Don't Think about Your Reader (But Do Care about Them)

During my sabbatical from Novel Spaces I toyed with ideas for a year’s worth of columns – and often resolved to write them while the were fresh in my mind. I did not. And this morning, when I realized my first column for 2018 was due, I was caught completely flat footed.

While flapping in circles wondering what to do, I came across some old advice about never thinking about your audience or market when you write, just write! I realized I had something to add to that. Because, like all absolutes, it’s not really.

My current novel series, Dirt and Stars, is young adult science fiction. The protagonists’ ages are 15 to 16 in book one, Down to Dirt, and age through 16 to 18 over the course of books two and three, Life on Dirt and Rise from Dirt. The market for YA fiction is, of course, everyone, but publishers usually target readers a year or two younger than the protagonists – in this case, 13 to 16. This perception of who will be reading the novel impacts how the editor and publisher feel topics like cursing, sexuality, emotional trauma, social issues, and other potentially sensitive issues are addressed.

And they’re right to be concerned – I live and have taught in a North Carolina county where Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian is banned from public schools and libraries because a 15-year-old boy describes the joy of – not the act of – masturbation. The novel intelligently depicts eating disorders, racism, poverty, alcoholism, suicide, and cultural identity – topics that should be addressed and discussed in middle and high schools. But that one paragraph has kept it out of untold numbers of school districts – which translates to the loss of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of copies sold to English classes.

Dirt and Stars is written in multiple first-person, told through the frequently-intersecting journals of five characters. Mara Duval of Tombaugh Station must write about her visit to dirt (Earth) for academic credit; Jael Alden intends to do great things and her father (half jokingly) told her to keep a record so she’d have the facts right in her memoir; Beth Duval writes because her best friend Jael writes; Lije Bronislav dreams of being an entrepreneur and believes great ideas can come from random observations; and Fatima Kielani has a social communications disorder and records her daily interactions for discussion with her therapist.

For thirty years I taught in an alternative high school, or taught “those kids” – the ones in the self-contained room at the end of the hall – in a traditional school, was a community support case manager, and did in-home and community “coaching” for family preservation services. When you’ve been around teenagers long enough that you’re part of the furniture, they’ll converse about all kinds of things in front of you. (Especially if you cultivate the impression you’re a little hard of hearing.) I drew on the things I learned and observed working with kids in crisis when creating my characters, how they thought and felt and how they spoke. And my first try was pretty upsetting for everyone who saw it. Eventually I figured out that realistically depicting what I’d experienced didn’t work for my story – all of my characters came from stable homes, were clean and sober, and didn’t have kids of their own. I had to draw on what I knew, not reproduce it; be authentic without being graphic; and make my people accessible without being generic.

Cursing, as Maggie King wrote so well about on December 22, Do You Let Your Characters Swear?, was an issue. Science fiction tends to attract younger readers and has a tradition of using made up curses. Firefly gave us gorram an evolution of “goddamn” and Battlestar Gallactica simply replaced “uc” with “ra” to give us the ever-popular Frak!
There’s one actual curse word in Down to Dirt, and it’s there for legitimate effect. The rest of the time the dirt kids say “crap” a lot and Mara says “blow” – which is, you guessed it, a made-up curse word. The trick was making this work without being too cute about it. I imply, but do not explicitly state, that while they only say crap "on camera", they use other words in other situations. And, about a third of the way in, after Mara vehemently exclaims “blow”, I have her explain it in this entry from Beth’s journal.

“Why do you say ‘blow’ like it’s the f-word?” I asked.
Mara looked at me sharply ... then the corner of her mouth twitched. “Because it is like the f-word,” she said. “Only not about that.”
“Oookay,” I said after waiting for her to add something more. “How is it like the f-word only not about that?”
“A blow is a catastrophic decompression,” Mara said. “Like a hull breach, or when you’re outside and your EVA suit is punctured, or the seals on your waldo rupture.”
I didn’t know what a waldo was, but evidently having its seals rupture in space was really bad.
“So you’re saying that if someone in space has a blow,” I said carefully, “they’re pretty much f-worded?”
“Pretty much,” she agreed solemnly.
Jael laughed. “Beth, you are the only person I know who says ‘f-word’ when there’s no one around.”

