#not adding a comma deliberately because i want you to read this sentence as if its fallen out of my mouth

[tallyhallsphotowall]

tally hall photos day #92: i dont even know how to caption this this picture is so weird

[tomatograter]

Tips for writing Dirk and Jake?

They're both simpler and goofier than they seem. Dirk and Jake are heavily emotionally oriented, but at the same time their emotions are downplayed by everybody (including themselves!) for the sake of keeping up a "respectable front." They're not very good at it tho. If you keep this logic in mind you'll prolly be okay giving them words to say.

Specially when put together, their quirks play off one another. Dirk is all modern and hyper specific lingo, internet poison, and a tryhard 'street' impression pulled from the internet and god knows what 00's tv serial he cobbled up together all by himself to sound # hashtag # cool.

While Jake speaks like a golden age actor playing a character, on a stage, with a transatlantic accent (this means a mix of american and british lingo that did not truly belong to either culture - it is, from conception to limited use then eventual death, a language made for Prestige Movies and to embellish the telling of Stories.)

Their characters are paired up like this because they naturally contrast with one another. The man from the future / The man of the past, neither of them fully being what they seem.

One thing a lot of people slip up on is the Language thing. Dirk sounds like a guy who's sprinkling hard words into his dialogue to seem smarter, knowledgeable, academic. Whereas Jake has an expansive and peculiar vocabulary (think like Rose's, here), but he doesn't care about 'sounding intelligent' so much as he cares about being LIKED or being charming, so with him it's about pomp and flair. You could say Dirk pretends to be limitlessly reliable while Jake pretends to be "A Himbo", but they know there's a limit to the act.

With both of them carefully crafting a persona they want to project outwards and be remembered by, they tend to adjust to the environment. If there's not a public to perform to, it's gone. Dirk is less playful and more technical-incisive if he's talking to AR and Jake really tones himself down at the end of Act 6 when he's just exhausted of being read wrong.

Them being friends for so long also influences how they speak to one another in contrast of everyone else; in dirk-jake conversations, both of them use a lot of bro-speak deliberately and almost excessively. It's a lot of Bro's & Dude's & Man's that serve to denote bestfriendliness or reassure that they're in the same brainwave.

Also, they cuss a lot, indiscriminately, and to great comedic effect. I see a lot of people being afraid if making Jake Say A Bad Word but this is nothing new to him. He often abruptly cuts off his charming old-timey thing to just sound like a normal regular dude who's gotten frustrated and it's that whiplash that makes the character. Jake can be pretty & abruptly mean if he wants.

Dirk keeps more of a leveled writing voice and syntax, even when he's arguing with himself, favoring readability over tone. He wants to communicate something with his long-ass texts, even if his explanations are too convoluted. When Dirk goes off the rails we're talking about metaphor- Like Dave, he enters a trail of thought and keeps adding to it sometimes, needlessly, as if he doesn't know just when to end a joke. (The "Bounce a coin off that ass" monologue, ex)

While Jake uses asterisks to *narrate his own actions* or EMPHASIZES important parts of his run-on sentences to show importance/tone/frustration BY MAKING THEM BIG. He uses periods to separate sentences more often than commas. When he does use punctuaction he can also exaggerate!!!! Not always, but often enough. If you see it happening too much edit it a little. (Jake also occasionally uses an emoji here and there though its very sparse so its more like a callback to how Jade does it. He learned from her, after all.)

Rereading their pesterlogs w/ each other and then with different partners (like dirk with jane, jake with calliope, how each of them talks to caliborn, etc etc) can help you pick on other useful cues and subtleties. They're generally more amenable and friendly to the girls. Also, dont skip the jake/hal conversations. They're crucial for characterization.

If comparing/contrasting is up to your speed, here are characters whose quirks sound similar to, compound to, or can help you write:

Dirk- Rose, Dave

Jake- Vriska, Jade

TL;DR: "intent" matters a lot to the things Dirk and Jake say, even when the text is riffing off it. Its more useful to think on /why/ they're saying this rather than "does this sound like enough lingo/oldtimey speak", because focusing too much on the latter is gonna make you end up writing nonsense.

