April 23 2013 {♥ 104}

▼eggsackly

Writing Tips #54:Forty-five Flaws that Expose your Lack of Storytelling Experience, part 3

bookgeekconfessions:

This is part 3 in a series of 45 common writing mistakes which mark a writer as a rookie.  Parts 1 and 2 covered the first 18 mistakes. Here, then are mistakes 19 through 27:

19. Imbalanced dialogue attributions. I talked in part 2 about problems with tagging, and I should have thought to mention this problem with dialogue attribution along with it. The mistake lies in not finding the right balance between too many and too few attributions. If you put a “Jane said” on every single line of dialogue, that’s overkill. Similarly, not providing any attributions is also bad. The trick that often trips up rookie writers is that different kinds of conversations require different levels of attribution.

A typical conversation is between two characters. Theoretically, if you let us know who began the conversation, we ought to be able to track the entire rest of it by relying on the fact that people take turns when speaking. True in theory, but in practice you should add extra attributions if dialogue is interrupted by some substantial amount of narration, if there is a pause in the conversation, or once every few lines of dialogue in long, uninterrupted stretches of talk. An atypical conversation involves more than two people. Movies and TV shows have no problem with this, because we can see who’s talking. But in books, you can’t rely on the characters to take turns in any predictable order. In a novel, unless each character’s voice is so amazingly distinctive as to be unmistakable, you pretty much have to attribute everything.

20. Confusing names. In real life, you probably know dozens of people named John, Anne, Steve, and other such common names. In real life, sometimes that causes confusion. I’ve caught clients actually giving different characters the same name, and since they’re just people in a book and all we really have to go by are those names, it can be incredibly confusing. But fiction is not real life. In fiction, you have the luxury of keeping the names of all your significant characters distinct. So do that. Help your readers out by keeping the names of all your characters different. Ideally, try to keep the first letters of their names unique, and avoid pairs of names that have similar rhythm and cadence. Don’t give us “Taylor” and “Tucker,” for example. We’re bound to mix them up because they sound so much alike.

Read More