That's what she said...

In interesting thread about speech tags over on Kindleboards caught my attention, and I thought I'd throw in my $.02.

First, head over to Kindleboards and check out the thread over there.  I'll wait.

[Mike presses Pause on his Massive Blog Controlboard.]
Back?  Great.
[Mike tries to press Play, hits Rewind by mistake]  Ack!  No!  Ah, crap...
[Mike scrambles to correct his mistake.  His blogdroids learn some new and interesting words.]
Okay, there.  Now...

Anyway, to recap: Speech tags or speech attributions are words like 'said', 'asked', 'replied' that you add to dialogue to let the reader know who spoke.

"You know," Mike said, "your shorts are on fire."
"Ahh!" Jim yelled.  "Put it out!"

More recap: use as few speech tags as you can without risking that the reader will become confused as to who's talking.  Julie Ann Dawson gives a great example of the overuse of speech tags, and why they should be minimized.

Still more recap: Avoid using anything but plain old 'said'.  Reason:  It's a simple, unobtrusive word.  As readers, we're so used to seeing it that we don't see it.  It gets out of the way, it doesn't break the flow of the dialogue.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers (a must have book for... well, the title says it all) has an excellent chapter on writing dialogue that goes into the proper use of speech tags (only the authors call them 'speaker attributions'--say that three times fast).  Yet again more recap: Seriously, only use 'said'.  Forget about 'asked'--that question mark in the dialog?  A really big clue-bat that a question is being asked.  'Replied'?  Nope, if its not clear from the dialogue itself that one character is speaking a reply to another one, you have a bigger problem than the need for 'replied'.

Do you have a long section of snappy back-and-forth dialog, and you're worried about all those speech tags piling up?

"I'm worried about all these speech tags piling up," Mike said.
"Why?" Jim said.
"I'm not sure. It's... distracting, somehow," Mike said.
"How long have you had this morbid fear of speech tags?" Jim said.
"Hmm... I guess it all started when I joined CritiqueCircle.com. Those people are rough," Mike said.

Minimize, remember?  Only use speech tags when it's necessary to make clear who's speaking.  Once you establish that back and forth pattern, cut them out.

"Rough, huh?" Jim said.
"Oh yeah.  Rabid grammar Nazis.  They'll rip you to shreds," Mike said.
"This is a joke, right?"
"I'm totally joking, okay?  Actually, they're the greatest."
"Your ass is grass, you know.  Better grovel some more."
"Totally.  Ladyv, Momzilla, I'm grovelling here.  Please don't beat me."

Of course, dialogue between two characters is easy.  Between three or more, you'll need to use more speech tags.  But even then, if it's clear who's talking, leave out the tag.

We got the beat...

 So, you're only using 'said', and you've cut down your speech tags to the minimum amount that's still clear.  And that long block of dialogue has become a reader-intimidating wall-of-text.

Use beats.

Beats (a term that comes from scriptwriting) are small bits of action mixed in with the dialogue.  They serve two purposes: they take the place of some of your speech tags, and the inject action into what would otherwise be as much fun as watching two Pat Paulson clones in a staged political debate.

"You think that saved your ass?" Jim said.
Mike shrugged.  "Maybe.  Better not show my face on that site for a while."
"Probably for the best."

Protip: Don't overuse beats, or your characters may end up nodding, shrugging, smiling, and frowning like a bunch of mimes on speed.

I'm so ashamed...

Having 'said' all that, I'll admit it: I break the rules.  After all, they're made to be broken, right?

Well, yeah, if you know you're breaking them, and you're sparing with your breakages.

“Get your hands off her,” I snarled.

I'll go hang my head in shame.

Turtles All The Way Down

Did I mention that I take long walks through the woods and fields near my home while I work out story ideas?  I'm pretty sure I did.

I met this little guy yesterday.  I admired him, he tolerated me.  We went our separate ways.

That was the walk where I realized that you can't write about faeries running through the forests of Faerie with hunting bows without giving them wolf companions.  When lead straight to an explanation of how the werewolf legends got their start.