(*All screenshots used in this post are from actual pesterlogs in Homestuck)

[childotkw]

Can I ask, what is the process of getting from Ver 1 to Ver 2? because I would look at Ver 1 and be like ‘Ooo that’s nice alr’ but somehow you’ve managed to transform it into something deeper! and how do you maybe prevent overwriting a sentence?

So, I’ll caveat this by saying my process for writing is generally write the thing as close to perfect as I can and then at a later date, come back and edit. And it’s always been incredibly frustrating and mentally taxing - because I wasn’t giving myself room to write bad paragraphs or shoddy lines of dialogue or poor descriptions. Everything had to be perfect. So when I would come back to edit things, I was stuck in this push and pull of I know this scene needs work but how do I word it right versus I should be better and not need this much editing - which is a funny approach to take to your own writing but I’m still learning how to write, and I’m only human so I don’t hold that against myself.

Moving on.

I find the simplest and most efficient way to analyse my writing and elevate it, is to just read it aloud. Seriously. This was a mindboggling concept to me when I realised it. 

I will sit down and read a passage aloud, and by voicing it, by repeating it out in different ways, adding words, taking words out, adding emphasis or different emotions to my words - it really helps refine my writing. 

If I have a piece of dialogue that needs improving, I say it aloud. But I try and put myself in the character’s shoes, then push myself to feel what they would be feeling. By identifying that emotion, I can then begin to describe it in a way that I feel captures it. 

So, the example I used in that previous post:

“Admiral,” the man said in a tone that implied ‘you bitch’.  “For all our sakes, I am going to pretend I did not hear that.” 

was said by Lucas. Now, in my novel, Lucas is an incredibly cunning man, that likes to twist the people around him. He’s well educated, and there is a faint sense of superiority to everything he does - not out of arrogance, but purely because he is that good. Now, taking what I know of him, the description of his tone (which was written jokingly by me at an earlier time) doesn’t quite match the image I am trying to present. It’s not sophisticated enough to show what I want the audience to see.

So. I started changing things. Figured out a better, stronger way of describing his tone of voice -

“Admiral,” the man started, somehow wrapping the single title in a tone that was equal parts mild and vicious.  

And elevated his vocabulary to begin to show all those qualities I mentioned above (intelligent, superior, cunning, likes to get under people’s skin, is deliberately antagonistic if it suits his needs):

“In the interest of protecting your reputation as a moderately intelligent man, I am going to ignore that.” 

Every line I write is geared towards showing something. So having that constant awareness helps me go from version one, to version two, of my writing. That conscious decision changes the way you look at words.

As for overwriting and trying to prevent that - again, my advice is just read it aloud. You will automatically know when a line or paragraph doesn’t work because your brain goes eh when it hears it. If you lose your breath while reading it out, you have either overwritten, or need to make use of a comma somewhere. That’s really all I can give you on that one, darling.

[gregofrph]

Greg Reviews: Chvrchesrp

Below the cut is an in-depth review of the roleplay group @chvrchesrp. Please keep in mind that this is my own opinion and you don’t have to take any notice of what I’ve written if you don’t want to. Everything I say is to be constructive, not mean and if you do take offence to anything I apologise. If you would like me to remove my review, please ask me and I will do so as soon as I can.

Theme/Graphics/Colour/Navigation:

I LOVE your theme. I’m so, so happy that themes like this still exist in RP groups. It’s easy to look at, easy to read and isn’t shoved together in a small box in the centre of my computer screen. Great start for me! Your main graphics are wonderful and follow the colour scheme that you have running throughout your blog which is also nice to look at. They’re not in your face and don’t hurt your eyes. Everything seems to mesh well together.

Your navigation at first was quite overwhelming, but with a literate roleplay with an intricate plot that’s expected. There’s a lot of information that needs to be understood. I can see why it took so long from establishment to opening, but that’s not a bad thing either, it just shows that you guys didn’t rush into anything and made sure that it was all researched and completed before you did anything else. Kudos to that. I’ve known admin to get too excited and open and RPG before everything was ready to go and struggled from there.

