Writing Excuses 18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue

Jul. 12th, 2023 02:04 pm
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Writing Excuses 18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue
 
 
Key points: Dialogue, conversations between people. Dialogue that doesn't sound like real people talk versus verbatim transcripts? Middle ground, that isn't accurate, but feels accurate. Writers convey to a human brain that a dialogue is happening. Every line of dialogue does two jobs, the authorial intention, why the author needs that line, and the character reason, which depends on who the character is talking to. Real life, um, or bantery fun? In real life, interruptions follow the actual word, but for punch, in writing you often interrupt at the word. Think of written dialogue as compressed talk, with the small talk stripped out. Pacing, accent, and attitude. Much of conversation is nonverbal. Pause points and body language. The rules in dialogue are much less rigid. Natural dialogue changes over time. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 28]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Conversational Dialogue.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] Today we want to talk about dialogue. How to do conversations between people. One of the things that will pull me out of a story faster than almost anything else are conversations, dialogue, that don't sound like real people actually talk. The problem is if you actually do write down exactly how real people talk, it is often unreadable and also just as bad. So there's a wierd middle ground that isn't really accurate, but feels accurate. We're going to magically somehow tell you how to find it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] By way of metaphor, in my audio engineering class, they explained... They sat us in front of a pair of speakers and played music, and the right answer to, "What are you hearing?" Is, "Oh, I'm hearing a pair of paper cones move back and forth powered by magnets." As audio engineers, we were taught we're creating the illusion of these things by using other tools. As writers, you are using patterns of dots, whether it's ink on the page or pixels on the screen or whatever, to convey to the human brain that a dialogue is taking place. It is a magic trick. At some level, you gotta lie.
[DongWon] Well, it's funny. We're kind of performing a version of that magic trick right now. I mean, this podcast is intended to be very conversational and it sounds conversational. But this is also not how the five of us sound when we're sitting around the dinner table and chatting. There's all this crosstalk, over talk, interrupted thoughts, pauses. Those are things that we, as podcasters, are working to [garbled]
[Howard] Wait, hang on. Is Dan allowed to have French fries?
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] No.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] But we're ignoring that for the moment. I mean, exactly, that kind of interruption. Right? Like in… We do that a little bit here and there, but I think we're very deliberate about it. Unlike me, at the dinner table, I'm a huge interrupter, as everyone here has realized.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] I think those are kind of things to think about is how are you going to manufacture the illusion of a flowing conversation, rather than replicating the absolute chaos that is a real conversation between friends.
[Dan] When we were talking this morning, and planning out exactly how we were going to do these episodes over breakfast, we were talking about this episode specifically, and I suggested one angle on it, and Mary Robinette suggested something else. Then we had a brief exchange that was mostly, "Uh... Ch... Oh..." Like, and we knew, because we've known each other for like 13 years, exactly what we meant.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] That's how we decided the topic for this was like 13 bizarre syllables in a row…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] That come to us, made perfect sense.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's one of the challenges when you're writing is that every line of dialogue is doing two jobs on the page. There's the authorial intention, the reason that you, the author, need that line to be there. Then there's the reason that the character is saying that. The reason the character is saying that is going to change depending on who the character is talking to. So it's like I could not have that multisyllabic partial utterance conversation that I had with Dan, with the majority of the listeners, because we don't have any of that shared context.
[Howard] It actually… It wasn't polysyllabic, it was multi-gruntle.
[Mary Robinette] Multi-gruntle. Thank you.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Our multi-gruntle modality is one that is very specific. So when I'm trying to create dialogue for characters, I think about two areas of intention. What am I trying to accomplish on the page, like, what scenic lift is this doing? Then, the other is, why is the character saying this? What is my character's goal? What's the [garbled]? Again, that shifts for me, depending on who they're talking to. So if I swap characters out in a scene, my dialogue has to shift as well.
 
[Erin] I think one of the interesting things about that is that sometimes your authorial intention can be to replicate conversation as best you can on the page. Sometimes it's more stylized. Any sort of dialogue can have a range from being almost completely fidelity to the way that we speak, with um's and pauses where you're trying to show that this feels like real life too, like, very bantery where it's completely… No one actually speaks like that, but there is a fun in it. I think about Dawson's Creek when it came out a zillion years ago, and no teenager talks the way that they do, but there was a fun in hearing teens use this like very complicated language that they wouldn't in real life. So, sometimes your intention is also in showing something with the dialogue style, in addition to the dialogue itself.
[DongWon] Or, I think about Deadwood a lot, with this… Where most of the characters spoke in a very vernacular way. Then you have Ian McShane playing Al Swearengen who talks in these elaborate Shakespearean just foul mouth paragraphs, where he'll just be talking and talking and talking. But it's one of the most delightful things to witness, and all of the other characters seem to understand him, even though I, as the audience, I'm like I barely figured out what he was trying to say there, but…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] It was delightful. So you can use that to great effect to communicate things about character in ways that play with what is naturalistic. But how the other characters listen and respond to that, I think, can also be very powerful.
 
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to talk about one mechanic, just to start us off. As an example of something that I see people doing on the page, and it was something that I would do, is that you want the character to interrupt some other character. In real life, when we're speaking, that interruption comes several words after the word that causes the character to want to interrupt. Most of the time on the page, you do the interruption right at that word. So if you want the dialogue to see more natural, then you go ahead and you let the character carry a couple of words past that interrupting thing. If you really want to put a punch underneath that word for some reason, then you would have them interrupt right at that time. So, like, if I were saying, "Uh, we're going to be going downstairs," and someone interrupted me on the page, and the downstairs was the thing that I wanted to underline, it might be, "We're going to go downstairs." "Downstairs! How dare you say downstairs!"
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Whereas in real life, I might say, "We're going to go downstairs to…" "Downstairs! How dare…" And it doesn't play the same. So you can think about that. Like, why are you doing that interruption and how are you playing with it?
 
