I'm not really sure whether action is the meat and dialogue is the potatoes or whether it's the other way around. Either way, jarring action and natural dialogue are both indispensable to good narrative. That goes for nonfiction and fiction alike. But when it comes to dialogue, how natural is too natural? An "Um" here, a nervous pause there, that makes your characters sound like fallible human beings instead of programmed automatons. But how much is too much? Well, my finding is that "just barely" is exactly enough. Mark Twain is probably the sterling example of this. Pick up "Huckleberry Finn", for example, and every line of dialogue you will read will have "just barely" any Mississippi River in it. But that "just barely" is all it takes. Any more than that, and you can experiment yourself to find out, would destroy the book's pacing and have you putting it down after less than a paragraph.
Oh..well..layer it, y'know, like, the cops squeaks out his gas chasing the jewel thief. Maybe he's eating a chili dog too. Or else, chop up your overlong movie up into a duology. Worked for Kill Bill.
Seems to me that would depend on the pace you are trying to maintain. Not every bit of good writing is loaded with "jarring action" and often, even when you have considerable action, it's jarring BECAUSE it's coming at a different pace than the more dialogue heave bits. One might consider, for an easy point of reference, almost any episode of Firefly, but to step away from the potential tangent there - let's take a classic Trek episode like "Balance of Terror" or "Errand of Mercy" The bits that were dialogue heavy, such as Kirk's exchange with Kor, are not rushed because of the need to maintain pace with the action. It's the contrast between the two that is effective, IMO. Even when the dialogue is in the midst of the action, unless the physical exertion of the character demands a more clipped delivery, you don't need to rush the scene - consider McClain's dialogue in "Die Hard" for example. Now, I've cited film examples but I'd say that in a novel you need to be even more aware of that because your dialogue has to communicate more than what's being SAID - it also has to convey things like mood, the character's impressions of each other, and so forth. All without being TOO expository. A long winded way of saying that YES a narrative pace is important, but it need not be a similar pace to the action bits. IMO of course
^^All good points. And maybe I wasn't as clear as I could have been on what I mean by "tight" pacing. Tight pacing doesn't always have to be "rapid fire" -- but every written word counts.
I don't claim expertness on this subject, but I'd say don't overdo speech affectations or accents, or they become obstructive and annoying. Scotty doesn't really say "Sair, muh wee bairns canna' handle any more!" In The Shining, Stephen King had the maintenance man at the Overlook Hotel refer to a set of ducts as "ducks" and that was the only real obvious affectation in that character's speech...and I thought that was perfect. I wouldn't add any "ums" or "ers" unless you really want to emphasize that a character is trying to come up with what to say.
Ah yes, i see. While i consider myself pretty good at dialogue (for an amateur at least) I don't ever try to "write accent" or any such things, but I do use regional speech patterns when they make sense (and admittedly, i almost never create characters from, for instance, New Jersey or someplace where i don't know the idioms well*) for instance - older people around here would say someone "took sick" where maybe others wouldn't. but as for the "make every word count" point - I think that's a very valid concern. The only place i could see including a lot of "um" or "er" type stuff is if it was character or situation specific, as an exception. maybe the character has a speech impediment or some mental affliction (in the way Raymond tended to repeat stuff in "Rain Man") or perhaps you are trying to communicate embarrassment or shyness on the part of the speaker. But what makes it work in those cases is how rarely they are used. So I think you have the right idea in that you want to convey the broadest possible amount of information in the fewest words when doing dialogue. A related thought, for me, is how to integrate necessary exposition into "ordinary" conversation. Generally, it seems to me, people in fiction tend to "exposite" a lot more than is natural. *made myself think of a question - is there a resource for writers where one can look up regional idioms and so forth? 'twould be mighty helpful.
The spoonful of sugar you need to help the medicine of exposition go down is action. Doesn't have to be "stuff blowing up" action, although if you could weave exposition into that, it'd be a hell of an interesting read. An example: Depict your character dressing a wound while at the same time allowing an internal monologue about how the character got wounded. Through that monologue, get your exposition done through inference, which you can then confirm later in direct dialogue between characters. *This ought to provide you with at least a jumping-off point for more research on regional dialects.
