Sister Shorthand

I had lunch with my Evil Sister yesterday. She treated, so that makes her slightly less evil. And it was a very expensive lunch, too! Why is my sister Evil? Because our birthdays fall one month and four years apart, and she loves, and I mean LOVES, to emphasize which one of us is OLDER. It's a good think I ordered the expensive shrimp salad.

But as we sat, I noticed how much we talk in shorthand. Sometimes we don't have to finish our train of thought--the other one fills it in. When we talk about a certain relative--they can read this and wonder--we don't have to go through the whole back story, we can cut to the present-day issue.

We couldn't be more different. They don't make 'em any more left-wing liberal than me. She's pretty middle-of-the-road. I am the "flakey, artsy" one. She's a homemaker and really, REALLY good at the job--meant as the highest compliment. You could eat off her floors. Me, you could find the makings of a buffet on my floor, but you wouldn't want to eat it. Me, we have funeral services when the goldfish die. Her? Well, you don't want to know what happened to her beta fish.

And therein, having just been a contest judge not too long ago, is one of the fundamental errors of dialogue. For some writers, it is so natural. The flow, the history, the backstory, the way people who are close to one another KNOW these rich histories in both silly and sad detail, the unresolved crap, and funny stories, the way people simply are. And they have an ability to WRITE that way. So that you BELIEVE that people are actually having this conversation in exactly this way, as if you're just eavesdropping.

And some writers? Filled with tags and falseness. I have NEVER said to my sister, "Well, SIS . . . " I have never said to her, "Remember that time when we did this or that as a family in the summer of 1972, you would have been 6 then, and if you remember, that was the year you loved the Beatles, and . . . ." In families, there's a shorthand. Our role as writer is to write the dialogue in a way that is utterly natural . . . and yet doesn't leave the reader TOO far out in the Land of Confusion. It's a fine line, and I think it's either easy for you or it isn't.

I don't need to be told cops and undertakers have a morbid sense of humor. Just let the dialogue tell me that. I don't need to be told teachers sometimes bring home this sing-song kindergarten-teacher voice to their own families. Show it. Let the dialogue do its dance. Sisters are close? Show it.

True story . . . once I brought an old boyfriend home with me for a weekend. My sisters (I have two) hadn't seen each other--all in the same room--in a while, at least 8 or 9 months at that point. I had long since moved out, one was off in college, and so on. We were excited to see each other and conversation flew. About five minutes into it, he started laughing. I asked him why, and he said (remember, my sisters and I are New Yorkers), "I JUST realized you were speaking English."

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

"This whole time, you three were talking so fast, it didn't sound like English. I assumed you lapsed into Polish or Russian when you were all together."

THAT'S how fast we spoke, like some strange staccatto.

Capturing "THAT" precise way of family and friends . . . is the writer's task.

So tell me . . . do you notice clunky dialogue? Doyou speak shorthand with someone? And how does this all translate into your dialogue?

Moments

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave,

find your eternity in each moment.

~Henry David Thoreau

Not only is this a great quote for how to live your life, but for how to write dialogue.

Last night, Oldest Daughter wanted help procrastinating. This basically means she comes in and flops on my king-size bed and insists on talking to me, even though I am clearly just a few deep breaths away from falling asleep. When I point out the obvious to her, she says, "No. Hang out with me." Note this was 11:00 p.m. Did I mention I rise at 5:30 a.m. and SHE is a night owl/musician?

Anyway, TV got flicked on and she breezed through channels, and all I got to see was ONE minute of the Movie Independence Day. But . . . it was a great moment of dialogue, in an otherwise popcorn flick.

In the scene, Jeff Goldblum (and can I tell you, I think he's sexy?) is riding his bike into the office--into the actual office, amongst the cubicles and so on. Riding bike must mean he takes his dedication to the environment seriously, folks. That's "movie speak" for "hippie." His assistant, played by my adored Harvey Fierstein, follows him around with that VOICE of his, telling him how the entire world is about to blow up or whatever. And in the midst of it, Jeff Goldblum notices someone didn't stick a can in the recycling bin. He makes a decent wisecrack, puts it in the bins, and the conversation keeps rolling without missing a beat. And on we go to find out that YES, MY GOD, aliens are about to eat us all alive, and YES, MY GOD, this brainy fellow is the one to save us all. But now, in the span of 30 seconds or so, we know his "type."