[Howard] I like to think of conversational dialogue, conversational moments in books, as a compression algorithm. My favorite compression algorithm is the GIF, or jif, or we're not going to have that argument, where you pick key colors and you say this color for this many pixels, this color for this many pixels. When I had a breakup conversation with a girlfriend in high school, we talked for like three hours. When you read a breakup conversation in a romance novel, when you see one in a rom-com, it is not three hours. What got compressed? What were the key colors? How many pixels did they run for until the reader knew that that was the color that they needed. I don't know what the right compression algorithm is for everything, but I know that it has to be compressed. Because real conversations take a lot longer than they take in books.
[DongWon] There's the way that nobody says goodbye on the phone in a movie unless someone is about to die. Right? Like… Because otherwise, you don't need that note of we are concluding the conversation. All of the information has been communicated, we're moving on from here.
[Mary Robinette] This is, I think, as a side note, one of the reasons that so many people in fandom have difficulty with dialogue is because they have… In real life, is because they have learned it from film, television, and books where all of the small talk has been stripped out.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Intriguing]
[Howard] Also, so many things in romance and rom-com and drama, people will say such cruel things without any sort of warm up or even any sort of justification. Because, wow, that's the punchy bit. I'm sorry, people, don't learn to talk by what you see on TV. Because those people aren't being nice to each other.
[DongWon] Well, it's also dialogue in fiction is designed to communicate the emotional state of a character. Right? You are very rawly and directly trying to get what the character's actually feeling across to the other character, but really to the audience so they understand what's happening in this conversation. When I am in conversation with somebody about how I am feeling about something, it is rare that I am directly stating it. Right? I'm talking about effects, I'm talking about consequences, I'm talking about all kinds of other things that are ways to get them to understand what my experience is. But coming out and saying it directly is actually not a very effective way to get them to understand what it is that you're experiencing.
[Erin] I'm thinking back to that idea of the compression algorithm. One of the things I like to do when thinking about dialogue is trying to read more uncompressed speaking. Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright, her style of doing plays is to actually go interview people and then turn it into a one woman show. She does some compression, because otherwise it would be endless, but her technique is trying to remain fairly faithful to the way that people talk. Like, so… Listening to her do her shows, I'm like, "Well, that's pretty true to what a mildly compressed speech is. Now what do I want to look at?" A Marvel movie might have like super compressed bantery stuff. Then, trying to figure out where do I want to fall in between. Repetition is a great example. When I listen to her work or other things that are more uncompressed, we repeat ourselves. When you broke up with your girlfriend for three hours, I'm going to guess you said the same thing 18 different ways. That's some of the stuff that happens in real life, but on the page, it gets repetitive in a bad way. Because you're not in the same moment. So you want to use… You can use repetition to make things feel more real, because that's what happens. We forget where we were, and then we come back to what we were talking about.
[Dan] Well, this goes back into some of our previous conversations about format and about different types of writing. There are things you can do, for example, in a script that don't work on the page because of all the extra um's and so things that we kind of add-in that sound very natural to us, but reading them become very onerous. Let's pause now and come back later.
 
[Howard] I did not know how much I needed Cunk On Earth until I watched the first episode of Cunk On Earth. This is a comedy documentary, faux documentary of human history presented by Philomena Cunk, who is a character played by the actress whose name I've now forgotten.
[Dan] Diane Morgan.
[Howard] Diane Morgan. Diane Morgan so brilliantly stays in the voice of Philomena Cunk. That's where half the comedy comes from. Her uncertainty when interviewing people, her… The self-consciousness coupled with the absolute certainty that she's right. "Oh, my mate so-and-so shared this with me on YouTube. No, really, the moon is a lie. I'll send you… You just need to see the video." I love Cunk On Earth. 30 minute episodes, which is the perfect length for this kind of comedy. Available right now on Netflix. If you've ever wanted to learn lots and lots of things about human history mostly correctly while laughing, Cunk On Earth.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, as we come back in, I want to talk about a couple of tools to make your character voices distinct. Because when you've got two characters speaking to each other, in an ideal world, they sound like different people. Coming out of narrating audiobooks, there are five things that make a character voice, roughly speaking. Three of which can be replicated on the page. I'll tell you the other two, because it'll annoy you that you don't know them. They are pitch and placement. But the three that can replicate on the page are pacing, accent, and attitude. So, pacing is something that you control with punctuation. It is someone speaking with very long, fluid sentences, or somebody who's talking with lots of parentheticals. I mean, sometimes they talk with parentheticals, but sometimes they don't. Like, that kind of thing. Accent is about your sentence structure. It's not about replicating someone's like phonetic distinctions on the page, it's that the sentence structure is going to vary based on where they're from. When I'm talking to my parents in Tennessee, I will… My pronunciation doesn't change that much. But I'll do things like, "I'm going to go on over to the store." I'm like I don't know what all of those extra…
[Dan] Syllables.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Mono-gruntal.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I don't know what all of those extra prepositions are actually doing. On over to? Like, what are we doing there? But that is, rhythmically, that is… That's built-in part of the accent. Then, attitude is about your word choice. So the words that you pick when you're mad at someone are very different than the words that you pick when you aren't mad at them. It's kind of an all of the above scenario, too. Like, if you take, "What did you say?" And you're mad at somebody, it's like, "The actual did you say?" That changes…
[Erin] Yeah. I love that where people come from impacting the way that they speak. One of my favorite things is that there are many languages where at the end of sentences, you basically say, "Are you with me?" Some sort of phrase, like, yeah, got it. It's like different languages have different words that go at the very end, but it's basically like, "Are you still with me as I am speaking?" If you have someone who comes from a culture like that, or you've invented a culture like that, you might have more check in words at the end of sentences, because that's part of their way of speaking. That will come through. I think something that's really important and interesting to consider is that none of us just speak in a vacuum. Everyone is… One of my sort of pet peeves is everyone has culture including you. So, as opposed to thinking of changes in language as something that just other people do, it's why do you speak the way that you do? Then think about for your characters, why do they speak the way that they do, and what are they conveying about themselves that they may not even realize through the way that they speak?
 