Conversations about sex can be both realistic and PG if neither character is sure of the other’s limits or expectations (or orientation) and they’re both sounding each other out without being explicit.

Late in Down to Dirt Mara is sexually assaulted. That scene went through more rewrites than the rest of the scenes combined. In the final iteration I describe just enough of the physicality to give context, but focus not on the act but on Mara’s panic—evoking the horror without detail. In the end, I think this worked better than any graphic description would have. And, relevant to the point, it made the scene accessable to the reader who might be overwhelmed (or offended) by a rawer telling.

So. Don’t worry about your reader when you write? Maybe not in the first draft, when you’re getting everything out so you can work with it. But at the same time, you should be mindful of the person listening to your story. Not readers in the generic – that’s the publisher’s concern, when they’re marketing the story you wrote – but that one reader you want to read, remember, and share what you’ve given them.

A Few Notes on the "Rules" of the Craft

(Marissa wrote an excellent column on lessons learned in the writing trade a few weeks ago. If you haven't read it, yet, you should. You can go ahead and do that now, if you'd like. I'll wait. My column this month is not so much a response to hers as a footnote.)

I am by nature contrary. Most of the interesting stories from my childhood begin with someone telling me I couldn't do something.

Early on in my career - as in before my first sale - an editor who had taken several fledgling writers under his wing (including, if memory serves, our own Dayton Ward) told us that how a story opens determines whether the reader (or, more importantly, the acquisitions editor) will continue reading past the first page. Among several tips on writing openings, he told us that we should never open a story with talking heads (that is, people talking with no sense of place,

context, or action), with the character waking up, or with a description of how bored and boring the protagonist is before whatever exciting, life changing event the story is about happens. Me, being me, proceeded to write nothing but stories that began with talking heads (which actually played to a strength of mine, more on that in a moment), the narrator waking up, or the character bored out of his or her skull wishing something would happen.

The first short story I sold opened with a talking head – a guy dictating his diary and random thoughts to a recorder. My second sale opened with the narrator waking up. My third with, you guessed it, one hundred and thirty-seven words of the lead character literally siting at his job wishing something, anything at all, would happen to end the monotony of his existence.

Do these three sales prove that rules are meant to be broken, or some similar bit of foolishness cosplaying as wisdom?
Nope.
They prove that I'm hard headed. Over the three years it took me to sell those three stories, I wrote and submitted over forty more that did not sell. If I hadn't insisted on doing things my way – which is to say the opposite of what I'd been told – I almost certainly would have sold more stories and sold my first story sooner.

One thing my early mentor said that I took to heart immediately: The reader does not owe us, the writer, a chance. Or the benefit of the doubt. Or even one second of their time – we can't ask or expect the reader to bear with us while we get going. We owe the reader the best story we can write, delivered in the most engaging and entertaining way possible.

Here's the 'more in a moment' thing about talking heads:
Dialog is the heart of every scene (or monologue, if the person is talking to herself). I say that because I started out to be a playwright - which is all about telling a story through the words of people talking on a stage. My first, rapidly jotted draft of a scene is almost always dialog - quotes with an initial to identify the speaker and the rare note on scene or blocking or business. Later I fill in the specifics of where they are and what they're doing. More than one writerly friend who never aspired to playwrighthood has tried this technique and reported that by first going with the flow, the give-and-take of the spoken word helped them "see" the conversation/confrontation as it would play out—which in turn made it easier to structure the movements and setting of the scene.
That's my only original pro tip.

But I'll leave you with a better one:
Don't write what you know. Write what you want to know. Keep pushing yourself, keep growing as a writer.

Guest author James R. Callan: The Dialog Signature

James R. Callan

After a successful career in mathematics and computer science, receiving grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA, and being listed in Who’s Who in Computer Science and Two Thousand Notable Americans, James R. Callan turned to his first love—writing. He wrote a monthly column for a national magazine for two years, and published several nonfiction books.  He now concentrates on his favorite genre, mystery/suspense, with his sixth book scheduled for a Spring 2014 release.