Plot:

When reading your plot I noticed that you repeated the same phrase in two sentences: in this day and age. I found this quite jarring and I’m not a fan of phrases/sayings/specific words etc being used straight after the other. I would suggest looking for something else to put in one of the sentences, for example, the first sentence could have ‘Now’ or ‘For years’, or simply just go into ‘The Gates of Heaven….’ And then connect the two sentences with a comma, as follows:

But how can an omnipotent, all-seeing being not see his own downfall? The Gates of Heaven are in Los Angeles, just as the Gates of Hell are in Las Vegas, and in this day and age, belief is waning: there are more religions and more atheists. These things weaken the powers of this God and all of the beings within his realms. God did not see, God did not know.

Other than that, your plot honestly sounds so awesome. It’s such an original idea.

Guidelines:

Your guidelines were shorter than I expected but they cover all of the basics. I was surprised to see that you didn’t have a starter rule like a lot of roleplays are adding in now as it helps with inclusion but I also like that there you trust your members not to bubble roleplay and ignore certain people. I liked that your activity was 6 days, I think that’s a solid time for people, but I do think that your activity checks should be random and not on a specific day. In the RP I admin it used to be a specific few days but people would deliberately work around that to be inactive 3/4/5 days and then post a couple of things just before activity (or straight after they’ve been placed on it) and disappear again. It’s definitely something I would consider adding in for your benefit.

I absolutely love that you’ve added a safe word to your roleplay. This is such a good idea and I would love to know if it’s been used and if it’s worked in the past? This is something I could see many RP groups getting on board with. I would definitely add a link to that straight from the guidelines in case people gloss over it by accident (or they’re too lazy to check it out).

Characters:

I like that you have a character directory. This is the easiest way to check out open/taken characters. Your directory theme is one I have seen before and is easy to navigate. Your graphic colour doesn’t whitewash any POC which is always a plus, and you have plenty of variety when it comes to FCs. I can’t believe you only have two open characters, that’s amazing! One thing I would say is that your font colour when you hover over the character graphic is hard to read, I think it needs to be a darker colour.

I admit I only glossed over a couple of bios, but they look like a great length, not too short that details are left out but not too long to be overwhelming and make people not want to read them. I’ve read bios where they’re unnecessarily long and it’s put me off a roleplay straight away. I really like bios when they’re written in second person, I think it’s such an interesting take on bio writing and whilst I can’t do something like that myself because my brain is stuck in third person mode, kudos to you for managing it!

Your masterlist is nice and easy to follow.

Application:

More and more I see roleplays that don’t require a para sample, which I find intriguing and trusting all the same. It certainly makes my life easier as an applicant. Using headcanons and things for the future are better ways to judge how people interpret the character they’re applying for whilst also allowing yourself to see how they write. Your application process is nice and simple and doesn’t scare me to look at.

Admins:

I love your intros, they did make me chuckle, and I love that the three of you have different duties. I think that definitely makes life easier for all of you, because you don’t have to feel like you have to do everything and having separate responsibilities can make you more of a team than if you’re all trying to do everything because people can get slack and it creates tension if someone feels like they’re always doing everything.

Other:

I LOVE THAT YOU HAVE AN RP TRAILER VIDEO. You used my FAVOURITE quote in it as well, from Angels and Demons, and as soon as I heard that it completely sold me on your roleplay, please, let me love you all right now.

Overall:

To be honest, guys, you’ve got yourself a solid roleplay here. You’ve been going for a long time now, longer than a lot of roleplays around here these days, and it shows by what you’re doing. You’ve ticked all the boxes, you’ve crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s in my opinion. I’m really, really gutted I don’t have more OOC time because I would love to apply to this group and I’m actually in love with it. I wish you all the best in the future with your roleplay and maybe if my schedule frees up you’ll see an app from me!

