And here we go

I've been trying to decide for a while now if I wanted to create a writing blog, and if so, what kind of blog would it be?  Do I want to just park my work here?  Do I want to actually talk about writing?  After some thinking, I decided I really want to do both.  So, I'll be posting my original fiction, but I'll also be talking about various aspects of writing.  I may even throw in the occasional rant, because hey, what writer out there hasn't wanted to throw their keyboard out the window.  Also, since I believe that one must read to write, I'll also be posting my monthly count of books read.

For this first blog, I'll go with a post about writing, followed by another blog posting of original fiction.

Dialogue.  Go to a local gathering place, be it the cafe at a bookstore, a park, a mall, whatever.  Just sit and listen to the way people talk.  Listen to the dialects, the slang, the accents.  People can be differentiated just by whether they say, "I'm going to do something" or "I'm gonna do something."  Now, take it one step further and actually look at that person.  Are they a head scratcher?  Do they bite down on their bottom lip when they're thinking of a reply?  Where do their eyes land when they talk, and does it matter what they're talking about?

I try to take in the little bits about people that add to a conversation.  In working to do this, I've become a bit of a people watcher in my life.  What does this move mean?  What does that one mean?  For me, a dialogue between two people, or a group of people, isn't just what they're saying.  It's how they're saying it, why they're saying it, and what else they're doing when they're saying it.  As I see it, dialogue doesn't live in a vacuum.  There are a dozen other things that can happen in a conversation and my job as a writer is to try to put as many of those things into the scene as possible.

Act it out, I say.  If it doesn't feel real when you're doing it, the actions won't feel real when they're read.  The same with the actual dialogue itself.  If it sounds stunted when read out loud, it's going to be a stumbling read.  No, you don't want everything written in such phonetic detail that the reader can't understand what they're reading anymore, but neither do you want it to sound like a robot.  I do my my best to tell the difference.  If it sounds false to my ears, then I'll change it.  If it sounds false to someone else's ears, I'll take another look at it and probably change it. 

Stephen King will admit that he's not good at dialogue.  I had that in mind when I read Under the Dome (you bet I bought that sucker the second it came out!) and found myself amending that to say that he doesn't do teenage dialogue well.  As I read his modern teens, I felt that they sounded more like the 70s than 2009.  The adults were great and realistic.  The teens--  Yeah, not so much.  Am I saying that I do something better than Stephen King?  Not on your life, buddy.  As far as I'm concerned, Uncle Stevie is an icon and if I ever met him, my brain would probably go to mush.  He's just an example of someone that readily admits that he doesn't do something well, and since I'm talking about dialogue, he fit the bill. 

I have a teenage brother and a teenage sister.  Their friends come around a lot.  I also work at a bookstore that's frequented by a lot of teens.  So, I get a lot of opportunities to listen to the way people talk.  That's not to say that I listen to their conversations.  I don't really care what they're talking about as much as how they talk about it.  I try to think about how they would word something, what slang they might use, and whether this particular teen would use slang at all.  That expands, then, to thinking about how the adults who may be listening to the teens are going to react to what they say and how they say it.  When I'm actually writing, I don't really think about it, I just go.  I let the conversations fly.  Before I write it, though, I have to consider what's being talked about, and how these teens would use language to talk about it. 

It can go too far, though.  Reading Dolores Claiborne wasn't exactly easy.  It wasn't a huge struggle, but not being from the area made trying to decipher some of Dolores's words difficult.  I enjoyed the book, that's for sure, but would I ever try something as complicated as writing an entire first person narrative in dialect?  Yeah, probably not.  You get into some of the more difficult phonetically dialects and accents, and you've got a whole pot of trouble boiling.

Of course, this isn't to say that I know what I'm doing all the time.  Obviously, I don't.  I think that all writers, whether they're just trying to get a foot in the door like me or they're outrageously recognized names like Stephen King or James Patterson, have things they do well and things that they don't do so well.  I just happen to believe that I excel at dialogue, while my stomach clenches with dread when it comes to writing good love scenes.

Style goes in with it all, of course.  Some people like to write flashes of dialogue, and I've read some that had me ready to whip my head back and forth between the two people talking because it was so intense.  In a creative writing class, I read a short story that was very short, just a back and forth dialogue, and it had every emotion in me going.  Personally, I like all of the bits and pieces that go along with a conversation.  I want the fingers tapping, the hands going through the hair, the twitching eyes.  I think, with the internet, we've gotten used to just words flashing at us, but there's just something about a face to face conversation that gets me going. 

I'm just saying, give a listen the next time you're out.  While you're at it, take a look.  You might be surprised at just how much happens in two or three minutes of conversation.  Then, while you're boggling at how you could possibly put all of that into one scene, remember that you don't have to do it all at once.  Start out with just two people having a conversation.  Bring in another, then another.  You may look up and find that you've got a four or five person conversation going that not only looks good on paper, but sounds pretty real when it's spoken, too.