farewell

In the run-up to the Story Elements course, I'm posting a trio of Writing Skills, one a week, to get you exploring the different ingredients that go into story creation: premise • characters • place • time • plot layering • tension & stakes • plot point of view • beginnings • themes & symbols • subplots • detail & dialogue • endings.

Bookings close in just three days!

This week's Writing Skill is A FOND FAREWELL, to play with the final four topics of the course: themes & symbols, subplots, detail & dialogue, and endings. It's also a delightful way of using epistolary fiction (stories told through documents) to make a short story, with a side-helping of exploring subtext, reveals, and voice.

Your character is writing a farewell letter – in which they are (rather badly) hiding that they're in love with the person they're writing to. Their badly-hidden love becomes increasingly clear to the reader, but they remain convinced that they're managing to hide it.

If you prefer writing to discover, you can just leap straight in and find out the rest through writing. Start "Dear H—," and just keep writing. If you get stuck at any point, then have a glance at the suggestions for planning below, to feed in further ideas.

If you prefer to plan a bit first, then take a few minutes to brainstorm / jot down notes around these three things:

• How they're leaving (eg ship, train, plane, etc: whatever appeals to you for vibe / time period)
• Why contact will be difficult once they're gone
• How they know each other (eg visited town, holiday, friend of a friend, roommate, working together on something, went through some hardship together, etc)

I suggest you start writing once you have those bits of info, and let more details emerge through the writing. Planning can be useful to give us enough of a springboard to start writing, but never plan so much that you don't get to make discoveries through the process of the writing itself. Discovering through writing is part of the joy, and what we come up with that way is often more organic. Don't worry if your letter seems to go "off topic": follow it and see where it goes.

If you need more ideas of what to write about, then you could include... 

• their supposed purpose in writing (eg to thank the person, clear something up, info they forgot to pass on when saying goodbye)
• reminiscences of particular moments, objects, etc that they treasured
• things they discussed together before leaving
  
• references to people they both know
  
• their current surroundings and the contrast of that with where they've left
  

Sometimes we can find a story's end through pure writing-to-discover; sometimes we need to step back a moment and do a bit more planning. So...

Towards the end: To make it a short story, you need some sort of pithy ending. Some possible endings you might consider are:

• a reveal (to the reader) that the other person loves them too, though the character writing the letter remains unaware (SO TRAGIC 😭)
• a postscript of how / when / where the letter is found, and by whom (that could be tragic, untragic, or anything in between)
• a factual detail that gives the reader foresight (eg if the ship they're catching is The Titanic) – that could be a date, a place, a specific transport with a famously disastrous end, etc (the delicious chill of prescience)

or anything else that occurs to you!

Why this skill?

This Skill is a lovely organic way to explore the final four elements of stories: themes & symbols, subplots, detail & dialogue, and endings. A letter written by someone in love immediately gives you its theme, whichever approach you take to it, and the intense focus of love, how it latches onto and treasures the smallest objects, will spoil you for choice with symbols. That same focus also allows you to explore detail & dialogue, because every texture of every moment and every word of the beloved's means so much, when a character is smitten – and, of course, the letter itself means you're using the character's voice. Making it a short-story of a letter also lets you explore the possible endings. And through that ending, the letter itself can become a subplot of a larger context: of the person who finds the letter, or the factual detail that tells us the inevitable end.

These are the final four elements we explore in the Story Elements course: live online classes OR in person in Oxford, your choice. Read more about the course and heaps of reviews, and book your place here.

Cracking dialogue scenes

 “It’s our style,” she said brusquely.
     He frowned. “Is it really, though?”
     She laughed scornfully. “Who else’s would it be?”
     “And you haven’t heard these phrases before?” He raised an eyebrow.
     She bit her lip. “Are we badly written?” she said worriedly.
     He shrugged. “I think we’re just first draft.”

Brusquely, scornfully, worriedly; frowning, laughing, shrugging, and eyebrows: that's what first draft is all about. And so it should be! But if we leave it like that, that's not really our style. To launch the online HONE YOUR STYLE workshop, I've got a brace of free Writing Skills for you, to whet your appetite and get you exploring your own sense of style. And here's the second: A Said –ly Hunt, a lovely skill to dramatically improve any dialogue scene.

In first draft, while you're hearing the back and forth of the conversation, and every nuance of every line, all the ___ly words come out to play: said sceptically, said ruefully, said wryly, said drily, said anxiously, said teasingly, said sternly, said brusquely, and so on. That's fine! We're in the thrall of invention; we want to capture everything and get it down on the page. But we don't want to leave it like that.