[DongWon] Love that. One of the things that I've been thinking about in the course of this conversation, I actually don't have a great answer for, but so much of conversation is nonverbal. It's facial expression, it's gestures, it's eye contact, it's all of these things. I think one of the struggles that we've all had living our lives mostly mediated by Zoom these past several years is these tools got much more difficult to apply. So when you're doing just verbal dialogue… So, like, in Dark One: Forgotten, we're not getting character gestures, body language, eye placement, all of that. All we're getting is what are they actually saying. So what are some of the tips and tricks to communicate the things that would otherwise be communicated by like a tag that's like, "He sighed, he shifted, he…" Whatever that happens to be. He broke eye contact in some way. Like…
[Mary Robinette] So… The thing is that we've actually been doing nonverbal dialogue… Dialogue decoupled from body language since the invention of the telephone. So we know how to do that. We're familiar with those patterns. What I find is that when you're trying to replicate that on the page, you want to look for the natural pause points. Because anytime you put in body language, that's going to slow things down. So instead of saying he paused, then you would say he scratched his ear. What I find is that… Again, the body language is, as you say, part of the communication. So, he looked away… Well, what did he look at? What is that actually conveying? I'm very bad in my books. My characters do a lot of sighing. I have to go back in and do a search and find/replace to swap that out for other pieces of body language. Because it becomes in-specific.
[Dan] So, if you want a really great example of how important all of these kind of nonverbal cues can be, get on… Jump on YouTube and go look up what I'm going to call the mother F-r conversation from an early episode of The Wire.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Which is two characters who are doing what is essentially like a…
[Mary Robinette] It's a crime scene.
[Dan] Crime scene investigation…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Trying to figure out how a woman died, where the bullet is, all these things. The only word that they say, over the course of about five minutes, is not one we can say on this show. But because of their attitude, because of their vocal inflection, because of the way that they look at each other, you know exactly what they're saying and exactly what they mean. It is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen. Flipside of that, another one of my very favorite shows is Justified. One of the things I love about that is how distinct the dialogue is. So, yes, of course, it's a show and so they're doing some visual cues. But, going back to what Mary Robinette was talking about, how do you make all of your characters sound different, watch an episode of Justified. Pay attention to, for example, the way that they threaten each other. Wynn Duffy is kind of an outsider, he's not really a Southerner, he doesn't have that kind of slow laconic way of talking that so many of them do. He's very clinical. At one point, he says, "If I see you again, I'm going to get a blow torch and make you as small as I possibly can." Which is just very direct and to the point. When Raylan Givens, who's the main character, wants to threaten somebody, he says in this very slow way, he… Actually, to Wynn Duffy, he pulls a bullet out of his gun, drops it on his chest, and says, "Next one's coming faster." Which is such a beautiful way of encapsulating his personality, the way he solves problems, his absolute economy of words, but in a way that's completely different than Wynn Duffy's.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things about threats in particular is that they often say more about the character who is making the threat than the character who is receiving the threat. Because most of the time when people are making threats, their actually signaling this is something that I would find upsetting. They are not necessarily signaling this is something that would be a problem for you.
[Erin] Thinking back to what we were saying about the difference between, like, when you're putting something on the page and dialogue and when it's spoken, I was thinking that sometimes it's… Think about this sentence. I don't know about that. Right? So I'm thinking if I don't know about that and I am saying it in a conversation with people who can see me, I might sort of pause, think, and then say, "I don't know about that." On the page, you might say like, "She furrowed her eyebrows," or something much better than that, but in…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] In a dialogue, I'd be like, "I… Don't know about that." That's what I would do on the phone. Because what I'm doing is taking that space where you would see me do the furloughing and putting it in a vocal… Like, I'm doing it vocally, because you can't see me. That's what you do on the phone. So, something that's really interesting is just pay attention to the things we do when we're talking on the phone and figure out is there a good place to put those in text. When do you lower your tone and whisper? When do you get louder, when do you extend vowels and when do you get more clipped in the way that you speak, maybe because you're upset.
 
[Howard] This circles back to what I think is kind of a 101 level, but we should all be reminded of it, writing and editing rule as it might be for dialogue, which is that the rules for grammar and punctuation and spelling and whatever else for dialogue are much less rigid than for other things. Because we don't put commas where they necessarily are supposed to go when we're speaking. Play with that. There've been a lot of times when I've had to step something from a copy editor because my grammar has been egregious and I have to go back in and say, "No, that was meant to be egregious," because of the way this is supposed to read. But in checking what the copy editor has written, I am like, "Let me make sure that that reads correctly. I didn't accidentally spell a bad word, did I? No. Okay. We're cool."
[DongWon] One other thing I want to point out is that what feels like naturalistic dialogue also follows trends and evolves over time. What was naturalistic in the 1950s was the screwball comedy, which is incredibly fast-paced, had a very specific accent, and cadence. Then we entered the 70s, where there was this very like naturalistic like thing is how people really talk. As audio changes, as technology changes, as our expectations change… Right now, we're in the era of mumble core movies, where it's almost impossible to tell what anybody's saying because of the way the sound is mixed in the way dialogue is written right now. You find that in prose, too. In text, how people talk in different eras, different genres. What feels like natural language, natural conversation, those shift depending on what you're trying to inflect. So I think what really we're circling around in so many ways is conversational dialogue, natural dialogue, is highly stylized. It is approached to great effect through a real character, through a real tone, through a real genre and category, in all these really powerful ways.
[Erin] I think I love that. I love that I think it's both what you're trying to inflect and also what you're trying to reflect. Because not all folks talk the same. So I think one thing that's really exciting is to not feel like you need to force yourself into the way that the dialogue that you're used to reading or use to seeing is, if that's not the story that you're trying to tell. I really love the way that like, an author like Susan Palumbo, who's a short story writer, uses dialogue in a different way. She's from the Caribbean, and, like, there's a different style of writing that she's doing that is amazing and completely natural. But just natural to a different storytelling ethos than the one that we're use to, specifically, in the United States.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to give you some homework this week. What I want you to do, and it's a very simple exercise. I want you to take dialogue that you've already written and delete every third line. This is going to give these gaps in the conversation, that you are going to have to then bridge with the body language that you use and having the other characters make the deductive jump that we would make in natural conversation. It's not going to be a perfect thing that you need to do with everything that you write. But it's an exercise in making deliberate choices for what you're doing in your dialogue. Try deleting every third line of dialogue.
 