I think I am pretty good at the "internal dialogue" sort of exposition, and I know it's the standard format - but it's a place where i watch myself carefully lest i try to cram too much into the opportunity. In the project i'm working on, I want to tell you the reader something about the background of my protagonist, who's a reporter. I have the sheriff refer to him with a (in the sheriff's view) mocking nickname, and the first time we hear it i take the opportunity to "IM" the origin of the nickname which is the shell for telling you what i want you to know about the guy's background. Pretty standard stuff - I just have to break it up into the right sized chunks so that, as you say, i do not bog down the narrative. At least, in my own biased view.
Yeah, it's probably -- and I'm just guessing here, but it seems like a good guess -- a pretty commonplace issue with most writers. We've got this Amazingly Cool Idea! Obviously, or we wouldn't be spending months devoted to that idea. The problem is, we want to give away that amazingly cool idea instead of drawing it out over 100,000 words. But drawing it out at the right pace is exactly what you have to do if you want to keep the reader until the last page. It's like coming up with the best joke you ever heard and then forcing yourself to spend two hours telling it and withholding the punchline. Obviously, if you tried that with a joke or with a conversational anecdote, you lose your listeners. I think that we as writers instinctively hold to that "get to the punch line" thinking as we write. But here's the thing -- you don't have to. In fact, it's literary suicide if you do. So work the exposition in, but only as absolutely necessary, and don't ever feel that conflict through dialogue and action won't hold your readers from tidbit to tidbit.
The Shining's maintenance man saying "ducks" is spot-on. Many blacks call a catalytic converter a "cadillac converter" call shrimp "scrimp" and clinometers "kilometers." Not poking fun, that's just the way many of them talk. Anywho, Quentin Tarantino is a terrible dialogue abuser IMO.
I think it's because he's a terrible "talker" himself. Listen to the Jackrabbit Slim's scene in Pulp Fiction. Uma Thurman's dialogue sounds exactly like Tarantino speaks.
Read it aloud. If you find yourself stumbling over it, or thinking If I met this character IRL I'd want to kill him, rework it. Also, ask yourself if it conveys the information you want to convey or if it's meandering all over the page. If the latter, start slashing. That's all you really need to do in print fiction. Oh, that and avoid the cutesy tendency to write pages and pages and pages of dialogue without any narrative in between or even a "he said/she said," so that halfway down the page the reader not only can't tell who's speaking, but doesn't care. In scripts, you need a few extra levels of caution. (A) Is an actor able to say these lines convincingly? (B) Is the director likely to chop things for pacing? And, most importantly, (C) Can these lines be heard and understood by the audience? If not, get back to work.
^I read that Harrison Ford complained about George Lucas' screenplay during the filming of Star Wars by saying "You can write this shit, George, but you sure can't say it."
Sometimes, every once in a while, you WANT a guy to be one you'd want to kill in real life - but only for a purpose. I do take your meaning. I'm probably pontificating in this thread too much, but this is one of two areas i think I'm well above average at - the ACTION stuff, particularly as it drives the plot - THAT is where I'm weak. Plotting, on the whole, can be a weakness depending on the type of story. (that is, i know what the overall story is, but sometimes not how to get through the more dramatic and climactic parts to the end) The other big problem i THINK I'll have but have never finished enough to find out, is cutting. I tend to be very impressed with large sections of my work and i anticipate pain and suffering when i inevitably have to cut.
Richard Schiff did an interview on one of the extra content DVDs for The West Wing, where he talks about developing Toby Ziegler's peculiar speech pattern because, unlike Brad Whitford and Allison Janney, he couldn't spit out those loooong Aaron Sorkin monologues in a single breath. True...I should have made exception for that. It's a neat trick, too, if you can pull it off without making the reader want to throw the book across the room. Cheap and dirty solution...make a list of your three favorite movies and/or TV episodes. Watch them over and over again and, if you can, get ahold of the scripts (many are available as free downloads) and figure out what makes them tick. Sometimes it's hard to quantify; you just know it works. It could be a matter of pacing, something unexpected flying over the transom, a line of dialogue or even a glance that pokes one of the characters enough to make him heave the poker table over and start shooting up the saloon. Once you've got the key to what makes that scene work, use it in your own work. What are the triggers you've built into each of your characters that will make them snap or make them do a 180 and turn their lives around, or make them jump into the frozen river and save a guy who's twice their size, even though they can't swim? Sometimes that's easier in script form, because you can just suggest it (REACTION: John. Something snaps. Jumps in river, grabs Jesse by the hair.), whereas in print you've got to spell it out. What I do is slow my internal "camera" down. People in crisis are running on adrenalin, so everything around them slows down. If you as the author write it that way, that gives it a kind of internal integrity. Short sentences, though. Oy, don't we all! And you never really get over that, but there's a point where you know it has to be done, and you learn to distinguish the flowers from the weeds. Still hard to do without whimpering just a little, though.