So in the next draft, we go on a ___ly hunt. (I redraft one scene at a time, before moving on to the next scene, while it's all still fresh and alive in my mind.) And we change all those ___ly words to actions. She said sceptically: She raised her eyebrows. He said sternly: He frowned. She said worriedly: She bit her lip. He said casually: He shrugged.

Better, definitely better, but not the gold standard. Those are still some pretty familiar phrases. And rapidly the scene is a slew of sighing, shrugging, grimacing, head shaking, and a metric ton of eyebrow action. (So many eyebrows.)

A few of those are fine, for transparent prose, but for the most part we want to take it a step further. What would that specific character, in that time and place, do to show that emotion? Here are a few of my recent edits.

     Shakily, she stood up and began packing her writing box with ink, pen, and paper.
     “You don’t need that, you’re taking the afternoon off!”
     “Please,” she said tensely. “I have to have it – I can’t…”

becomes

     Shakily, she stood up and began packing her writing box with ink, pen, and paper.
     “You don’t need that, you’re taking the afternoon off!”
     “Please.” Her hand gripped its side, her knuckles pale. “I have to have it – I can’t…”

In another scene, two lovers have been reunited after a time apart and are sprawled on the mattress catching up.

     “I see. Would this be anything to do with a boatful of treasure belonging to you turning up in front of Culpeper’s at dawn?” she said wryly.
     He smiled ruefully. “I can’t say.”

"said wryly" I just deleted: her words are wry enough on their own. "ruefully": I struggled with that. I had to go back to the underlying meaning: what does it mean for him to smile ruefully? He wants to tell her and can't. He's trying to soften his refusal. Okay…

     “I see. Would this be anything to do with a boatful of treasure belonging to you turning up in front of Culpeper’s at dawn?”
     He hooked his leg over hers, his calf rasping gently against her thigh. “I can’t say.”

These actions are now exactly specific to that character, in that scene, in that location: we're a long way from all-purpose shrugging and eyebrow-raising. And we've moved from some pretty pedestrian first-draft to passable transparent prose to a smooth scene brimming with natural action and bonus characterisation. That's what we're after! What's more, once the character actions are carrying the tone, I can lose some of the other __ly words or all-purpose actions by just crossing them out.

So, that's what we're going to do. If you have a first-draft scene with plenty of dialogue and __ly words / shrugging etc, you can just leap straight into that. Alternately, we can create some first-draft material to play with. Because those character actions are so specific to them, there, then, we need to gather a few things first: two characters, who're chatting; somewhere with stuff for them to do; and something suitably fraught for them to discuss, to bring out all those lovely emotions. So here we go:

• Your two characters: grab two from this handy ran-gen
• Somewhere with stuff for them to do: They're cleaning / clearing out an old workshop. This one, if you like.
• Something suitably fraught to discuss: Their mutual friend has been causing trouble and generally doing wrong. They both like this person, are frustrated with them, and they're at odds for how to approach the situation / what to do about it.

To make this a ten-minuter, spend five minutes writing the scene, completely freely, making sure to include plenty of dialogue and all those ___ly words we use to capture our sense of the tone. Then for the next five minutes, go on a said __ly hunt: what very character-specific and scene-specific actions can you replace those with?

Why this skill?

Honing your style is part discovering our complete and giddying freedom, to write exactly as we please, and part eyeing up and finessing our prose, line by line. That's why we don't want to put the brakes on in first draft: when we let loose, more of our original and unusual phrasing can leap out, because we aren't censoring it. Alongside that, though, comes a rash of familiar copy-paste phrases: phrases we grab ready-made off the language shelf, clichés we dash down as shorthand markers, to hastily capture in words everything we're imagining. Those worn-out workmanlike phrases are like battered scaffolding: they're not pretty; we don't want them to stay there; but we damn well need them while we're still building the thing!

So we write our first drafts with complete freedom, and then we go back and finesse. For everything that's overly familiar, we think: is this what I want, in my style, in this scene? Sometimes, we do: sometimes people shrug. Often, we really did just grab the first phrase to hand and by pushing it further, we can find something far more original, vivid, specific – and unique to our own style.

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Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Layout: THIS is what your book should look like

Proper layout isn't just some finessing to-sort-out thing before you send a manuscript out (like spellcheck and proofreading) - it allows you to do nifty things in your actual writing that you couldn't do without it. Like cut out all those filler scenes. Attribute dialogue with a whole lot less "he said" "she said". Create silence between speech. So whip out your current manuscript. Does it look like this?