Time to Write

How to write better dialogue

One of the topics that usually is skimmed over in writing books is how to construct compelling dialogue. Naturally you have to start with compelling characters—then what they have to say has a much better chance of being the same. However, in an article in Poets & Writers magazine, novelist Benjamin Percy gave some more specific tips:

 “If you must have a protracted verbal exchange, then damn it, give your characters something to do. By that I do not mean give them a cigarette or a beer. I mean make them grill a steak or attend a carnival or splat together a papier-mache volcano or inch their car through a long stretch of construction.”

 He calls these tasks a lower-order goal—in most scenes every character wants something but in this case there is something else, relatively pedestrian, to be achieved as well.

 I’d add that the activity you choose may, of course, have some meaningful relationship to the deeper meaning of the scene.  If they’re making plans for their wedding while washing and drying the dishes, for instance, if he drops a valuable plate, that might act as foreshadowing for an emotional crash coming up somewhere later.

Percy

also writes about how tone relates to voice and to music: “…the foot-tapping rhythm of the page. Typically, dialogue is staccato, while narrative is legato. To linger too long in the choppiness of dialogue disrupts the smoothly connected paragraphs of the narrative…But one’s impassioned plea for forgiveness interrupted by the other’s slow, methodical arrangement of a house of cards has enough rhythmic interruptions to keep us tonally engaged, like any carefully constructed orchestration.”

Percy

cities one of my favourite authors, Graham Greene, as worthy of study in this regard and there are many others, including Anne Tyler, Richard Price, and Elmore Leonard.

(To write good dialogue, you need to create great characters. That's one of the many topics covered in my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)

 

More writing secrets of Dan Brown

Whether or not you’re a fan of Dan Brown’s work (admittedly, I’m not) he’s got something the public wants. In an older Slate article, Bryan Curtis examined what makes Brown’s fiction tick:

 “Brown has done a lot of thinking about what makes a successful Dan Brown thriller. He has found that it requires a few essential elements: some kind of shadowy force, like a secret society or government agency; a ‘big idea’ that contains a moral grey area; and a treasure. The treasures in Brown’s four novels have been a meteorite, anti-matter, a gold ring, and the Holy Grail.”

 “When all of Brown’s elements come together, doled out over cliffhanging chapters, with characters that exist to ‘move the plot along,’ it is like mixing the ingredients to make a cake.”

 Here’s what Brown himself says: “All of my novels use the concept of a simple hero pulled out of his familiar world.”

“The trick is to make your characters experts…then you pair them with an expert of a different discipline, making it convenient for the experts to assay to one another at some length, in the process spilling all the research you have done for your novel.”

 I don’t advocate trying to follow anybody else’s pattern but having a look at what works for somebody else might inspire you to figure out your own version.

(Want to be guided through to your writing goal over the period of 60 days? Check out my new Breakthrough Strategy Program at www.jurgenwolff.com.)

How writers and others can build a platorm (part 7)

In previous posts, we’ve looked at what a platform is, who to target, how to find them, and the kinds of things you can offer them. There’s one big decision you need to make about how you want to handle the people who you lure to your site. That is whether you will make them register with their name (perhaps just their first name) and email address, or give them the content freely. Let’s see the advantages and disadvantages of both.

 If you ask people to register with their contact information before you give them access to your report or video or audio or other product, you will have the information you need in order to stay in touch with them. You can let them know about your latest products and services, special deals, appearances, etc. Of course you must make it easy for them to unsubscribe from anytime they want to, but this way you can build up a good list of interested people. Some internet marketers stress that having a list like this is absolutely crucial.

 The downside is that a certain number of people will be put off by the need to register, either because they can’t be bothered to fill in the form or they fear that it will lead to getting unwanted email.

 If you make your content readily available without any need to register and specify that you are happy to have anybody distribute it, it will be seen by more people. It’s a good way of building up awareness of your name and what you offer.

One time management coach created a small guide to using your time better and distributed it this way and he said it has been downloaded more than 60,000 times. Because it included his email address and a blurb about his services at the end, it did serve a marketing function. His guess is that if he’d required registration in order to allow downloads only a couple thousand people would have done it. He has gotten business as a result of it, but of course there’s no way of knowing how much more—or less—business he would have had from it if he’d required registration and sent a variety of messages over time to that list.

 Your decision is this: do you want to get your name out there in a general way, or do you want to build a list of people who are interested enough to give you their name and contact information? Of course you can combine the two and use it as a test: create one report or video to distribute freely (from a download site that doesn’t require registration) and another on a related topic for which people have to sign up. Then keep track over a period of several months the contacts and new business you get from each. Overall, I suggest the list-building approach.

