250 Things You Should Know About Writing (7 page)

You can move well beyond the tentpoles. You can free-fall from the 30,000 foot view, smash into the earth, and get a macro-level micro-view of all the ants and the pill-bugs and the sprouts from seeds. What I mean is, you can track every single beat -- every tiny action -- that pops up in your plot. You don't need to do this before you write, but you can and should do it after. You'll see where stuff doesn't make sense. You'll see where plot holes occur. Also: wow. A Meat Beat Manifesto joke?

Plot is narrative, and narrative has units of measurement: momentary beats become scenes of a single place, scenes glom together to form whole sequences of action and event, and sequences elbow one another in the giant elevator known as an "act," where the story manifests a single direction before zig-zagging to another (at which point, another act shifts). Think first in acts. Then sequences. Then scenes. And finally, beats. Again, take that 30,000 foot view, but then jump out of the plane and watch the ground come to meet you.

In real life, don't cheat on your spouse or lover. Not cool, man.
Not cool
. As a writer, you don't cheat on your manuscript, either: while working on one script or novel, don't go porking another one behind the shed. But inside the narrative? The laws change. You
need
to cheat on your primary plot. Have dalliances with sub-plots -- this is a side-story, or the "B-story." Lighter impact. Smaller significance. Highlights supporting characters. But the sub-plot always has the DNA of the larger plot and supports or runs parallel to the themes present. Better still is when the sub-plot affects, influences or dovetails with the larger plot.

Every little component of your story threatens -- in a good way, like how storms threaten to give way to sun, or how a woman threatens to dress up as your favorite
Farscape
puppet and sex you down to galaxy-town -- to spin off into its own plot. Your tale is unwittingly composed of tiny micro-plots: filaments woven together. A character needs to buy a gun but can't pass the legal check. His dog runs away. He hasn't paid his power bill. Small inciting incidents. Itty-bitty conflicts. They don't overwhelm the story, but they exist just the same, enriching the whole. A big plot is in some ways just a lot of little plots lashed together and moving in a singular direction. Like a herd of stampeding marmots.

Look at plot construction advice and you'll see a portion set aside for "exposition." Consider exposition a dirty word. It is a synonym for "info-dump," and an info-dump is when you, the storyteller, squat over the audience's mouth and expel your narrative waste into their open maw. Take the section reserved for exposition and fold it gently into the rest of the work as if you were baking a light and fluffy cake. Let information come out through action. Even better: withhold exposition as long as you can. Tantric storytelling, ladies and germs: deny the audience's expectation ejaculation until you can do so no longer.

A plot twist is the kid who's too cool for school -- ultimately shallow, without substance, and a total tool. It's a gimmick. Let your story be magic, not a magic trick. Not to say plot twists can't work, but they only work when they function as the only way the story could go from the get-go. Again: organic, not artificial.

Plot is math, except instead of numbers and variables it's characters, events, themes, and yes, variables. The ending is one such variable. An ending should feel like it's the only answer one can get when he adds up all parts of the plot. This actually isn't true: you can try on any number of endings and you likely have a whole host that can work. But there's
one
ending that works for
you
, and when it works for you, it works for them. And by "them" I don't mean the men in the flower delivery van who are watching your every move. I mean "them" as in, the audience. P.S., don't forget to wear your tinfoil hat because
the flowers are listening
.

Speaking of ends, plot is just a tool. A means to an end. Think of it as a
character-
and
conflict-delivery-system
. Plot is conveyance. It still needs to work, still needs to come together and make sense -- but plot is rarely the reason someone cares about a story. They care about characters, about the way it makes them feel, about the thing you-as-storyteller are trying to say. Note, though, that the opposite is true: plot may not make them love a story, but it can damn sure make them hate it.

Our eyes flow over dialogue like butter on the hood of a hot car. This is true when reading fiction. This is true when reading scripts. What does this tell you? It tells you: you should be using a lot of dialogue.

We like to read dialogue is because it's easy, not because it's stupid. Dialogue has a fast flow. We respond to it as humans because, duh, humans make talky-talky. Easy does not translate to uncomplicated or unchallenging. Dialogue isn't, "I like hot dogs," "I think hot dogs are stupid," "I think you're stupid," "I think your Mom's stupid," "I think your Mom's
vagina
is stupid." Dialogue is a carrier for all aspects of the narrative experience. Put differently: it's the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. I think I'm supposed to add "motherfucker" to that. I'll let you do it. I trust you.

Let's get this out of the way: don't hang a bunch of gaudy ornaments upon your dialogue. In fiction, use the dialogue tags "said" and "asked" 90% of the time. Edge cases you might use "hissed," "called," "stammered," etc. These are strong spices; use minimally. Also, adverbs nuzzled up against dialogue tags are an affront to all things and make Baby Jesus pee out the side of his diaper, and when he does that,
people die
. In scripts, you don't have this problem but you can still clog the pipes with crap if you overuse stage directions. Oh, heavy dialect and slang? Just more ornamentation that'll break the back of your dialogue.