[how2to18]

APPROXIMATELY ONE THIRD of the way into Alain Mabanckou’s third novel, the contemporary classic Broken Glass, the eponymous narrator lovingly describes a literal pissing contest between “Robinette, the inconquerable, the piss queen of the town, of the neighborhood,” and the local bar, Credit Gone West, in which most of this novel takes place, and an apparently pompous stranger, commencing with Robinette yelling, “hey you there, strutting about like a barnyard cock, if you can piss longer than me then I’ll let you shag me, any time, any place, free of charge, I give you my word.” The stranger accepts, leading to a lurid, and suspenseful, poetically charged 10-page scene of “urinal combat,” an excretory “miracle deserving of papal beatification,” moreover, the already rather transgressive scene is told with no punctuation, save for commas, in one long, labyrinthine 10-page sentence — no, make that technically one long, 10-page mezzo-phrase that has no official capitalized beginning, and no end defined by a period.

To be more precise, and grammatically “correct,” the novel in its entirety is one long, 160-page mezzo-phrase, comprised of comma-laden lines, paragraphs, monologues, and scenes with no orthodox start, no punctuated conclusion. Nevertheless the novel’s first words skillfully, clearly supply all the data we need:

let’s say the boss of the bar Credit Gone West gave me this notebook to fill, he’s convinced that I — Broken Glass — can turn out a book, because one day, for a laugh, I told him about this famous writer who drank like a fish, and had to be picked up off the street when he got drunk, which shows you should never joke with the boss, he takes everything literally, when he gave me this notebook he said from the start it was only for him, no one else would read it, he didn’t want Credit Gone West just to vanish one day, and added that people in this country have no sense of the importance of memory […]

The above not only provides setting, voice, occasion, and plot (the story of a bar and its patrons), but arguably Mabanckou’s purpose and vision: to make a book about writing, memory, and booze, on its face a seemingly suspect recipe for good fiction. But not here.

Mabanckou is openly interested in formal play and deploys similarly experimental means in his fourth novel, Memoirs of a Porcupine, but in Broken Glass his aims are so voice-driven we quickly forget we’re amid such a sophisticated undertaking. The change is seamless, resulting in a perfectly balanced work of both “high” and “low” art, a novel that relentlessly challenges “normal” modes, all in the service of performing the voice of an amateur writer — a canny move — with a bent for scatological and prurient portraits, and who also happens to be a damn good scribe. The book’s overwhelming style fades as style, per se, as we find ourselves embodying the stoned perspective of Broken Glass, the aging, boozy, denizen of Credit Gone West, in the town of Trois-Cents, in Republic of Congo. Glass becomes our improbable lens on the world, emphasis on improbable.

Critical acclaim, controversy, and much political conversation surrounded Broken Glass upon its first publication in France in 2006. At the time, African literature was framed as overtly anthropological, old guard, politically utilitarian, and, often, in the eyes of Western readers, necessarily embedded within the romantic rhetoric of “redemption narratives.” Broken Glass, however, both the novel and its narrator, appears disarmingly uninterested in redemption, not for its characters, nor for its readers. The book instead is explicitly interested in bar fights, bar talk, and, ultimately, booze, blood, urine, shit, semen, sweat, and water, all of which figure throughout. It’s a book of many streams. Which is to say the novel is interested in tangible life and its fluid components, and its narrator demands that this be a story of people — real life, real people.

This handsome new edition comes with an introduction by Uzodinma Iweala, probably best known for the novel Beasts of No Nation (and the film of that book). Iweala provides context for Broken Glass: “[A] book so irreverent in its approach to the revelation of the African soul, so brutally satirical in its battle against stereotypes of African literary characters’ search for meaning, that upon its first translation into English in 2009, critics could not ignore its ferocious difference.” That difference is important, but a wholly political read threatens to undo Mabanckou’s multilayered achievement. Iweala knows this too well:

To say that a novel whose central protagonist possesses the sole ambition (besides writing his stories) to get and remain drunk is more about Africa than the bottles of wine soaking its pages is to be willfully consumed by structural stereotypes. […] Broken Glass is a novel about addiction, but it moves beyond typologies to examine addiction’s core.