It was a moment. A non-writer wouldn't even notice. Hell, had I been SLEEPING and not forced to watch it, I wouldn't have noticed.

But the point is . . . so often when I am critiquing manuscripts (and right now I am doing the "contest judge" thing), I see HUGE back story dumps. If I was going to say what gets axed with my red pen more than anything else? Back story dumps. And writers hate parting with them. "But NOOOOOOOOOOO, I MUST tell the reader about his childhood on the banks of Lake Huron. It's important to the story later, on page 349."

Um. No.

Here's the thing, like our pal Thoreau, like the B-movie popcorn spectacle, look for MOMENTS. Drop the hint, move on. A line of dialogue could tell you more than an entire page of back story if done right.

I've used before as an example that I had to, in each book, tell the reader that Billie Quinn was a genius. It IS important, and while you might discern that after reading 300 pages, I, as author, don't have time for you all to get up to speed. I need you to know that early on. So it's her BEST FRIEND who tells us that. Billie, who narrates, tells the reader that Lewis LeBarge is a genius. She just flat out tells us he is the smartest man she's ever met, than most human beings will ever meet. He's the lab director, so even from a non-partisan viewpoint, he must not be dumb. And then at SOME point early on in the books, he says, in a throwaway line, something like, "Just because you're the ONLY human being who can keep up with my brain doesn't mean . . . " or "Shut up, I know your IQ is that high but it doesn't mean . . ." A moment of dialogue. I don't have to tell you her test scores, the scholarship she got, her academic background. None of it. A line. A moment.

Back to life. Find your eternity in a moment this weekend. I often find them in sticky kisses from Demon Baby. But wherever you find it . . . peace and joy, my friends.

Thoughts? What are your "eternity moments"? And how do you put in single moments in your writing?

More Editing How-To's: Dialogue

More editing how-to's.

I like writing that is spare and lean. And there's nothing worse than looking at a page full of "he said's" and "she said's" when reading dialogue. However, I remember when I was first writing, I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out how to write lengthy dialogue without the occasional reminder for the reader of who the heck was talking. That's when I learned to tie an action to a speaker. When I became an editor, I found out most of the publishers I worked with preferred this method, too. And when authors didn't so do, when they had a lot of he saids and she saids, their dialogue somehow seemed "clunkier."

Okay, so how do you do this?

"I don't understand why you are so damn difficult."
"That's part of my charm."

This has no identifiers. Now, if this was part of lengthy dialogue, you wouldn't want to have a whole bunch of lines without knowing who was speaking. Ever do that "line counting" thing? Going backward in dialogue when you are reading to figure out who the heck is speaking? That's not good either. And you like to know who speaks first.

"I don't understand why you are so damn difficult," he said.
"That's part of my charm," she replied.

Kind of clunky. And if you have a lot of he saids/she replied/he offered/she added, it gets even clunkier. Plus you run out of different ways to basically say "he said." So you tie an action to the speaker.

He reached for case file. "I don't understand why you are so damn difficult."
"That's part of my charm."

There's no confusion, but you eliminate he said/she said entirely. He has the action. It's his dialogue. He owns it by default there. You can even put the action after the piece of dialogue.

"I don't understand why you are so damn difficult." He picked up the case folder and flung it across the room.
"That's part of my charm."

I understand that an occasional he said/she said is a quick touchpoint in dialogue. But when I edit and see a ton of dialogue "markers," I usually tell writers to get rid of them, and this is the method most often used.

Any other dialogue tricks up your sleeve? Do you do that "line counting" thing in dialogue-heavy books? (Or am I the only one?) Thoughts?

Peace,
E

It's All About the Details

The picture at left is not my dad, but it is my dad's apartment when he was a kid. That couch was his bed. Yes, take a good look at those cushions.

