The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [26]
You will make your own decisions about character speech. However, I hope you'll think about the points just raised. Oddball spellings, excessive dropped letters to indicate colloquial mispronunciations, attempts at racial or ethnic dialect, and heavy use of realistic dirty talk all risk offending someone; some you might offend will be editors, who have the checkbooks, and others may be members of honorable American minorities who have already been thoughtlessly battered, verbally and otherwise, for a dozen generations or more. Under such circumstances, is it really necessary?
18. DON'T FORGET SENSE IMPRESSIONS
WALLY, MY PROBLEM student, brought me some story dialogue the other day. It read like this:
"Don't make me go any closer!" Annie cried.
"There's nothing to fear," Joe soothed. "See?"
"That's easy for you to say!" quoth Annie.
"Is that better?" asked Joe.
"Oh, yes!" murmured Annie. "Much!"
"Annie, you do love me, after all!"
"Yes!"
I'll spare you the details of the real-life conversation that then ensued between me and Wally. However, the gist of it from my standpoint was that I as a fiction reader didn't have any idea of what was going on in Wally's story in the dialogue just quoted. Wally protested that he had, after all, followed the rules of stimulus and response, and had given me everything the characters said; therefore, he couldn't understand what my problem was.
I then tried to explain to Wally that the dialogue left me at a loss. Among other things, I could not:
• See anything that was happening during the dialogue;
• Hear anything except the dialogue words;
• Smell anything that might be pertinent, Taste anything, Feel any other possible tactile sensations;
• Know any thoughts the viewpoint character might be having, so that I might as a reader get a hint as to how I was supposed to be taking this dialogue;
• Feel any emotions of the viewpoint character, also as an aid to my reader response to the situation being portrayed;
• Be aware of the goal of the viewpoint character, so that I can guess how things are going in the scene.
"Wally," I concluded, "dialogue without any sense impressions, thoughts or feelings of the viewpoint character gets totally abstract; it stops making sense; the reader gets lost. I'm not suggesting great, purple patches of stuff—just enough to keep me oriented."
Wally went off and rewrote. He soon came up with something like the following (his additional material is italicized):
The chill wind tugged at Joe's coat as he pulled Annie closer to the edge of the cliff. Behind them, gusts swayed the ponderosa pines. A few feet from where he now led the quaking girl, the granite escarpment simply stopped. Beyond the brink was the windy vastness of a sheer, thousand-foot drop, straight down.
Annie's shaking became more violent, and her eyes glistened with sudden, frightened tears. "Don't make me go any closer!"
Joe stepped back a step, leaving her alone on the brink. He had to make her confront this terror or she could never forget what had happened here last summer. "There's nothing to fear," Joe soothed. "See?"
Annie's wide eyes took in the space between them—how much farther back from the edge he had moved, leaving her alone. "That's easy for you to say!" she said bitterly.
Suddenly Joe couldn't be cruel to her any longer. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her, intent only on protecting her, always, if she would just let him. "Is that better?" he asked.
"Oh, yes!" Annie murmured gratefully, snuggling against him. "Much!" Still crying, she raised her face to his and gently kissed him. Her perfume, mountain flowers, surrounded them. Joe could scarcely believe the glad certainty that