The Dialog Signature

Most of us recognize the significance of our signature. It is, or should be, a unique representation or identification of who we are. In Mexico, where we spend time, signatures are an art form. They may not clearly show the various letters in a person’s name, but they are unique and they identify the person who has put down his mark.

Signatures count. Look at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence and one name stands out. It isn’t Th. Jefferson, although he was very important in the process. John Hancock’s signature draws the eye to it, and even today, we say, “Put your John Hancock on the dotted line.”

So, what does this have to do with writing? Am I talking about the way you autograph a book?

Ideally, each of your major characters will have a signature, a dialog signature. Your written signature identifies you. The dialog signature of your character should identify him or her. It should be as unique to the character as your signature is to you. And just as your signature tells us something about you, the dialog signature of each character should tell the reader a lot about the character.

When you make up a bio for one of the people in your book, you should include his or her dialog signature.  How do you do this? Ask yourself these questions.
• What vocabulary does she use?
• What is her diction?
• Does she have a regional dialect?
• Is English a first or second language for her?
• What cadence is normal for her?
• What are her marker words?
• What is her normal sentence structure, or does she have one?
• How verbose is she?
• What mannerisms does she exhibit while speaking?
• What body language does she show?
• Does speaking come easily for her?
• What circumstances make her nervous when speaking?

Answer these and other questions and you will have a dialog signature for the character. Keep this handy when writing dialog for this character and you will make this person consistent. The reader will recognize the speech patterns. In many instances, you may not even need an attribution when she speaks.

In my book How to Write Great Dialog (Oak Tree Press, 2014) I devote a chapter to the dialog signature, giving examples of how to use marker words, the use of sentence structure or the lack of it, and many other aspects of a dialog signature. And I give many examples to show how different characters would say, or convey, the same information.

Here is an example from my suspense book A Ton of Gold (Oak Tree Press, 2013).

“I think Eula is right. Bessie didn’t start the fire. Could you get a forensic pathologist to look at the body? Do a complete autopsy?”
Glothe cracked the knuckles of his left hand. “Do that sometimes. Pretty good guy in Tyler. Doc Haas. Course, usually Willa suggests it, calls him.”
Mark didn’t say anything.
“Maybe get Doc Simms to call Willa. Make her think it’s his idea.”
“Good. How about not letting it out that Eula is alive?”
“That’s a bigger stump.”

The sheriff Glothe doesn’t worry about complete sentences, or subjects or verbs, for that matter.  Mark, on the other hand, has a more structured speech.

There’s definitely more to dialog that copying what you hear in the post office.  Make your novel sing – and sell – with great dialog.

Website: www.jamesrcallan.com
Blog: www.jamesrcallan.com/blog
Amazon Author page: http://amzn.to/1eeykvG
Twitter: @jamesrcallan

A Ton of Gold (Oak Tree Press, 2013)

On Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions

How to Write Great Dialog (Oak Tree Press, 2014)

On Amazon in paperback

Writing Like A Man

Friends, Romans, Readers & Writers,  please welcome author Kristen Elise.

“How do you write women so well?”

“I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.”

Jack Nicholson’s line from As Good As It Gets was met with laughter by men and cringing by women (as we concealed our inner laughter from the men in our lives so as to not publicly condone the statement.) Of course, Nicholson’s character was a romance writer. Had he been a mystery writer, the line might have gone something like this:

“I think of a man, and I take away action and add sap.”

I have been accused of “writing like a man,” a comment I took as a major compliment. Now, before readers and writers of both genders take equal offense and burn me at the stake, please allow me to explain: it’s a fact that author gender matters to some readers. Specifically, it matters more to men.

Attached are a few statistics from Bowker’s publication of “The Mystery Consumer in the Digital Age.” The stats I have are from 2010, but let’s face it, ladies, we haven’t advanced that much in the last three years.

The good news is that to ~90% of women and ~80% of men, author gender makes no difference in how likely the reader is to read a book. The bad news is that 21% of men and 7% of women are less likely to pick up a mystery based solely on the fact that it was written by a member of the opposite sex.