Now here's the thing, we used to go visit my grandmother in the city when I was little, and she was still in the same coldwater tenemant flat. And so when I wrote scenes in The Roofer, set in apartments like that, or bars like John's, the details were dead on. My father used to make fun of a certain writer who I don't want to defame here, who interviewed my dad's friends for a certain book about the Westies. And they all told him lies. On purpose. To see which ones would make it in his book. Said book is now being made into a movie. He's the screenwriter. He THINKS he knows these guys, but guess what?

You see, whether it's the underbelly of New York, or writing about diving off the coast of Costa Rica, or performing brain surgery . . . you have to get the details right. And that's more than just research. When I wrote Mafia Chic, I heard from a lot of restaurant workers who loved the details of the kitchen crew. Guys missing fingers, guys with dredlocks and blasting music as they prepped, whatever. It was born out of my working in restaurants. But it wasn't about the recipes, or the "front of house" details. That crew in the kitchen was what made that book real. I KNOW those guys.

On the flip side, I've edited manuscripts for aspiring authors with plot holes . . . but honest to God, a plothole is often fixable. You might need to adjust said plot, but you can often fix it with an inserted chapter, or finessing a scene. But there is NO fix, other than completely rewriting, someone who doesn't get the flavor right. Who can't describe gritty in a way that is really gritty. Who gives mobbed-up guys dialogue that sounds either like college-educated former choir boys, or so Joe Pesci as to be a cariacature. Research can only take you so far. THAT'S what they don't tell you about writing . . . that's what classes on writing don't reveal. That's, I might opine, the difference between writing talent and just being able to write. You can research until you have notebooks full of it. But if you don't get the street language just so, if you can't get the cadence of the dialogue right, you're just not re-creating that world. You can bog a scene down with all the details you want, but if you can't BE in that world and that scene in a more visceral sense, I think you're just reporting.

Thoughts?

Someone Once Said . . .

I've decided to try to dig up some good quotes about writing and process and share them every once in a while. My first quote comes from a true writing genius:

I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard

I chose Elmore's quote because I definitely have learned a few things about writing from things he's said in interviews, books he's written. And this one quote really speaks to me.

Why?

Because my name is Erica Orloff, and I am a skipper. (Heretofore an ANONYMOUS skipper, but now I've admitted it. And that I am powerless to change the way I read.)

Can't help it. A book has to be extraordinary for me to read every word. Otherwise, I skip.

But more than that, as a writer, this is my style. When Spanish Disco first came out (my very first novel), I got a lot of very nice emails from readers who liked the edginess of it. I got a great blurb in Cosmopolitan magazine. I was thrilled to have my first novel out there. It was also at the relative beginnings of chick lit in the U.S.--not that I think you can pin it on a single date or year or book. Nonetheless, when you went to the bookstore, there weren't row upon row of pink covers (not that mine was pink) in trade size flooding the new release table. Chick lit was hot. And a few readers DEFINITELY let me know that I had a lot of nerve thinking my book was chick lit.

Well, the problem was, I never had. I wrote a comedy. I never considered genre--I just happened to try to sell an edgy comedy when that was what publishers were buying--and marketing. But Spanish Disco, as one online reviewer wrote, didn't have the Sex and the City vibe. There were no name brands mentioned. No parties. No wildly funny friends. No Cosmopolitans. None of that. Part of it was Cassie Hayes, my heroine, was a tequila-swilling b*tch and a loner. Part of it was I don't particularly care about any of those things--name brands and Cosmos. That would be the part I skipped.

So I left all that "skip" stuff out. In fact, as I went on to write 5 more novels for Red Dress Ink, with one exception, none of them had that vibe. Because that would be the part I skipped. I don't drown people in details. I can't read historicals for precisely that reason.

And therein is part of it, too. People who like historicals would NEVER skip the details. That's part of what they love. Me, I like dialogue. The more realistic the better. And I skip to that part. It's all subjective.

So . . . do you skip? What parts? And do you find you hack away at the "skip" parts in your own work?