And yet for all its “bottle worship” and ruthless portrayals of addiction, Broken Glass is not, in the end, without its own rough redemption. Nor is it without a beating heart. The novel’s “hydrographic detail” extends beyond its supremely convincing stream-of-consciousness style, beyond its deliberate fixation on mortal fluids, and toward the novel’s defining image, a nearby river. “I really hate this river,” Broken Glass laments, “it’s a lagoon of death, the cause of all my grief, the reason for my anger, my irritation, I would love to get back at this river, to tell it to give back my mother’s soul, which it swallowed up one day, a day of deepest silence, but I don’t want to talk about that chapter of my life just now, I’ll come to it a bit later.” Like our best writers, Glass tells the stories of others in order to know his own.

Broken Glass has a loud and living voice, an almost overwhelmingly singular style masterfully translated with dedicated consistency by Helen Stevenson, with fireworks on every page, and expertly navigates its many unapologetically human projects. It casts a bright, honest light on its subjects, and asks questions that are democratic, serious, and perilous for those in power: Whose stories are worth telling? And who gets to tell those stories? All of this even as Mabanckou beautifully, subtly, sadly, and, yes, redemptively tells the story of a narrator grieving from the bottom of a bottle. The book is profoundly literary, bouncingly readable, funny, heartbreaking, obscene, fierce, and restorative. It’s a book of love, really. Tough love. What more could you want from a masterpiece?

¤

Scott Cheshire is the author of High as the Horses’ Bridles (Henry Holt). His work has been published in AGNI, Electric Literature, Guernica, Harper’s, One Story, and the Picador Book of Men. He lives in New York City.

The post Streams of Consciousness appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2UaD4yB via IFTTT

[bern33chaser]

How to Write Dialogue

Dialogue refreshes. Seeing quotation marks on a page has been proven to increase readability, which means that readers find the page more interesting. And you want your readers to stay interested. Dialogue breaks up “gray text” and gives your eyes a break too.

Dialogue uses basic rules for punctuating and formatting:

When the speaker changes, hit Return and start a new line (which Maeve Maddox demonstrates in Formatting Dialogue.)

Put punctuation, such as the closing comma, inside the quotation marks.

A colon can be used in a script, but in other forms of writing, you don’t routinely punctuate dialogue with a colon.

TOM POLHAUS: Heavy. What is it? SAM SPADE: The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.

Here are some suggestions for more effective dialogue:

Do something, don’t just talk. Conflict creates action out of dialogue. If everything is dialogue, it’s a play. In real life, people do things while they talk, and they don’t talk all the time.

Don’t be yourself. New writers need to “find their voice,” but when you write dialogue, it’s not your voice now, but another’s. If they all sound like you, they all sound the same. Figure out what makes your characters different from you – perhaps age, life experiences, or social status – and how those differences affect their speech.

Who’s speaking, please? If it’s hard to tell the characters apart, your reader will be confused, bored or frustrated. Ali Hale gives several solutions in Dialogue Writing Tips. For example, you can have each character speak at his or her own rate, fast or slow, terse or wordy, big words or little words, long sentences or short, rude or polite. Vocabulary can also distinguish characters. They may express agreement in different ways: “Aye,” “Yup,” “Ja,” “Okey dokey,” “Absolutely,” “For sure, dude!” “Indubitably.”

Limit extreme dialect. In the 1800s, authors would represent a regional or cultural group by phonetically spelling their pronunciations, leaving out dropped endings, and so forth: “Och, dat wuz fright’nin’ an’ no dou’t!.” Unfortunately, deliberately adding misspellings and apostrophes makes your writing harder to read. Maeve Maddox and Kate Evans provide a better way in Showing Dialect in Dialogue and Writing Dialogue In Accents and Dialect.

You don’t have them with “Hello.” In fact, start your dialogue after the greeting. Leave out the fluff, pleasantries, and repetition. Real speech can be so repetitious that professional transcriptionists have special keys to avoid typing words such as “Okay” and “Fine.” Some people can have an entire conversation using only the word “Fine.” But don’t put it in your novel. Skip past the boring details. Really, it’s not the details that are boring, but the vague parts.