[Mary Robinette] In our next episode of Writing Excuses, we discuss the different sounds of collaboration, and learn about two of our hosts experiences building worlds with Brandon Sanderson. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.39: Writing Bodies and Intimacy, with K. M. Szpara

Sep. 28th, 2022 05:54 pm
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Writing Excuses 17.39: Writing Bodies and Intimacy, with K. M. Szpara
 
 
Key points: Content warning. Bodies and intimacy, without euphemisms. The intimacy of what you and your partner call body parts is rich with knowing yourself and/or character growth. Communication is key, and the growth of trust. Think about how the context of the scene changes the action. Think of intimate scenes as fight scenes or conversations. Or as dances? Metaphoric language, fade to black, or simple direct descriptions?
 
[Season 17, Episode 39]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Bodies and Intimacy, with special guest, K. M. Szpara.
[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.
[Piper] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon Song.
[Piper] I'm Piper J. Drake.
[Howard] I'm Howard Tayler.
[Mary Robinette] We are here live on the Writing Excuses cruise with a live audience of writers.
[Applause]
[Mary Robinette] Also, our special guest, K. M. Szpara. Kellan, say hello.
[Kellan] Hi. This is my first Writing Excuses cruise. I am the author of books such as Docile as K. M. Szpara, and I write a lot about like sex and vampires and blood.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, we are going to actually give you a content warning for this particular episode. We're going to be talking about bodies and intimacy, and we're not going to be using euphemisms. We're going to be talking about adult acts that adults do with actual adult bodies. Adult bodies run in a full range.
[Kellan] Yes. Which is to say that as somebody who writes queer and trans bodies a lot, if this episode might trigger you on any of those axes, please take care of yourself.
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So with that, let's dive into the actual content. So you pitched this episode to us, Kellan. What are some of the things that you think about when you're thinking about like writing bodies and intimacy? What are some important aspects of that?
[Kellan] Sure. I mean, for me, it's so important to show especially queer and trans bodies. There's such a mystery sort of around us, even to our own selves sometimes. We do a lot of manifesting of our own bodies when we are alone with others. I have sat down and struggled with what do I call these character's genitals that makes me feel okay and makes the character feel okay and makes the character's partner feel okay. Or what conflict does that bring up. So, for me, like settling on that intimacy between one or more people and being alone or with others with your body is so rich with your inner external conflict tension, but also a sense of knowing yourself and/or character growth.
[Piper] I love that. Because communication is so key. You can really see that in the development of the relationships through the course of the book, because you can find during different moments through the story that they're more likely to trust, and there is a building of trust over time as they feel more comfortable communicating with each other and also being self-aware. Like you said. Just aware of themselves and what they need.
[Kellan] Yeah. It's funny because I was talking earlier on this retreat with my agent, actually, and I brought up how when I first started writing, I learned to sort of like the meat and then there's unresolved sexual tension for the entire book and they kiss at the end and that's the prize for the reader and the characters. That was real bad for me. I've instead fallen into the thing which I think is very queer, which is very queer not applicable to everyone all the time, but, for me and many other people, which is that there's sex first. Intimate moments first. Then, sort of like dealing with the emotional and/or communications that lead right up to it. Also the falling out, and how that manifests over the course of the rest of the novel or story.
[Piper] Oh, yeah. Definitely. Because I know that we think of romance in particular as being rather structured in the order, and I have even taught how there is often a progression of intimacy that happens. But once you know what that progression kind of is expected, you can also explore how it happens not quite in that order, and what that does to the character, that reaction time, and that thinking about it and exploring what works for them. I love that.
[Kellan] For me, in real life, there is no order. Right? So we do different things with different people at different times. It's really important to me that characters feel like emotionally true. So, yeah. I mean, yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that as you're talking about this, as emotional truth, I'm thinking about some of the scenes in Docile and the way the context of the scene changes the action. You want to talk a little bit about how you communicate context and safety or not safety?
[Kellan] Sure. The context is interesting because my first thought was like where is the sex happening.
[Chuckles]
[Kellan] Sometimes it happens in your like executive office at work, which I guess you're allowed to do if you're the CEO. But I think the actual context is who are you having sex with, what kind of sex you're having, what are the power dynamics between you. So, for example, even though there are many sex scenes in Docile, there's the blow job scene, there's, as my editor has once said, one ass-eating scene per book as mandated by God.
[Laughter]
[Piper] Only one? Are we like limited to one or is it at least one?
[Kellan] No, it just happens that way.
[Piper] Okay.
[Kellan] So. But the point of that is the sort of context is… It is, for Elijah, the protagonist, it is I am being asked to do something versus something is being done to me, and, do you feel like more of a willing participant if you are doing the thing, which presents a whole different struggle emotionally than lying back and having something happen to you. Then, later on in the novel, he gets to have his first like real consensual sexual experience and navigates that with a totally different context using language she'd never had access to before, feeling emotions he's never felt, trying to deal with how to go about having some of the same experiences physically that you had the first time, but with somebody who is being very respectful about it.
 