The Howl

The genre of the story I'm currently writing, Changeling, is called 'Young Adult Urban Fantasy'.  It's the first story I've ever successfully sat down to write.  I've gotten it through the first, very rough draft, and I'm currently on the second draft, fixing things like continuity and plotting problems.  It's definitely been a learn-how-to-write-while-writing experience.  It's also been about as much fun as you can have out of bed--a total blast.

The story's complicated, so I won't go into much detail here.  Suffice it to say that the main antagonist of the story, the B.B.M (Big Bad Monster) that my two teen FMCs (Female Main Characters) must face, is... well, I'll let them tell you:

“Okay, Sis, listen to this.” I read from my laptop’s screen what my Googling had turned up.

“…there stood a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon. And even as they looked the thing tore the throat out of Hugo Baskerville, on which, as it turned its blazing eyes and dripping jaws upon them, the three shrieked with fear and rode for dear life, still screaming, across the moor. One, it is said, died that very night of what he had seen, and the other twain were but broken men for the rest of their days.”

I turned around in my chair to look at Katie, lying on her belly at the end of my bed, with her chin resting on her hands. “Sound familiar? That’s from The Hound of the Baskervilles. Arthur Conan Doyle is supposed to have based the hound in the story on old legends about something called a ‘black dog’ or ‘barghest’.”

See what I mean about this story being a blast to write?  I mean, how cool is it be able to work in a reference to The Hound of the Baskervilles?

Like a lot of people, walking helps me think.  I live in a rural neighborhood in North-Central Florida, and the walking is great here.  Not only are there plenty of woods, fields, and low-traffic roads, but it's early spring here, and the weather is perfect for walking.  Later in the year, it'll become too hot and humid during the day, so I'll switch to walking mostly at night, but today, I took a long walk around a big, tree-lined hayfield.  The field is still mostly brown, but here and there are patches of green clover, with a few early spring flowers.  In a few weeks, before the brown grass turns green, fills the field and gets tall, it will be covered in a blaze of bright flowers.

So this morning I'm walking around that field along the treeline, deep in thought, working out a plotting problem in my story, when suddenly a long, mournful howl comes through the trees.

It's one of the neighbor's dogs, of course.  But my very first thought was Holy crap, it's the Hound of the Baskervilles!  Flee, flee!

First-Draft-Complete

Time to pop the cork on the bubbly. Last night I reached first-draft-complete on my work-in-progress, Changeling. Finally!

Since this is the first time I've mentioned Changeling here on this blog, here's the (admittedly rough) story blurb:

Siobhan Miller is a young girl of fifteen, a sophomore in a rural Tennessee high school, and a Faerie. For when she reached puberty, Siobhan went through a shocking physical transformation that revealed her to be one of the fae of old Irish folklore. It's difficult enough fitting in at a new school, meeting boys, making new friends, and dealing with the 'popular girls' clique, while hiding her differences behind the illusion power that is part of her fae heritage. But after these long centuries, the land of Faerie is growing closer once again, and its magic is returning to our world. And with that return, creatures and abilities long thought to be myths are awakening, and 'things' are beginning to come over from the otherside. Siobhan is forced to deal with the consequences, before they can expose her secret to the rest of the world.

 Now, it's not a readable first draft, by any measure. This is my first completed story, and it was definitely a learn-as-I-go experience. I owe a big debt to all the great people over at Critique Circle, who tore to shreds effectively critted the chapters I posted there. I learned a lot from the guys and gals there. Still learning, too.

Now for the bad news. Changeling is enormous. 135K words. It has plot dead-ends. The writing varies in quality from chapter to chapter. It needs lots of work.

None of which was unexpected. I'm not discouraged at all. I knew going in that I didn't know what I was doing, so I followed some sage advice, and gave myself permission to write badly... for the first draft. Otherwise, as in my past, it would have never gotten written.