“How are you doing? Fine? Glad to hear it. How is your family? Fine?”

If a dialogue doesn’t advance the plot or expand the character, omit it. People all over the world say “Looks like rain” every day – everyone can agree on the weather – but you don’t need to do it in your story unless the rain would ruin an important action or object.

You don’t have to use complete or grammatical sentences. Real-life dialogue isn’t like that. People interrupt themselves, pause, change their minds, and so on.

Show their motivation. Or at least, show they have motivation, even if what it is remains a mystery. They may not be telling the truth or telling everything, but they have reasons for saying what they do.

Don’t have the maid tell the butler what he already knows. Yes, dialogue is a great way to feed details to your reader, but it needs to reflect what your characters would have actually asked.

“Is Heathcliffe Manor dark and dismal?” “Yes, as you remember from working here for the past thirty years, the previous owner had most of the windows painted over.”

Try it out, out loud. Reading your writing audibly to yourself (or someone else) helps you decide whether your dialogue is natural. It may cause you to shorten parts of it by showing you that you need to breathe.

Avoid the info-dump. Sometimes at the beginning and the end of a detective novel, someone says:

“First, tell me everything you know about the murder.” “Tell me, how in the world did you figure out that the butler did it?”

But an info-dump isn’t as much fun as revealing information naturally.

“This gold mirror must be four feet wide! How will we get it downstairs?”

From this one piece of dialogue, we can surmise that strangers are moving rich people out of a multi-story house.

Limit the cast. The more characters there are, the more confusing the conversation can be. If it’s hard to distinguish character voices spread through the story, it’s even harder to distinguish them when they’re all talking at once.

About dialogue tags

A dialogue tag tells you who is speaking. Writers and teachers disagree about what else it should do.

“Call a taxi,” she said. “Taxi!” he shouted. “Where you wanna go?” the driver said gruffly.

Some teachers want their students to choose from the hundreds of alternatives to said, telling them, “Said is dead.”:

“Stop the presses,” he bellowed. “Everything will be fine,” Kate reassured them. “Y’all need to meet my grandson,” she gushed. “Only the Shadow knows,” he whispered.

J.K. Rowling is notorious for her adverbial dialogue tags, which she usually places in the middle of a dialogue. Three examples from a single page of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone:

“Oh yes, everyone’s celebrating all right,” she said impatiently. “You can’t blame them,” said Dumbledore gently. “I know that,” said Professor McGonagall irritably.

On the other hand, Stephen King advises writers to avoid adverbs and use nothing but said: “While to write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ is divine.” He also says, “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

Journalists are taught to use only two verbs in dialogue tags: said and asked. Adding adverbs or using more colorful verbs compromise their objectivity.

I agree with Stephen King. The word said doesn’t distract from the dialogue itself. It is unnoticed and unobtrusive. Dialogue is a character talking. A dialogue tag is you talking. The writer’s rule is “show, don’t tell,” and when you add an adverb to a dialogue tag, you are “telling.” You are also drawing attention to yourself.

When it comes to verbs, I distinguish between active verbs such as croaked or whispered and descriptive verbs such as threatened or urged. Saying “he croaked” shows your reader the sound of the speaker’s voice, something which they wouldn’t otherwise know. Saying “he threatened” is a crutch – the reader should be able to see the threat in the dialogue itself.

I never say ‘She says softly.’ If it’s not already soft, you know, I have to leave a lot of space around it so that a reader can hear that it’s soft.” – Toni Morrison

More suggestions for dialogue tags:

Don’t use impossible verbs. Several commonly used dialogue tags represent actions that can’t really be performed while speaking.

“That’s not necessary,” laughed Bob.

If this could happen in real life, this would sound more like:

“That’s (ha ha) not (ha) necessary (ha ha),” said Bob.

Laughing and talking simultaneously is not possible.

Avoid Tom Swifties. The authors of the Tom Swift adventures of a century ago didn’t limit themselves to said because they believed in elegant variation. As a result, dialogue tags with obtrusive verbs and adverbs have been parodied in a class of puns called “Tom Swifties.”

