-1/09/09

Currently I have drafts of the next three Thyself Known chapters (11,12, and 13) and a draft of the next Oyu no Ranma chapter.

Thyself Known is a little frustrating to me, because the way I see it, I haven't even gotten to the really good part yet. And I have to keep my musings from steering the plot car away from where I want it to go. Right now my guess is TK is going to end up with 30 chapters.

Having read through TK myself to refresh myself on what's going on with the character and sech, I couldn't help noticing the way my writing style changed over the years. For those of you who tried reading the first chapter and found it a bit, shall we say, bad, please keep in mind that eight years pass between the first and last chapters. There couple things I've noticed that I'm embarrased about. One is that the first few chapters I mix POVs a BUNCH. For those of you who are new to writing, POV is point of view. It's generally bad to go from one POV to another willy nilly, because it causes confusion. Its a bit like one of those video games that try for cinematic camera angles, but don't quite do it right and you're left trying to figure out where you are while zombies or whatever are killing you. Most of the time, maybe its fine, but then there's that low bridge or a doorway. Same thing with POV shifts. Most of the time its not really a big deal, but whenever there's complicated action going on, or a larger than normal level of introspection it really helps to have it be clear who is experience/doing what's being talked about.

POV shifting is what I would call a secondary problem with a story. The kind of thing that a casual reader might not even notice per se, but that if fixed, makes the story clearer, and consequently more enjoyable. I think most of the problems with the early chapters of TK are in this category. So it's not THAT bad, but still.

A primary problem would be something that causes a reader to stop reading regardless of whether they're critiquing the story or not. One of these, related to the POV shift is the dialogue bleed through problem, which I see from time to time in fanfics and other amateur writing projects. This is where you have two or more characters speaking and at some point the reader loses track of who is speaking what. I've actually encountered this in published fiction a number of times and it always frustrated me to no. If you have been told you have this problem or suspect that you do, here's what you do about it.

1. Make sure that when a different character speaks, you start a different paragraph. This is the least you can do. It doesn't solve the problem, but if you don't do this, then it's going to be a problem. And quotation marks. You really must use quotation marks. It's tempting to say that people who don't use quotation marks are in some way unintelligent, but in my experience this is not necessarily so.

Who are you? I'm Batman.

is a lot different from:

"Who are you?"

"I'm Batman."

2. Describe what the characters are doing before or after they speak. This serves to both identify who's speaking and give the reader more information about them. This is something I still struggle with, because it's sometimes difficult to shove a description in the middle of dialogue especially when you feel like you're really rolling, but it makes the fiction better and it does break things up quite as much as you think when you're writing.

The man dangled desperately from the dark figure's grip over the vat of acid. "Who are you?"

The cowled head of the figure descended, and the man could see bloodshot eyes underneath the mask. "I am Batman."

3. As a last resort, if there is no other way to indicate who is saying what, use a dialogue tag (Mark said, Sam protested etc.) This is a last resort because it is a crutch and because if you use too many dialogue tags it quickly becomes annoying. Also I recently found out Michael R. Menengay of the Dragonpage podcast doesn't like them, so I'm going on a low dialogue tag diet. I kind of miss the tags whenever I get rid of them though. One thing is sure, you don't want too many dialogue tags, but perhaps getting rid of them entirely isn't good either.

4. If two of your characters are having a heated argument or something, all you need to do is separate what they say into different paragraphs for each speaker. Descriptions, and even dialogue tags, slow the pace down. By the same token if you want two characters to have a thoughtful conversation about their feelings, use more descriptions, otherwise it will feel rushed. Even if you want a very fast paced interchange however, after about four or six lines of dialogue, bleed through becomes more of a danger, so you really have to take a small moment to indicate who's saying what.

"Dweeb."

"Fartface"

"Maggot."

"Maybe you are but what am I?"

"A maggot."

"Maybe you are but what am I?"

Alice had enough. She was going end this debate once and for all. "A pretty pretty princess."

"Maybe you are but..."

"Why thank you!" Alice curtseyed.

Tom crossed his arms in protest."That wasn't fair!"

5. Another thing you can do is give your characters distinct speech patterns, but this really only helps in a small fraction of scenarios and it can lead to problems. I would say this is especially true in Ranma fanfiction. Ranma is always cutting off the 'g's on -ing words, Akane is always saying "honestly!", Ukyou says "sugar", and Kasumi goes "oh my." You can practically make a new version of Old McDonald with Ranma characters. Which is fine, except that there is a point where these affectations stop being characterizations and start to become gross exaggerations and caricatures. If you are sticking to the slapstick comedic route of canon, its fine, but if you want to do something deeper, they can distract from what you're trying to do.

That's it for this edition of Zorknot's tips for writing. Join us next time when we discuss what to do when plots don't behave. Hopefully I'll have figured that one out by then.

-Zorknot