[Mary Robinette] Can we talk about some tools that we can use to do this well? Like, one of the most useful frameworks that I was given when I was first writing the kind of intimate scenes that I do, which frequently resolve into fade to black, but was to think of them as either a conversation or a fight scene. That with a fight scene, I have to think about the geography and things that human bodies will actually do. And that with a conversation, that there is something that each person is trying to communicate to the other through the physical actions of their body.
[Dongwon] Yeah. I think a lot about fight scenes when it sort of comes to these kinds of moments in books. In part because we live in a society that can be very prudent… Not prudent, prudish and prurient about bodies and about sex and about intimacy. But we're a society that also glorifies violence. We have lots of scenes in movies that have very extreme explicit details about what happens to a body when violence happens to it. So, so much of fiction is already engaging with the collision of bodies in these high intensity emotional moments. We're just only allowed to talk about certain kinds of that versus what is a scene of intimacy versus a scene of violence. Functionally, in the narrative, they often perform a similar thing where two characters enter a scene with different goals, different emotional states, and they exit that scene having resolved some aspects of that, or evolved into a different emotional state. So there's a way in which I think of these functionally as performing the same thing in the narrative, hopefully with different outcomes, hopefully one of them's not dead by the end of it. But I think there is a way in which that, from a high level, mechanically they can be very, very similar. It really comes down to how we, as a society, can think about and interact with bodies in that way.
[Piper] Actually, I want to provide a contrasting approach. Because I'm really well known for fight scenes, especially in my romantic suspense, and body count, especially a lot of my other work. But I write romance. One of the things is while I have combat scenes and fight scenes in my stories, I often think about moments of intimacy as dance. It's one of those things that I didn't do on purpose, but because I was a dancer, and I was in dance from age 3 to 28 actively, and also, it's a part of my meet cute with my partner, Matthew J. Drake, that we danced together and we both enjoyed West Coast swing and blues fusion, that I often think of intimacy scenes and how I choreograph them as dance. Whether that's horizontal or standing up…
[Chuckles]
[Piper] Or a little bit of both and also the logistics of lifts. Right? Like it actually translates better for me. If it involves more than two partners, also, choreography helps a lot for that because what bodies can do. Right? Like, one person may be very bendy and one person may not be very bendy, and also, like, what are the logistics of actually being able to lift two people. Like a lot more of that actually translates better in my head to dance choreography. So that's another alternative.
[Dongwon] I think of fight scenes is also being about dance, right? It's about that movement and control and… In part, I love martial arts movies. I know we're wondering further off-topic at this point.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] But I do think dance is a really useful thing to think about in terms of that interaction and that give-and-take in that interplay of power and connection and emotion are all things that flow back and forth in this.
[Howard] Let me circle this back real quick. One of my favorite MCU fight scenes is the one in Civil War where Falcon says to Spidey, "Have you ever been in a fight before? Usually there's not this much talking." Conversation during intimacy to me is one of the most wonderful things to read. I don't just want the choreography, I want dialogue. I want… It's a conversation. It's much more than just blocking. Much more than that.
 
[Kellan] I am also somebody who's deeply in love with a first-person present point of view. I can get away with it as much as I can. But I feel like not everyone chooses it and uses it to their full advantage. So, for me, like being in a different first-person point of view for a sex scene, and then flopping the points of view for the next sex scene, like, you are not just getting the… You, the reader, gets to see the conversation between the two people, but then you get to see later how the other character might have experienced that sex or contact totally different from the other character. I had a story out with two trends boyfriends. They both had different physical needs when it came to sex. So you really got to live in their heads and in the dialogue.
[Piper] Yeah. I think the progression is also important through the course of the story, because, again, we're also seeing the progression of how they work together. To come back to the point about communication as well, and dialogue, I think it's amazing and awesome, and I love it. I'm so into it. It's also really hot, I think, in romance that there is consent not just upfront, but repeatedly through each step of that interaction, and, if there's not, what are the reactions to it.
 
[Mary Robinette] These are, I think, wonderful points. Let's take a moment to pause for our book of the week, which is actually by Kellan.
[Kellan] Wow, what a surprise.
[Laughter]
[Kellan] That book would be First Become Ashes. It is a novel whose pitch I did not practice before this. It takes place in a cult. In the first chapter, they are all liberated from the cold against their wills. They were raised to believe that you could do magic. So when the FBI says you cannot do magic, and also, everything you believe is fake, one of them, Lark, spends the rest of the novel sort of unraveling what that means for him as a person, grappling with beliefs and his own body, especially since he took sort of like a sacred chastity vow with a literal chastity device. So, there's some really interesting sex that comes out on the other end of that.
[Mary Robinette] That sounds very exciting. It's called First Become Ashes by K. M. Szpara.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, let's move on to one of my favorite things, which is talking about how things can go terribly wrong. So let's talk about some tropes and euphemisms and ways of discussing this that are maybe not the most intimate. For instance, I had to narrate a book that literally had the line, "She released his love snake from its denim prison."
[Laughter]
[Piper] Purple prose.
[Kellan] I mean, if you say that during sex and the other person doesn't laugh and then you will have a great time… That would be a cool scene.
[Piper] I mean, yeah. Or is it monster f-ing? I would drop in f-bombs. We are going adult. All right. So, monster fucking is a thing. It is a very… It's rising in popularity right now. I know of at least two books with a prehensile penis going on. So, love snake would be applicable.
[Laughter]
[Kellan] Yeah. I mean, people ask me this a lot, like, how do you keep writing so many sex scenes? Does the language get stale? How do you… Like, I name this very bluntly. I usually use cock in sexual situations, but then you'll see that I use dick when someone's just like alone thinking about their bodies. I… One ass eating per book. It's like does butt sound sexy enough? Like, I do want it to be hot, right? So, like, sex is both about characters and tension and intimacy, but also butts. So, like, for me, it's picking these words that titillate not just for the reader but for you as the author. I mean, I am…
[Garbled]
[Kellan] Be turned on by what you write, is, like, sort of a mantra that I think.
[Mary Robinette] Well, I think that's true with any emotion that you're trying to provoke in a reader, that you are your own first reader. So I think that's a very natural thing. Not something that people should be ashamed of even though we are constantly told by different forms of media, especially anything that is remotely off of mainstream, that you shouldn't do that thing and should somehow be ashamed of it.
[Kellan] I actually thought I was a little bit odd because I have… I don't like to write the word butt because it's not pretty to me. So I like bum or behind or ass better as like a hotter thing when I'm writing. I'll actually have an editor call me up, and be like, "Do you have a problem with butt?" I'm like, "No. It just… I don't like the way the word looks."
[Mary Robinette] It is not a pretty word on the page. Like with the Regency, I get a lot… It's buttocks.
[Laughter]
[Kellan] Yeah, buttocks is almost hotter to me. Or bum is more hot, hotter to me. Behind can be really hot, but then it gets confusing.
[Howard] I've found great uses for it, but they haven't been intimate uses.
[Laughter]
[Kellan] Well, the words I struggle with are always like what do we call testicles. Balls, which is also not like a super sexy word. Then, like, apple, which makes me sound like you're saying you're an apple.
[Garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Weird side note. In Icelandic, a euphemism, or a term of endearment, for like when you're looking at a little baby and it's like, "Oh, how cute you are. Aren't you a little ass hole? What a cute little ass hole you are. What a little raisin ass hole."
[Wow]
[Piper] Yeah. The visual that I just had.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, yeah.
[Kellan] Quite…
[Mary Robinette] My gift to you. My gift.
 