“Someone has let the soup boil over!” Tom said hotly. “It’s pouring rain outside,” Tom stormed. “I’ll hold the flashlight for you,” Tom beamed. “I prefer pancakes,” said Tom flatly.

Don’t be like Tom.

Is this dialogue tag necessary? Sometimes you don’t need one. In a conversation between two characters, the reader can assume that alternate lines are spoken by the same character. Here’s an example from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace with some of the dialogue tags removed:

“Forgive me!” Natasha said in a whisper. “Forgive me!” “I love you,” said Prince Andrei. “Forgive…” “Forgive what?” “Forgive me for what I di…did.”

Can you use an action tag instead of a dialogue tag? You don’t need a dialogue tag if you have just identified the speaker in a different way.

The detective abruptly snuffed out his cigarette. “How about you and me working together?”

In this case, he reader understands that the detective is speaking.

Dialogue is not just for fiction. Try including dialogue in everything you write, even scholarly papers and business memos. Seeing quotation marks brightens the eyes of an academician as much as anyone else. Instead of formally summarizing what your employers said to you, why not quote them word-for-word?

You are subscribed to the free version, which is delivered only twice per week, contains ads and doesn't include exercises. Pro subscribers receive our tips daily, with no ads and with interactive exercises. Click here to activate your Pro subscription today!

Publish your book with our partner InstantPublisher.com! Professionally printed in as few as 7 days.

Original post: How to Write Dialogue from Daily Writing Tips https://www.dailywritingtips.com/how-to-write-dialogue/

[writeallofthethings]

4 EASY TIPS FOR CUTTING BACK ON WORD REPETITION

October 10, 2016  EV Scarlet

When I’m line-editing my writing projects, I’m a HUGE nerd for sentence fluency. I don’t know why. Each sentence has a rhythm or cadence, and sometimes it just sounds wrong unless I phrase it just right. Word repetition plays a huge role in this and can be one of the easiest things to spot out when you sit down to edit.

Of course, there’s a good type of repetition, and a bad type. While the good type sounds poetic, the bad type sounds choppy and awkward.

Changing up your word choice doesn’t mean you have to resort to some highly eloquent speech or anything. In fact, you should NEVER raid the thesaurus just for the sake of mixing it up.

There’s no rule for word variation. There’s no “you can only use the same word once every 500 words” or something. It’s something you want to be aware of, but if your character is more likely to say “like” instead of “such as,” it’s not bad writing to have them say “like” 90% of the time. That allows your narrator to have their own voice.

As such, I’d be more concerned about a lack of word variation in a smaller excerpt of text (like a paragraph or a page) as opposed to larger chunks like chapters or the book as a whole.

It’s an art, because while you don’t want to lean into bad repetition, you also don’t want to make things so complicated that you’ve lost your reader. You don’t want to jump through hoops to avoid repeating yourself, or that will mess up your sentence cadence even more.

An Example of Word Repetition Take a word like “door,” where there really aren’t any synonyms for it. I mean, technically there are, like “portal” or “entry” or “ingress” or something, but I mean, if you’re just talking about the door to a bedroom, any of those words are highly inappropriate. A door can just be a door. It’s a matter of fancy footwork to keep things from dragging.

Here’s an example with heavy repetition of the word “door.”

With a deep draw of breath, I stepped towards the door. This time I’d do it. I’d knock and I wouldn’t leave until she opened the door. Each step was firm with confidence, and far too soon, I stood in front of her door. I set my shoulders and raised my hand to knock. The proximity to her door almost made me turn away, but I was already decided. I knocked.

After a pause, the door opened on silent hinges.

Despite it being a common word without many sensible replacements, you CAN avoid overusing it.

With a deep draw of breath, I stepped towards her room. This time I’d do it. I’d knock and I wouldn’t leave until she let me in. Each step was firm with confidence, and far too soon, I stood in front of her door. I set my shoulders and raised my hand to knock. The proximity to the painted wood that hid my sister from the world almost made me turn away, but I was already decided. I knocked.