A video instructor of mine called the process of editing out parts you like but know must be sacrificed "murdering your children."
...I've never cut anything...either that means I'm brilliant, or shitty...no middle ground there.. Or..I'm such a procrastinator, maybe I did all the editing in my head before I finally sat down to write the thing..2 years later...
Maybe that's why it's a weakness. I can't remember any TV show or movie that i like BECAUSE of the action. I love characters and stories and meaning, admittedly most would be unsatisfying without some action but it's sort of a subtext to the story. for instance, one of my favorite movies is Braveheart - and yes, obviously, there will be a battle scene or whatever, but the reason i love it is for scenes like the horseback speech, or when he tells the guy to present himself before the Scots and kiss his own arse. One of the first novel-length stories i ever attempted had an action scene just as you mentioned in the prologue - the whole "time slowing down" business. it was, in real time, a very short event but it was key to the evolution of the protagonist. I CAN (pretty easily) write such a scene when I have a "feel" that one's called for. what I perceive as a weakness is that often my conception of a story doesn't often have an obvious natural place for action - and I worry that the reader will feel the book is just 30 chapters of talk-talk with very little actually happening.
For one thing, gratuitous action scenes can be annoying. (I think of Alexander's line in Galaxy Quest, "Well, I see you managed to get your shirt off!") Then we get down to the definition of "action," and what type or genre of story you're trying to tell. A mystery novel, for example, requires some sense of jeopardy, either to the protagonist or to the killer's potential future victim, or both, but the major part of the story-telling is in unraveling the clues. You can build suspense by *implying* that the killer is lying in wait about to dispatch the detective with an ax if s/he gets too close to the truth, but you don't necessarily have to follow through or, if you do, it can be a quick swing and THUMP at the end of a chapter. Then you can drive the reader nuts by seguing into a flashback or a subplot and keep them guessing, or just be kind and tell them at the start of the next chapter whether it was the detective or the killer or even a third party whose body just hit the floor. The same pretty much holds true for a thriller. Replace "serial killer" with "terrorist", "mad bomber," or "master spy about to plant a virus that will destroy the entire security system," and there's your action. A horror novel, OTOH, pretty much requires you to write the scene where the good guys dispatch the zombies moment by moment. The action in a s/f novel can be nothing more drastic than the slow leak of oxygen that gives the characters on the space station less than two hours to live. How they act/react/interact in those two hours is your action. And a so-called "mainstream" novel, i.e., a straightforward telling of the stories of people going about their everyday lives without the trappings of genre fiction, can have subtle bits of action strewn throughout that aren't melodramatic, but that have an impact on the plot and characters: "Lisa replayed the voicemail yet again. She paused a moment, then erased it. Jerry would never know his father had called just before his plane went down. Her secret was safe, for now."
One of my favorite bits of dialogue to write is when a character unexpectedly "loses it" on the person they are speaking to. One bit in that first book (that i lost) that I liked had a guy who'd stopped in to a diner or convince store or something, having bought gas, and the girl at the register noted his car and the discussion evolved into her brother (or dad) had one like it. At some point - I don't remember the details - one said something to the other that pushed a button...maybe something about drunk driving or some such, and the other one just went completely off on them. It was as close to a perfect scene maybe as i've ever written. it was dramatic, in one sense it was "action" (in that it was a divergence from the previous rhythm of the story - but it was all dialogue.
Oh lord, that's slowing me down with "House of Cats" . . . every time I sit down to work on it, I wind up changing stuff in the last few paragraphs . . . Just need to ignore that shit and plow straight thru, at least get the damned thing finished. Then I can go back and edit to my heart's content.