[Dongwon] One thing I was thinking about is something you touched on very briefly before, Kellan. I think there's a way in which… There's a demand and hunger for queer stories, but a lot of times, those queer stories elide over queer bodies. Right? I am also trans and queer myself, and one of the things that I become frustrated with is somehow… Sometimes that metaphoric language, sometimes that fade to black, sometimes being a little bit more clever about how you're describing certain body parts can kind of unintentionally erase the bodies of the people who are being presented on the page. Right? So, how much do you find that that directness is useful or not? I mean, because there's also kind of things where sometimes there are inevitably gender valences attached to certain body parts. That's become complicated.
[Kellan] I got you. I mean, one of the reasons I keep writing very explicit sex scenes, especially for my trans characters and my queer characters, there is this air of like are you exploiting bodies that are already exploited a lot. Like, us trans people, it's very much like the what's in your pants question. I answer that repeatedly because I want these characters to have agency over their bodies. Like, for example, in the novelette I wrote, Small Changes over Long Periods of Time, we have a trans character who… He's a trans man, he calls his clit a clit, he calls it… At one point, like, engorged like a swollen tick. Which is, like, not necessarily something that's like superhot, but, like, is the vibe for him right now. It's like sometimes our bodies, like, do feel like hot, but also kind of weird and gross at the same time. I have this agenda, which is not simply to write sex scenes because I think they're hot, but also because I want other people to think that I'm hot. I want other people to think that people like me are hot, and know that we are having good sex. Like, queer and trans sex is experimental in that we don't learn about it growing up necessarily. We are putting ourselves on the map as we go. I feel so honored to be part of that conversation.
 
[Mary Robinette] I think that's wonderful. I also think that that segues us really nicely into our homework assignment.
[Kellan] Yes. So, for homework, I would like you to write a character undressing, either alone or with others.
[Mary Robinette] So, you're going to do a little bit of exploration.
[Wolf whistle]
[Whee!]
[Mary Robinette] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.34: Developing Subtext

Aug. 24th, 2022 04:30 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 17.34: Developing Subtext
 
 
Key points: Text, subtext, and context. The words on the page, the layer of meaning underneath that, and what's going on around the words. How do you provide the clues to let the reader get the subtext? Body language, character interpretation. The emotional charge in what's being said. On the nose!
 
[Season 17, Episode 34]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialogue Masterclass Episode Seven, Developing Subtext.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're between the lines.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Maurice] I'm Maurice.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] Awesome. So. We are going to talk about subtext today. I think the very first question I want to ask you, Maurice, is what is subtext?
[Maurice] So, subtext. So, when I think about subtext, so… I'm going to try a math analogy here, so bear with me. So dialogue operates in three dimensions. There is text, subtext, and context. So the way I think about it is text is like the words on the page, subtext is the layer of meaning underneath the words on the page, and context is what's going on around those words. So when I think about subtext… I mean, we all intuitively understand subtext, because if I come home and my wife is on the couch watching TV and I go, "Hey. Is anything wrong?" And she says, "No! Everything's fine!" Like, my Spidey senses are going to go off. Just on an intuitive level. I know something's going on, but the words on the page were "No, everything's fine." Yet I know, because of context and subtext, yeah, maybe everything is not fine. So that's what I think about… That's one way I think about subtext.
[Dan] Yeah. Subtext is very useful in a lot of different ways. There's a lot of things that you can accomplish with it. You can say things without coming right out and saying them. You can have the characters inferring and implying things. You can even get around various censors, is some of the ways that I've used subtext in the past as well. So it's a useful dialogue tool because if you can pack something with a subtext, you can… It becomes very information rich. Right? The same things are being said, but we understand much more than just the words that are being said. So I guess the question is how do you do that? How do you imbue something with this extra hidden meaning?
[Mary Robinette] So I want to use what… The framework that Maurice has already set up, which is that there is the text, subtext, and context. Subtext, and this is important, exists between the text and the context. You cannot have subtext without having context to compare it to. So here's an example which I think I have used before. So I come from the American South, which is what is called a high context region. So high context culturally means that in order to participate in the conversation, you have to have a lot of context, because so much of it happens subtextually. So these are examples like the American South, large parts of Asia, Brazil as I understand it, will have big parts of the conversation that everybody understands, but is not actually said out loud. So, my husband, by contrast, comes from a low context culture which is you just say things directly without much subtext. So here's the actual conversation. My mom says, "There's a bag of apples on the counter in the kitchen." I reply, "Oh, okay, I can have a pie made for dinner tomorrow night." My husband's like, "Wait a minute. Where did the pie come from?" I'm like, "Well, she just said that there's a bag of apples on the counter in the kitchen." Because to me, contextually, this is very clear based on the relationship my mom and I have. All of the subtext in there is "I bought a bag of apples. If you have time to make a pie, it would be really great, but I don't want to put you out." I'm like, "Oh, making a pie sounds awesome. I don't have time or energy tonight, but I could do it tomorrow night." But you only get the pieces of dialogue on either end of that. "There's a bag of apples on the counter in the kitchen." "Great, I can have a pie for tomorrow night." My husband is like, "Wouldn't… Don't you think she was just offering you an apple?" I'm like, "No. Because then she would have said do you want an apple, or, more likely because high context society, she would have just brought me apples to avoid the other conversation which is would you like an apple? No, thank you, I couldn't. Really, they're very fresh. No, seriously, I just can't take an apple. But these are apples that were picked at my grandmother's farm. Oh, well, in that case, of course I'd love to try an apple." So when you're thinking about this, this subtext, you have to think about the context that goes around it. Because… This is the other fun thing, people will read the subtext based on their cultural understanding of how subtext works. They will bring their own context to the conversation. So if I said to my husband there's a bag of apples on the counter in the kitchen, and he didn't… Well, actually, I would never say that to him because I know that he… Let's be clear, I know that he does not have the context. But, if I were writing a novel and I wanted to make things awkward, then my character would just say that, and then my character would get mad because he didn't read the subtext. Which would be very clear to everyone there. So, thinking about the subtext as the unspoken part that is kind of held in suspension between text and context.
 