That’s a little disturbing if you’re a female mystery writer: you might presume that 10.5% of all mystery readers already don’t like you, and therefore that maybe you should write in drag. But it’s not really as bad as that. The majority of mystery readers (68%) are women, so we level the playing field a little bit by sheer number.

In the end, male and female authors share almost equal success. If you look at the top 15 mystery writers for readers of all ages, they’re 40-47% women. As for the all-time, hands-down fave – Madame Christie, bested only by Shakespeare and the Bible.

So what makes that 21% of men and 7% of women automatically judge a book by its cover (and by that, I mean the name on the cover?) The answer is: a personal preference for a writing style automatically associated with one gender or the other. And there might be something to the stereotype. Here’s a little experiment:

Below are two randomly selected excerpts from novels I have recently read. And I do mean randomly selected: In each case, I opened the book to a random page and then copied verbatim the first two complete paragraphs. Here they are: 

Excerpt #1:

Turbulence is still turbulent, whether one is flying first class or coach. 

The plane bounced and threw hot tea into my lap. I sat in the exit row in the first class cabin, on the upper deck of a 747, traveling from Los Angeles to Edinburgh. It was my first time in first class, and definitely my first time to enjoy a port tasting at 35,000 feet. However, port and turbulence don’t mix. My stomach danced first with queasiness, then with fear of meeting my Scottish relatives for the first time. To add to my anxiety, my beige cotton khakis were now stained Earl Grey. 

Excerpt #2:

Hugo shrugged. “I’m not paying your salary, so do whatever you like, Boss.”

“Just make sure you do your shit right. That’s all you need to worry about.” Tom reached for his wine glass but, when he saw it was as empty as the carafe, he grabbed at Hugo’s, spilling half on the paper table cloth before getting it under control.

Who wrote each of these? If you guessed #1 Woman, #2 Man, you’re right. The excerpts are from #1 Whisky Descent, by Sara McBride, and #2 The Crypt Thief, by Mark Pryor (and I thank each of them for playing along in this exercise.) 

Did you think the author’s gender was obvious? What gave it away? Do you think your gender comes through in your own writing? And, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I hereby present a fun challenge: In the comment box below, write a line or two under a fake or androgynous name (Kris is always a good one…) Feel free to pull a short excerpt from your own WIP, if you’d like. And let’s see if we can guess your gender.

Statistically, in the mystery market it might be in one’s interest to write like a man. But I’d settle for the success of Madame Christie.

Kristen Elise, Ph.D. is a drug discovery biologist and long-time resident of San Diego, California. She lives with her husband, stepson, and three canine children. Please visit her websites at www.kristenelisephd.com and www.murderlab.com.

Back cover copy for The Vesuvius Isotope:

When her Nobel laureate husband is murdered, biologist Katrina Stone can no longer ignore the secrecy that increasingly pervaded his behavior in recent weeks. Her search for answers leads to a two-thousand-year-old medical mystery and the esoteric life of one of history’s most enigmatic women. Following the trail forged by her late husband, Katrina must separate truth from legend as she chases medicine from ancient Italy and Egypt to a clandestine modern-day war. Her quest will reveal a legacy of greed and murder and resurrect an ancient plague, introducing it into the twenty-first century.

Dial D for Dialogue

As a longtime writer, I have always believed that the heart of a story is crisp, right to the point dialogue.

I am all for strong narrative, description, scenery, thoughts, and other elements that make for a great novel. However, what comes out of the mouths of characters can make or break the book.

For instance, if your protagonist just goes on and on while saying little of substance, it can definitely weigh down the novel and cause the plot to drag.
On the other hand, if a character has something worth saying, that can be said in as few words as possible while still moving the story along, then that will hold the attention of the reader and give the writer something to build on.

Beyond that, I enjoy hearing what people have to say in fiction, as opposed to telling us what they are doing and thinking. I believe this breathes life into any plot and make the characters seem real. The latter is especially true when the dialogue comes from the heart or soul of character and is spoken in real language rather than scripted words as is often found in screenplays and teleplays.

Do you prefer more or less dialogue as a writer or reader?