After a pause, the door opened on silent hinges.

Doesn’t that sound better? Try reading the whole thing out loud if you need to. Seriously, reading something out loud can work wonders when it comes to flow. As soon as your tongue trips over something awkward, you’ve found your problem.

Once you’ve recognized a word repetition problem, here are some ways to fix it: Try rewording your sentence. Even if you use the same word, if it’s used in a different spot in the sentence it’s not as annoying. If you start every sentence with “The door” then your lack of word variation is all the more glaringly obvious, since it’s also paired with a lack of sentence variation.

Think of another way to say it. Even if it’s not necessarily a synonym, this can help. In my example, I substituted “door” with “painted wood.” Not all painted wood is a door, but since the door was already mentioned, I can trust my reader to know what I’m talking about. Just don’t go too crazy.

Read it out loud. I know I’ve already said this. And I know just about every writing advice thing says this and no one actually does it, but seriously. You will catch so much. Awkward sentence cadence, missed words, inorganic dialogue.

Plus, if you’re alone and you don’t have to worry about listening in, you can get into it and give your characters all a different voice and call yourself a dork.

Don’t raid the thesaurus. Please don’t. Please, please. It does not work.

For fun, I’m going to replace every usage of “door” with the order they’re listed for Word’s thesaurus. Granted, the differences between these synonyms for “door” should be more obvious than other words, but any improper thesaurus raiding basically reads like this:

With a deep draw of breath, I stepped towards the entrance. This time I’d do it. I’d knock and I wouldn’t leave until she opened the gate. Each step was firm with confidence, and far too soon, I stood in front of her entry. I set my shoulders and raised my hand to knock. The proximity to her exit almost made me turn away, but I was already decided. I knocked.

After a pause, the access opened on silent hinges.

That’s for a common word like “door,” at least. Honestly, repeating a word like “door” isn’t a huge problem. It’s common, and we’re used to hearing it all the time. You can reword a bit so you’re not using it every sentence, but don’t worry about using it more than once on the same page.

Using Uncommon Words? When it comes to uncommon words and phrases, you need to be a bit more careful. Dropping in some words like “jubilant” or “morose,” while pretty, will also attract more attention.

Adding in some higher-level vocabulary is a great and powerful thing for your writing. It adds some flavoring and color, and you’re doing good for your readers too, by teaching them some cool new words. But those colorful new vocab words also stick out since we’re not used to hearing them. When you use an uncommon word multiple times on the same page or even in the same chapter, it feels jarring and unnatural.

So keep adding in some nice new words, but keep it to a sprinkling. You might not notice yourself repeating these words in drafts, so have a friend or writing buddy read it. They’re more likely to notice the repetition than you are.

By the way, did you subconsciously notice that I used the word “cadence” multiple times in this post? It’s one of those more uncommon words that will catch your attention, even if you’re not consciously thinking about it. (I snuck it in so you could see the example for yourself!). Then again, if you were skimming, you probably missed it.

Best ways to find word repetition? If you’re not aware of which words you might be over using, here’s a handy dandy word counter thing for you! Simply paste in a chapter or however much, and it’ll tell you how many times you use certain words.

Please be smart when using this. Obviously you’re going to have a billion uses of “the” and “a” and stuff, so don’t go through trying to varying up your transitional and prepositional words. If you are using the same word (not including every “and” and “but”, like I said) maybe 10+ times in the same chapter, go through each instance and see if there’s a better way to say it, at least for a few of them.

Most of my current WIP takes place in a cemetery. Although there’s technically a difference between a cemetery and a graveyard, my narrator doesn’t care enough to make the distinction, so I have her swap out between the two terms. Since it’s part of my setting, these words will still turn up a lot and they’ll become “common” to my readers, but I think it’s a nice little way to keep things fresh.

And despite bullet point #4, you can use the thesaurus. In fact, thesauruses are awesome. But be deliberate with which word you choose as your replacement. Make sure the connotation and the meaning fit up with what you’re going for.