Learn the structure of dialogue. If a screenplay, know the format. Capitalized name, centered above parenthetical stage direction and the line of dialogue. VO, OC, OS, contd:

SCOOTER (VO)

(shouting)

I always said that life was like a box of marmots. You

never know which one's gonna nibble off your privates.

In fiction, know when to use a comma, when to use a period, know where the punctuation goes in relation to quotation marks, know that a physical gesture (
nodded
, f'rex) is not a dialogue tag.

"Fuck that monkey," John said.

"But," Betty said, "I love that dumb chimp."

John nodded. "I know, Betty. But he's a bad news bonobo, baby.
A bad news bonobo
."

You want a pig to run faster, you grease him up with Astroglide and stick a NASA rocket booster up his ass. You want your story to read faster, you use dialogue to move it along. Like I said: dialogue reads easy. Dialogue's like a waterslide: a reader gets to it, they zip forth fast, fancy and free. Want to slow things down? Pull away from the dialogue. Speed things up? More dialogue. Throttle. Brake. Throttle. Brake.

Short, sharp dialogue is a prison shiv: moves fast 'cause it's gotta, because T-Bone only has three seconds in the lunch line with Johnny the Fish to stitch a shank all up in Johnny's kidneys. Longer dialogue moves more slowly. Wanting to create tension? Fast, short dialogue. Want to create mystery? Longer, slightly more ponderous dialogue. Want to bog your audience in word treacle? Let one character take a lecturing info-dump all over their heads.

One of dialogue's functions is to convey information within the story (to other characters) and outside the story (to the audience). An info-dump is the clumsiest way to make this happen. Might as well bludgeon your audience with a piece of rebar. And yet, you still gotta convey info. You have ways to pull this off without dropping an expository turd in the word-bowl. Don't let one character lecture; let it be a conversation. Question. Answer. Limit the information learned; pull puzzle pieces out and take them away to create mystery. Let characters be reluctant to give any info, much less dump it over someone's head.

And yet, you have to do it. Dialogue is a better way of conveying information than you, the storyteller, just straight up telling the audience. The curious nature of dialogue, however, is that it would
seem
to rectally violate that most sacred of writing chestnuts --
show, don't tell
. I don't open my mouth and project fucking holograms. I tell you shit. And yet, the trick with dialogue is to
show through telling
. You reveal things through dialogue without a character saying them. This means it's paramount to avoid...

"On-the-nose" dialogue is dialogue where a character says exactly what he feels and what he wants for purposes of telling the audience what they need to know. When a villain spoils his own sinister plan, that's
on-the-nose
. When a protagonist says, "I cannot love you, elf-lady, because an elf once touched me in my no-no hole," that's
on-the-nose
. Trust me, we'd live in a better, happier world if real world dialogue was all on-the-nose. On the other side, we'd experience duller, shittier fiction. Characters -- and, frankly, real people -- reveal things
without
saying them.

Text versus sub-text. On-the-nose dialogue versus dialogue that is deliciously
sub rosa
. Meaning exists beneath what's said. The best real world example of this is the dreaded phrase spoken by men and women the world around: "I'm fine." Said with jaw tight. Said with averted eyes. Said in sharp, clipped tongue. Never before have two words so clearly meant something entirely different: "I'm fine" is code. It's code for, "Yes, something is fucking wrong, but I don't want to talk about it, but actually, I
do
want to talk about it but I want you to already know what's wrong, and what's wrong is that you had sex with my mother in a New Jersey rest-stop and put it on Youtube
you giant unmerciful cock-waffle
."

Put differently: pretend that dialogue is more about hiding than it is about revealing. The things we the audience want to know most -- who killed his wife, why did he rob that bank, did he really have a romantic dalliance with that insane dancing robot -- are the things the character doesn't want to discuss. Dialogue is negotiating that revelation, and it's a revelation that should come as easy as pulling the teeth out of a coked-up Doberman. Meaning, not easy at all.

The fact that characters lie, cheat, conceal, mislead and betray all in dialogue tells you that dialogue is a critical way of building tension and suspense and conveying mystery.
Characters are always prime movers
.

Hannibal Lecter susses out the truth through dialogue. (Oh, and he also eats people.) But he's also performing meta-work for the audience by sussing out
character
through dialogue. Clarice Starling is painted in part by Lecter's own strokes. A character's blood, sweat, tears, ball-hair and breast-milk lives inside their dialogue. How they speak and what they say reveals who they are, though only obliquely. After writing a conversation, ask yourself, "What does this say about the characters? Is this true to who they are?"