http://www.sfnovelists.com/2012/05/25/the-skill-list-project-dialogue-preliminaries/

http://www.sfnovelists.com/?p=9053

This is another post in The Skill List Project: an attempt to list all the skills involved in writing and selling fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. Last time, I suggested we might take a look at dialogue this month…and since I haven’t come up with an excuse that will let me avoid it, I suppose I should bite the bullet and talk about talking. (It’s difficult to talk while biting a bullet, but I’ll soldier on.)

Opening Formalities

The most basic requirement for writing dialogue is getting the punctuation right. As I noted in a posting earlier in this series, punctuating dialogue isn’t rocket science, but a lot of novices get it wrong. Unless you’re William Gaddis, you don’t have the option of making up your own punctuation rules—get one of the reference books I mentioned in the post on punctuation, and follow the rules exactly. Getting “creative” with dialogue punctuation won’t make an editor think well of you.

As another opening formality, I’ll honor tradition by acknowledging that written dialogue is a very different beast from actual speech. Every how-to-write book in the world spends multiple paragraphs soliloquizing about how real-life speech is full of, “Um, ahh, er, y’know, huh, <pause>, right?” not to mention inelegant sentence fragments, repetitive redundant repetitions, and other such infelicities. We seldom notice them in everyday conversation, but these verbal tics would drive us to the brink of homicide if they were faithfully transcribed onto the page.

An occasional, “Um,” or incoherence can be useful for characterization, setting a tone, or establishing an air of authenticity. However, use such tricks sparingly: as spice, not the bulk of the meal. Like so much else in fiction, you can write dialogue that feels real without slavishly reproducing reality.

…And Anyway Reality is Overrated

Sometime, even feeling realistic is not your goal. Since I recently saw The Avengers, let me talk about the dialogue in that:

• Thor speaks in “high fantasy hero” dialect: flowery, with few contractions and no slang.
• Loki speaks in “high fantasy villain” dialect: lengthy sentences with heightened vocabulary and the sense that he’s always giving a speech rather than having a conversation.
• Tony Stark speaks in Smartass: almost everything he says is a joke (and lucky for the audience, most of his lines are actually funny).
• Coloney Fury speaks in Badass…although maybe that has nothing to do with the words in the script and everything to do with Samuel L. Jackson.

Other characters speak more “realistically”: their lines are still distinctive (Captain America’s boy-next-door wholesomeness is very different from Black Widow’s “Am I the only adult in the room?” way of speaking) but the characters have more everday believability compared to Thor, Loki, Stark and Fury.

Is it bad that some characters don’t speak believably? It depends on the context and your artistic goals. This is easiest to see in wisecracking characters like Tony Stark. In real life, someone who manages a good punchline every five minutes probably has a reputation for being a really funny person. In comedy, however, going five minutes between laughs is a disaster. Comic characters are usually impossibly witty…and we love them for it.

“Good” Dialogue

This raises the question: what is good dialogue? For an answer, I’m going to borrow some ideas I got from Steven Brust at an SF convention some years ago. Brust was talking about what makes good characterization, but I think his insights are also applicable to dialogue. I’m going to steal them, and adapt them for my purposes here.

Brust observed that people use the word “good” to mean several different things, some of which may be partly or wholly incompatible with each other. “Good” can mean:

• Believable: In the case of dialogue, this sounds like real people talking. You can imagine yourself or your friends saying more or less the same things.
• Entertaining: We like hearing this kind of talk, often because it’s humorous, but alternatively because it’s badass or poetic, charming or endearing. Such dialogue is often unrealistic—too slick or poignant to be true—but we don’t care.
• Likeable or Fascinating: Some voices just grab you. I felt that way as soon as I started reading N. K. Jemisin‘s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I can’t put my finger on why the narrator’s speech is so compelling, but her voice simply caught my attention and I had to keep reading. In Samuel R. Delany‘s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, there’s a fabulous monologue from a criminal named Clym the Professional¹ that has stuck in my mind for almost thirty years because of its sheer audacious weirdness…and speaking of weirdness, who can ignore the dialogue from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass? Both those books became classics precisely because the dialogue was like nothing anyone had ever heard before.

Preliminaries Over…Next Time Down to Work

Given that “good” dialogue is resistant to definition, what can we say about the skill of writing it? That’s a question I’ll look at in my posting next month. In the meantime, I’ll ask you readers for your ideas: what books (SF or not) are notable for having dialogue that works?

¹ Actually, the superscript doesn’t mean a footnote. You’ll have to read the book to find out why, but in the novel’s world, every job title has a superscript number. ↩

I probably shouldn't review the book yet because I haven't actually finished it, but I plan to finish it tonight and I don't think the last 20 pages are going to change my opinion of it.

In the Beginning... by Isaac Asimov is one of the most fascinating books I've read, and I want to write this about it because nothing I've seen about it has described it accurately.

The description is that it's a comparison between the book of Genesis and the current scientific theory about the origin of the cosmos. It starts out like that, but it pretty rapidly switches away from that model (which is good because that would get tiresome after a few dozen pages) and into an in-depth, unapologetically-secular, line-by-line analysis of Genesis.

What we call the book of Genesis is actually two documents, referred to as the P-document and the J-document. Together these are probably the oldest written records of (our) civilization, chronicling the tribes settled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Parts of the two documents are garbled and nonsensical, and Asimov tries to speculate on what they might mean, but doesn't pull any punches assuming that the documents themselves are wrong (as opposed to them holding divine meaning we can't comprehend). Parts of them contradict each other or have glaring translation errors, but the book isn't mean-spirited about it. Far from being focused on disproving the creation story, he just tries to explain what it might mean.

