All posts tagged Writer Resources

Creating a thrilling read through dialogue and character

Dialogue and character series: 1st installment

What a thriller writer has to say about dialogue and character

By Mel Comley

Mel Comley

When Thea asked me do this article I thought, hmm… I’ll give it a go.

But when I got down to writing, I found it far harder than I’d anticipated.

I’m one of those writers who used to hate using dialogue but who now loves it. I have to say that I’d rather create a dialogue scene than a descriptive scene any day.

I think not only does it balance a book/novel out but also makes for a more interesting read.

At the beginning of my journey I was told that my writing consisted of too much tell and not enough show. ;-)

Now, I tend to use dialogue as a form of getting around this all too familiar issue.

But dialogue has a far greater importance in the whole story-telling scenario, it’s main job is to make  it is easy to differentiate between the characters. In real life we all speak differently so it’s equally important that as writers we make our characters do the same.

Yes, it gets harder the more books/novels you write, to try and create new characters who can easily be identified by what they say. But it’s an absolute must in our line of business.

As writers we all strive to make our books and our characters stand out from the rest. Having distinctive characters, using realistic and not stereotypical dialogue helps us to achieve these results, hopefully!

I spend hours playing around with a character before installing them in my books. I write down each character and an example of what each of them might say.

When I was learning about the art of writing I had a book full of different exercises. One of these exercises was to name all your characters and in the following column write down what each character would say for a certain item or room. For example: In the UK we have a tendency to use different words for the room in which we relax in after we’ve completed a hard day’s work, depending on what class we are. It can be known as a lounge (used by middle-class people) sitting room (usually used by the lower class.) Whereas in the good old days, the same room would have been known as a Parlour and was only really used for entertaining purposes on special occasions.

Take that one step further, during the use of dialogue you can also hint at the different dialects people use. An example of this is again using the UK terminology: A person speaking from in the extreme north of England would say ‘Away with ya,’ and they tend to call people ‘Pet’ all the time. But in the south we have a saying that people sound like country bumpkins and we tend to imagine them talking with a piece of straw hanging out of the mouths, saying things such as: ‘How’s you doin’, me luvly?’ ;-)

So for me there really is only one way to write a novel and that’s to write a character driven novel. We all need to see our characters come alive on the page and help create a stunning novel that thousands will read.

I receive numerous messages daily either via email or on Facebook from fans telling me they love the Lorne books. I refer to my thrillers as ‘The Justice’ series but it makes me happy knowing that I’ve done my job by creating a wonderful and distinctive character who is loved by many.

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My bio.

I am a best-selling thriller writer who has started dabbling in different genres. I live in Northern France with my two crazy dogs who love to drag me round the village every morning. As a writer it’s the only form of exercise I get.

You can find out more about my books on my website: www.melcomleybooks.com

or my blogs

Follow me on twitter @melcom1

Or on Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mel-Comley/264745836884860

If you liked this post, please do share.

Thea is the author of several novels that she considers left of mainstream. You can find her on BN, Kobo, Sony, Apple

Anomaly by Thea Atkinson
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by Thea Atkinson on February 20, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in guest blogging
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Posted by Thea Atkinson on February 20, 2012

http://theaatkinson.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/creating-a-thrilling-read-through-dialogue-and-character/

The truth about the secret inspiration of a skeptic

Gordon Bonnet Guests at GonzoInk:

Wednesdays is for Writers and at times, GonzoInk celebrates it with an exercise, an essay on writing, or a guest post by a writer. Today we have the latter two all wrapped up in one nice post by Gordon Bonnet. (@talesofwhoa) on twitter. Please do follow him. he’s incredibly supportive. I really enjoy his blog posts especially those he writes with skepticism in mind. Plus, he has a wicked sense of humor.

Here’s Gordon:

Grab it at Amazon

The following is really a question without an answer, but an intriguing question nonetheless.

I belong to a fiction-writing group that meets weekly on Tuesday evenings.  The range of different styles, plots, and approaches to writing in this group is staggering.  We have (just to mention three examples) a woman writing stories of Mennonite family in Oklahoma during World War II, and the cost (both personal and public) of being a pacifist in a time of war; a tale, humorous and heart-wrenching by turns, of a girl who is foisted off upon her aunt’s extended family, and has to adjust to living in a rural village after spending her whole life in the city; and the story of an 18-year-old farm boy who has been drafted to fight in the French and Indian War.

We have had extended conversations in this group about where inspiration comes from.  To be sure, each of these (and my own writing as well) reflects our lives’ experiences; the settings, and often the characters, are those we know, even if vaguely fictionalized.  But where, really, does that spark come from that sets us off (or that sets an artist or a composer off) on the path to creating something?  I can say from my own experience that I seldom have any real clue where my own ideas come from.  I tend to write fiction with a supernatural twist (an amusing pastime for a hard-headed rationalist, perhaps, but I have to indulge the mystical side of my personality somehow, don’t I?).  And with few exceptions, I can’t really point to anything that was the source of the basic ideas for the pieces I’ve written.

The word “inspiration” comes from the Latin words “in-” (which, indeed, means the same thing as in English) and the verb “spirare” meaning “to breathe.”  So “inspiration” literally means “an inward breath.”  You can still find the word used in its original, literal context in the medical use of “inspire” (meaning “to breathe in”), but the figurative sense is more common.  An inspiration is something that breathes life into a work; and there’s this sense in the term, isn’t there, that it comes from outside us — that it’s something we are the recipients of, not the creators of.

I know that I have frequently had the experience of feeling like some character I was writing about has leapt off the page, and has taken the plot into his or her own hands.  One particularly striking example occurred in my novel Convection, about ten people trapped in an apartment complex during a hurricane.  I had initially intended the character of Jennie, a 19 year old convenience store clerk, to be simply the sullen and bitchy counterpoint to the nine other people in the building; just a foil against which the others’ efforts to remain steadfast, to help each other cope, would stand out in higher relief.  But Jennie wasn’t content to be a backdrop, and an obnoxious one at that, and the only way I can state it (because this is how it felt to me) is that she took over and wrote herself a bigger part.  Her bitchiness became a defense mechanism for her own insecurity, instead of a raison d’etre of her character; and she ended up being the quick one, the only person who was able to put the pieces of the puzzle together and figure out why one by one, the survivors of the storm were being killed.  The throw-away character became second only to the point-of-view character in importance to the plot, and when (in the second to last chapter) Jennie gets killed by one of the three remaining people who have survived to that point, the members of my writers’ group were unanimous in their dismay.

“She was my favorite character,” one of them said.  “I know why you killed her, but I hate you for it.”

All of this is just by way of describing how out of control of the writing process itself I often feel.  Now, I’m as certain as I can be that this is just an illusion; I do not believe that there is some kind of Jungian Collective Unconscious from which I am drawing inspiration.  But if this belief (or lack thereof) is correct, then where do these ideas come from?  I suppose that the conventional answer is “the subconscious,” but this to me doesn’t seem to do anything more than to put a name on something we have no explanation for.

So, in the end, I have no explanation for the “otherness” I feel when I am struck with an idea for a story, or the odd feeling that a character has taken control of my hands and is making me write him or her into the story in a different way than I intended.  I am completely convinced that there is a perfectly rational explanation for both of these phenomena, but I’m damned if I can figure out what it is.

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If you’re a writer and need some networking love, please do visit the squirrelarmy page.

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by Thea Atkinson on December 21, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in guest blogging, writerwednesday exercises
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Posted by Thea Atkinson on December 21, 2011

http://theaatkinson.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/the-truth-about-the-secret-inspiration-of-a-skeptic/

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