[Dan] Okay. So let me follow this up. Let's say that you were going to put into a book that conversation with your mother. How would you provide the right contextual clues to let a non-Southern audience understand what was really going on?
[Mary Robinette] So this is where you have to use the non-spoken… The other pieces of dialogue. So we've been talking about dialogue as the lines that are said out loud. But there's also all of the other pieces. There's body language, and then there's the character's interpretation of the line that is said. So this is where you would deploy something like free indirect speech where the character interprets it as part of the narrative or… So that my character might think, "Oh, I know that mom really wants a pie. So that's why she's mentioning the apples." Or, actually, if it's free indirect, "She knew that her mother really wanted a pie. She didn't have the energy to do it that night. So she made a counter offer. I could have a pie ready tomorrow night."
[Dan] Awesome.
[Howard] Yeah. In thinking about the pie thing, it occurred to me that the way the apples are described tells you whether or not they are pie apples or eating apples.
[Mary Robinette] In a bag.
[Howard] There's a bag of apples on the counter is pie apples.
[Mary Robinette] In the kitchen.
[Howard] I've… In the kitchen on the counter. Yeah, I've… Bag of apples in the kitchen. I put apples and the fruit basket on the counter is I found some apples that I think you will love and I have set them in this basket and I would love for you to try one because we have this thing about artisanal apples and eating them and whatever. It's the difference between the bag in the basket.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Context.
 
[Dan] Okay. Let's pause for the book of the week, which, Maurice, this is you this time.
[Maurice] Yeah. So, it's a book… It's not out yet. I believe it comes out early 2023. It's called The Lies of the Ajungo. It's by Moses Ose Utomi. So, it's a novella. I've read this novella twice already. I really love it. I'm just going to read the back cover copy for you real quick. "In the City of Lies, they cut out your tongue when you turn 13 to appease the terrifying Ajungo empire and make sure it continues sending water. Tutu will be 13 in three days, but his parched mother won't last that long. So Tutu goes to his oba and makes a deal. She provides water for his mother, and in exchange, he'll travel out to the desert and bring back water for the city. Thus he begins his quest for salvation for his mother, his city, and himself." The great thing I love about this book is this book moves at the speed of fable. If that makes sense. Moses has a way of just weaving magic into his… All the lines in this book. So, like everything has a certain weight to it, on top of just the lush language that he uses. So I've really enjoyed this book, obviously, twice. It's just I love the magic that it just… This book is just imbued with.
[Dan] Cool. That is The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi. That'll be out next year, in 2023. So look for it then.
 
[Dan] Okay. So, let's talk some more about subtext. Howard, how are you able to put subtext into the work that you do?
[Howard] In comics, it's actually pretty easy. Because you can have a dialogue bubble whose words disagree with, at least on the surface, the facial expression, the body language, of the character. I didn't have to use words to describe how the character was standing. I can just communicate all of the body language with the dialogue, and the subtext is right there. In prose, it's something that I've had to learn, and it's something that I've actually had to back off of a little bit because I can see… When I'm writing, I can see the way people are talking, the way they're… The things their faces are doing, the things they're doing with their hands, and I have to decide which of it is important and which of it is not. Because I'm capable of describing all of it, but it really slows down a scene when I do that. So, for me, subtext is an exercise in… It's like an exercise in risk reward management. Which of these little bits of body language can I describe for the most impact, and which do I just need to let slide because there isn't enough page.
[Mary Robinette] The other thing that you just said that I want to keep up to this is body language and seeing them interact. But sometimes what the subtext is is not a specific line that I just didn't say out loud. Sometimes the subtext is just a mood. That the subtext is this character is annoyed all the way through this scene. Because there's what's called direct versus indirect communication. I referred to this earlier, direct is, "Will you pass the salt?," indirect is, "Is there salt?". Even more indirect is, "Oh, this soup is a little bland." Although…
[Howard] Oh, that's direct.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, that is direct.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Actually, that's… Scratch that. Those are fighting words. Unless you're [garbled]. But thinking about, when you're crafting that subtext, thinking about your character's emotional state is also going to really express… Really help you guide how that happens.
[Maurice] Yeah. So I think…
[Dan] Uh… Oh, okay, go ahead Maurice.
 