(Do you want to be guided through to your writing goal in 60 days? See my new Breakthrough Strategy Program at www.jurgenwolff.com and my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)

The writer as performer--is this you?

Last year writer Malcolm Gladwell sold out the 2000 seat Lyceum Theatre in the West End with a ticket price of £20. The Financial Times’ write-up revealed that he used no props, no slides, just a big video screen of him talking. He used the 65 minutes to tell the story of one vignette from the his most recent book, “Outliers.” There was no Q & A afterward.

 As the article points out, it was more like a theatrical one-man show than a typical author’s appearance. It has some distinguished ancestry via the lectures of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain.

 The article’s author, James Harkin, the director of talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, sees Gladwell’s show as part of a trend encouraged by the success of TED, the festival of Technology, Entertainment and Design which features 18-minute talks by a variety of innovators. (You can see videos of many of these at www.ted.com and they’re well worth your time.]

 Are such talks going to save authors whose income from their books may be declining? Well, as usual, it’s a big help to be successful already. Gladwell’s best sellers, “The Tipping Point” and “Blink” paved the way for him to become a star of the lecture circuit. It also helps if you are a good performer—there’s no doubt that Gladwell feels confident in front of a crowd.

If you also feel comfortable speaking to groups and have an entertaining message that will appeal to an easily-identifiable target audience, it may be worth exploring whether talks could be a part of your repertoire. You won’t start out by filling the Lyceum, but it could add to your income and increase interest in your books or other writing.

(If you'd like an affordable writing coaching program that guides you for 60 days through to your writing goal, check out my Breakthrough Strategy Program at www.jurgenwolff.com)

Another vision of the future of books

Many publishers are still rearranging the deck chairs as the ship starts to sink slowly, but HarperStudio, a newish imprint of HarperCollins, is experimenting to find new ways to do business and find customers. They publish two books per month and pay no advances but do a 50-50 profit share with authors.

 Julia Cheiffetz is an editor there and she told Fast Company magazine about some of their activities:

 “At HarperStudio, there’s an R&D element to what we’re doing. For instance, we gave all of our authors Flip cameras and asked them to start video blogging, opening up their writing process and cultivating an audience as soon as a book is acquired. We’re looking at multimedia packaging…with each project we think about what kind of experimentation is appropriate.”

 Of course you can think the same way if you’re self-publishing or if your book is published by a more traditional company—as long as you’re willing to do the work yourself. For inspiration, have a look at their YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/user/TheHarperStudio

How writers and others can build a platform (part 6)

In previous posts in the series, I’ve suggested how to find your target audience, what kinds of content to use to attract them, and how to decide which media to use. Now let’s move on to the action phase.

 The next step is to create the incentive that you’ll use to get people to connect with you. As we discussed in previous posts, you can use text, podcasts, reports, e-bulletins, videos, etc. Here are some tips on that:

 Create a series. As with this series of posts, if people are interested in the first part, they’ll come back for subsequent instalments. That could be a series of articles, a series of videos, several related blog posts, etc. You can later gather them together and offer them as a free or paid-for report.

 Make it personal. This doesn’t mean you have to reveal all the details of your personal life, but be sure to emphasize the things you can offer that others can not, and let your readers or viewers see that they’re dealing with a real person.

 Use each message as a way to lead people to what else you offer, just as in these posts I have referred to my podcast, e-bulletin, and books.

 Encourage feedback. On your blog, allow comments, in your e-bulletin include an email address, on your online articles include links in your bio box, etc.

 Whichever medium you choose…do something different! Your message will be competing with many others (on YouTube, with millions) so if you want people to be interested, offer them something unique in terms of content, presentation, or both.

 Should you require people to register (that is, give you their name and email address) in order to get your free content? That’s what we’ll look at in the next post on this topic.

 (For information on how to use traditional and new media to market yourself and your work, see my books, “Your Writing Coach,” available in the US and UK, and “Marketing for Entrepreneurs”—UK only at this stage).

Guillermo del toro on the "story engine" of the future

In Wired magazine, Guillermo del Toro talked about the future of movies and other media:

 “In the next 10 years, we’re going to see all the forms of entertainment—films, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single platform ‘story engine.’ The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It’s going to rewrite the rules of fiction.”