I really wish that he had done a book like this for other parts of the bible, like the gospels, or revelations. It would have been really fascinating.

Edit: Oh, apparently he did.

This entry was originally posted here, where there are comments.

Cover art for my novelette "Faster Gun,"  (Working title: "John Henry Holliday is Sick of the These Time-Traveling Assholes") forthcoming on Tor.com this summer.

The artist is Richard Anderson.

Hey, listen up, true believers.

GAME OF THRONES won the Stan Lee Award for Best Television Program.

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2012/05/scott-snyder-and-sara-pichelli-dominate-stan-lee-awards/

It's not a No-Prize, but it's pretty cool.

'Nuff said.

Survived 16 hrs of travel, a week at the beach with a flaky net connection and four people trying to download and play Diablo 3, 30 hours in Richmond, an all-too-compressed few days in the DC area, work, and a fairly easy flight from National to Madison. Am now At Wiscon, more or less.

Been reading everything that goes by on DW/LJ, even though I've not been posting. Been recuperating. Starting to feel like a human being again. Not being At Work has been good for me, I think.

Will write more, later.

Original post at Dreamwidth | comments | Comment there or here

I'm working on "The Deeps of the Sky" tonight, and generating a regular festival of Words Word Don't Know:

luminesced, tropopause, sheeny, thicks, unnavigable, dartlike,

Meanwhile, I had a little argument with myself on twitter as to whether I should use some modestly bogus science to create a cool special effect. I went with it. ;-) Now I'm stopping because I have to figure out how the protagonist intervenes to stop the Bad Thing from happening, or how he mops up afterward...

Oh, I might have just done so. Woot!

http://www.sfnovelists.com/2012/05/23/a-post-in-which-you-tell-me-about-self-promotion/

http://www.sfnovelists.com/?p=9049

This is a totally self-serving post, even more than usual.  I have a new book coming out in just under six weeks, and I am wondering if all of you readers out there can suggest ways in which I might convince you to buy my book.  Seriously.  Self-promotion is one of those things that authors are told we HAVE to do.  And yet, we face the same problem with every book we publish:  Even if we spend every waking hour devoting ourselves to publicizing our latest release, we can only reach a small segment of the reading public.  Put another way, we self-promote because we’re told that we should, and because, frankly, we have to do SOMETHING around release day, because if we don’t we start going crazy.  But many of us, myself included, come to doubt whether our efforts are worth the time and energy and emotion that we expend on them.  Self-promotion is a ton of work, and sometimes the payoff is not readily apparent.  And so, I want your help with this.  Among the many things we try to do, which ones actually reach you?

Let me tell you a bit about the novel and what I’m doing for it.  The book is called THIEFTAKER, and it will be out on July 3.  It is the first of a series of historical urban fantasies that I will publishing under a new pseudonym, D.B. Jackson.  So, new book, new series, new pen name — this is a pretty big moment in my career.  I am doing everything I can think of to get the word out.  I’ll be signing books in a number of places throughout July and early August; I’ll be attending conventions later in the summer and fall; I have promotional postcards to send out and give away at all my appearances; I’m having t-shirts made that I will sell and also use for promotional giveaways; I’ll be doing what has come to be known as a blog tour, meaning that I’ll be posting interviews and essays and character interviews on various websites and blogger sites throughout June and July.  In addition, of course, I have my own webite, blog, Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads accounts; I have sample chapters posted online (so does Tor Books, my publisher); Tor is sponsoring a book giveaway at Goodreads; I have published a couple of short stories in the Thieftaker universe, one at Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and another (forthcoming in June) at Tor.com.  And yes, I’m using this portion of this post to plug the book and the various sites I’ve mentioned.  So sue me . . .

But the question I asked at the outset is a serious one.  What things that an author does to self-promote are most likely to catch your eye?  Even with all those things I’m doing, which are taking up lots of time and which are the focus of my entire summer, I feel that I am not going to reach enough people to have a serious impact on my sales.  Do you care about signings?  Do you pick up free postcards or bookmarks when you see them at a convention or a bookstore?  Would you buy an author/book t-shirt if it was cool enough? If you have a favorite blog that you read on a regular basis, do guest writers excite you or annoy you?  Yes, okay:  It depends upon the guest.  But is your initial reaction to seeing a guest post “Oh, cool!” or “Ugh, why can’t I just read something from the person whose blog I came to see?”  Do you ever read sample chapters before buying a book?  Or are you an impulse buyer, who sees something online or in a bookstore and takes it off the shelf because of a cool cover?  Do blurbs from other authors ever influence your choices? (Because believe me:  We spent a good deal of effort getting lots of cover blurbs for THIEFTAKER.)

Lots of times, these posts are designed to give information — tips on writing, insights into the publishing industry, stuff like that.  This time it’s your turn to give some information to us.  Personally, I would be incredibly grateful for any and all feedback you can provide.  My career success — and that of my SFNovelists colleagues — could be helped by your answers.  Thanks in advance for your responses.

Oh, and if you happen to be looking for something to read this summer, please check out THIEFTAKER, by D.B. Jackson.  It comes out on July 3.

David B. Coe
http://www.DavidBCoe.com
http://www.dbjackson-author.com

Originally posted by will_couvillier at James Gunn's Online Workshop