[Maurice] One of the ways I think about subtext is, just like Mary Robinette said, it's like subtext is the emotional charge underneath what's being said. Right? A lot of times, as you're seeing the scene, the characters, they're going to betray what they're really feeling in some subtly different ways. Right? What… Again, I'm a TV junkie, but one of the shows I watch, one of the police procedural's I watch which really helped me out a lot in this was a show called… It only lasted like three seasons… Called Lie to Me. It was based on a book by Paul Ekman. I think he wrote a book called Telling Lies. But it's all about micro-expressions. Right? So, just watching how they would explain how micro-expressions work, all of a sudden I'm just like, "Oh. Hang on." So now I am getting to see just the direct correlation between what the body betrays about what a person's really feeling and now I'm able to convey that in the text. So for us as writers, it's like oh, I don't need as many dialogue tags if I'm writing their physical reaction to something. What was their physical reaction? What was their facial expression? What other kind of body language are they betraying with what's being said in the moment? So that's one of the things that helped a lot.
[Mary Robinette] So, while we're talking about this, I actually want to talk about the opposite of subtext, which is on the nose. Because one of the flaws that you'll see sometimes with early career writers or published writers to is that you'll read something and be like, "Wow, that's really on the nose dialogue." What that means is that the character is saying exactly what they're thinking in the moment without any subtext at all. It is exactly serving the plot in that moment. There's no tension, there is no… It's just statements…
[Howard] There's nothing to unpack.
[Mary Robinette] That are not… There's nothing to unpack at all. It's fine for a character to do that occasionally. But if you have a string of it, where everyone is doing that, that's where you wind up with on the nose dialogue.
[Dan] Yeah. The… Both on the nose dialogue and subtext can be very useful tools culturally. So for… A good example of on the nose being very good, I just watched a movie from India called RRR. It's about two guys, two revolutionaries in the early 1900s in India who end up meeting each other. Then there's a song, because it's an Indian movie and they have songs. They have a whole song where the lyrics are as on the nose as it could be. These two guys just met each other, now they're best friends. Even though one of them is secretly working against the other one and doesn't realize it. Like it's… The whole plot of the movie just described to you by a guy singing a song. Culturally, that's really valuable, because I don't… I'm not a part of that culture. There are nuances to their interaction into their relationship that I would have missed without that song to say, "Hey. Gringo who's watching this, let me explain some stuff to you." At the same time, subtext can be really useful for cultural reasons as well. Some of the write-for-hire stuff that I have written… In one, for example, I wanted to make two of the characters gay and they did not let me for corporate reasons. They're like, "No. We will not allow that. We're not going to have gay characters." So I was able to make them clearly gay in subtext so that someone looking for it will be able to see it and someone who doesn't want that in their fiction doesn't have it. That kind of stuff is so useful as a way of giving your audience the kind of stuff that they need. The ability to see yourself in fiction, especially for marginalized groups, often comes through subtext because we can't say it out loud.
[Mary Robinette] Just, again, to underline what Dan is talking about, the thing is that those clues are there for someone who has the right context, and is looking for it.
[Dan] Absolutely.
[Mary Robinette] But for someone who does not live in that context, they aren't there. Also, I think that we should all acknowledge that the corporate overlords are in the wrong in that particular case.
[Dan] Absolutely. That was the subtext of my statement. Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I was saying the quiet part out loud for you.
[Dan] Thank you very much.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Very on the nose.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So. Let's slide into our homework. I want you to… We're going to force you to develop subtext. I want you to take a work in progress… If you want to grab that transcript that we had earlier, that's also fine. But grab a scene with dialogue where you understand what's going on in that scene. As a writing exercise, I want you to just delete every third line, regardless of who's saying it, regardless of how important it is. I just want you to delete every third line. Then go back and try to use nonverbal cues to make the dialogue still make sense.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 11.43: Elemental Drama Q&A, with Tananarive Due

Oct. 26th, 2016 01:12 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.43: Elemental Drama Q&A, with Tananarive Due

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/10/23/11-43-elemental-drama-qa-with-tananarive-due/

Q&A Summary
Q: Rather than having a protagonist change themselves, can a protagonist be an impetus for change in others as a source of drama?
A: Yes. James Bond and iconic superheroes rarely change, but the interesting stories are about the people around them changing. Episodic stories often have a main character who doesn't change, with the changes happening to the people around them.
Q: What happens when a character refuses to learn and overcome their fatal flaw?
A: Tragedy. Key question is can the character change? If they fail, that's a tragedy.
Q: What are the lines between drama and melodrama?
A: Music. True melodrama winks at the audience. Accidental melodrama usually means you didn't introduce the characters and show us the motivation for the conflict. Make sure the emotion is earned.
Q: Do you have any tips for writing body language that reveals a character's internal state?
A: Puppetry has three movements, aggressive, passive, and regressive. Aggressive, lean towards and engage further. Passive, sit still. Regressive, lean back and disengage or avoid. Add in open or closed silhouette, with arms out or crossed, reflecting engaging or not engaging. Top it off with the point of view character interpreting or reacting. Don't overdo it! Use body language to remove ambiguity or emphasize. No head bobbing, please.
Q: When do you not show character growth? Is it sometimes good to have it not exist? Is there a reason not to add drama?
A: Contrast with external events, or contrast with another character.
Q: When writing a character that undergoes a great change that makes him or her radically different, how do you keep it realistic? Also, how do you realistically show people acting differently from their schema?
A: This is a reflection of the difference between what character is perceived to be and who they are internally. Hang a lantern on the fact that they are struggling with who they think they are and who they really are. Make the character realize who they really are and what they are really capable, and let them be heroes and heroines.

( Looking for a hero... )
[Brandon] I think we're going to call it there. I really want to thank Tananarive for coming on with us.
[Tananarive] Oh, thank you.
[Brandon] And I want to thank our audience.
[Whoo!]
[Brandon] Howard has some homework for you.
[Howard] I do. The name for this is if I only had a brain. We're going to be starting issue with our next month of elemental genre. We're talking about the issue elemental genre. What I want you to avoid is the strawman. Take the issue that you are planning on writing about or take an issue about which you are passionate. Identify both sides. Identify which side you are on. Then take the other side and write it convincingly. Put a brain in the strawman. In fact, go ahead and put meat and bone and all of the other body bits on the strawman and turn this into a person, because actual people hold the position that you abhor or disagree with, and they are actual people. Once you can do that, once you can write both sides convincingly, we will believe your book.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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