 He indicated that such a story engine could tell many stories simultaneously:

 “We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way—act one, act two, act three. We're still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you're following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else. “

 That sounds like a game scenario, and del Doro says that although game companies are conservative about trying new things, “in the next 10 years there will be an earth-shaking Citizen Kane of games.”

I don’t even have a PS3… maybe that’s why I’m having a hard time envisioning this story engine…although I can imagine that it could be possible to get drawn into, for example, a drama that has a weekly TV episode (which could be delivered via the computer), augmented by mini-episodes that appear on your mobile phone or as messages via email. Maybe something like Second Life, but one that comes to you instead of you having to go to it. Certainly food for thought as writers struggle to see our future… (and one thing that needs to be re-booted is the ‘search’ function at the Wired website—trying to find this article there was like pulling teeth. As usual, I should have Googled right from the start).

(Want guidance in reaching your writing goals? See my Breakthrough Strategy Program at www.jurgenwolff.com)

The power of being a contrarian

Someone described the essence of wisdom as being aware of what everybody else is doing…and doing the opposite. Hmm, I wish I’d done that when everybody was buying stocks…

 It’s true that the breakthroughs in any field tend to come from contrarians, not from people doing more of the same. Yet most of us come under pressure—not least from ourselves—to go along with the majority. “Nobody else is doing this” feels like a reason not to do it, rather than what it is—the best reason to do it.

 In fiction, it’s zombies and vampires at the moment. Good reasons to flee!

 In non-fiction, it’s about how to make do with less. I’m not suggesting you write about how to have a larger carbon footprint or splash money around, but if I were trying to come up with a self-help angle I’d be looking at thriving rather than just surviving.

In marketing, everybody is scrambling to Twitter their way to riches. Might be a good reason to take a closer look at the old-fashioned print media.

 What are the people in your field doing? What’s the opposite? Might there be a way you can capitalize on the opposite?

(for tips on how to be more creative and productive, sign up for my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request now to BstormUK@aol.com)

Is structure your writing weakness? Here's one solution...

I’ll admit it: when writing fiction I’m usually more interested in the characters than the structure of the plot (the same applies to my reading). But of course we have to make sure that our stories work. In an article by Hallie Ephron in The Writer, crime novelist Val McDermid told how she dealt with this:

 “Analyzing her first effort, McDermid recognized that her weakest skill was plotting. ‘So, I consciously worked very hard on storytelling and the structure of the next books. For a long time I literally would outline each book, chapter by chapter, on file cards.’ …As the plots in the Kate Brannigan novels became more complex, McDermid found she had to use multicoloured file cards to keep track of the plot strands.”

 “With each new book, McDermid says, the breakthrough for getting into the writing comes when she finds a structure that works to tell the story. …About five books ago, despite stories that increasingly required structuring, McDermid found she no longer needed coloured index cards to manage the multiple plots. ‘I could do it all in my head,’ she says.”

 When working out storylines for a TV series, I use Post-It notes stuck to the wall, with one horizontal line (and one colour) for the main plot and then extra horizontal lines each in a different colour for the subplots. If structure is a challenge for you, too,  give it a try.

(If you want a complete guide to writing, get my book, "Your Writing Coach" from Amazon or your favorite online or offline retailer. If you want a 60-day coaching program that guides you through the process with coaching calls, tons of tools, and email feedback, see my Writing Breakthrough Strategy at www.jurgenwolff.com.)

How writers and others can build a platform (part 5)

In previous posts we’ve looked at how to identify your target audience, how to find out where they are, whether to attract them with entertaining or informative content, and what approaches fiction authors can use. If you’ve done that, you’re ready to take the next step and create the content.

 Which medium do you think would be most attractive to your target audience?

 Possibilities include:

•  Text: articles that you can distribute via sites like ezarticles.com; print or electronic newsletters; e-mail courses, reports, White papers, e-books.
  

•  Video: fictional series; interview series; tips and techniques. You can put these onto YouTube and other video distribution sites, or on your own site, or both.
•  Audio: fictional series, interview series, tips and techniques.
•  Facebook or MySpace pages: for yourself, for the book, for the protagonist or other characters – your entries on these pages could include text, audio and video.

You also need to consider what media you find the most appealing to create. Fortunately, all are getting easier all the time to produce. I suggest that rather than trying to use all of them at once, you now choose one or two.

 In the next post in this series, we’ll look at how to put your decisions into action. (for more on how to use traditional as well as new media to market yourself and your work, see my book, "Your Writing Coach" and in the UK, my newest book, "Marketing for Entrepreneurs.")