So now I go over it with a weed whacker (might need a heavy-duty brush mower), trim out the wordiness many of you have ragged on me, I mean, given me thoughtful advice about. Straighten out the plot. Get rid of superfluous plot threads. Work on fleshing out some of the details. Apply more of the lessons from those annoying excellent crits.

I love the story world and the characters I've created. I feel confident that, with effort, patience, and the lessons I've learned/am learning, Changeling will grow up to be an enjoyable, readable story.

I Had No Idea She'd Do That

The first time a character took over and started writing her story herself, it blew me away.  Seriously, it was an 'Oh my God' moment.

Oh sure, I'd read what other writers had written about when it happened to them.  But you have to experience it for yourself to truly understand the amazement it brings.

But when it happens to you, it's a sign that you've reached the point where you deeply understand your character's personality and motivations.  The point where you don't have to try to figure out what your character would do next.  The character tells you.  And sometimes it takes the story in a direction you didn't expect.

Resolute

My New Year Writer's Resolutions:

1. I will dedicate myself to my writing.
2. I will be e-published this year.
3. I will write more, and edit less, until the first draft is done.
4. I will learn how to create book cover art, even though I suck at artistic stuff, because I want to understand how it's done.  If Sarah Wynde can create a wonderful book cover using PowerPoint for God's sake, there must be some hope for me.

What If?

I used to wonder how a writer came up with his/her story ideas. 

Then, after I'd been working on my very first written story for a few weeks--long enough that I'd started to believed it was something I could really do--I got to thinking about how it had happened.  Where'd that first inspiration come from?  Why did the story play out the way it did?

This is the way it happened for me.

I'd been reading a popular fantasy series that revolved around faeries living in the modern world.  The books were well-written and entertaining, and the concept resonated with me, but the stories ultimately left me unsatisfied.  The worlds that the author had created were well-crafted, but just not what I wanted to see.

As someone who'd always had fantastical stories running around in my head, I naturally thought about the way I'd tell a story like that.  Faeries in today's world?  Loved it.  Now, how could that possibly work?  How could I find a way to reconcile the conflict between magical faerie creatures, and our mundane, definitely unmagical, real world?

What if...  What if faeries and the faerie lands were real, as real as we are?  What if, a millennium or more ago, there'd been a way to pass between our world and the faerie lands, but even then that connection had been fading away, or closing up?  What if faerie magic had faded from our world, as its source was cut off.  What if those faerie creatures that could retreated back into the faerie lands, did so, and those that could not retreat, or chose not to, slowly died out.

What if our legends and stories about faeries and other mythical creatures were mostly wrong, but still had a core of truth?  What if all those stories sprang from a common source?

And finally, what if, now, today, that connection between our world and the faerie lands was once again beginning to open, and slowly at first, faerie magic was returning to our world, and faerie creatures were crossing over to earth?

I'm someone who's always been able to think better when I'm on my feet, walking.  I love to take a long walk at night and think.  I'll plan the next day, or work on a programming problem (I'm a computer programmer by profession), or tell myself a story.

One night, I was walking and thinking about that series of books, and faeries, and asking myself those 'what if' questions.  A story that would try to answer those questions sounded like fun.  I thought, what if this was a story that centered around a young girl who suddenly discovered she was the descendant of faeries--and her fae nature was starting to emerge?

My story's main character was suddenly there in my head, narrating her story.  I heard her 'voice', the way she spoke, her speech patterns and word choices.  I immediately knew what part of the country she lived in, where she went to school, what her home life was like.  Her personality came through clearly in the way she told her story.


I cut my walk short and made it home as quickly as I could.  I had to get her story down before it slipped away.

I wrote for four hours straight.  I probably paused a few times.  I had to have, but I have no memory of doing so.  I wasn't really writing so much as channelling her as she told her story.  I think I only stopped because I suddenly realised I was barely able to keep my eyes open, looked at the clock, and saw that it was 3 AM on a work day.

I no longer wonder where story ideas come from.  They come from an active, open mind, one that reads or notices something, and then asks, "What if?"

Welcome to My Worlds

Hi, and welcome to this, my blog about learning to write, the stories I'm writing, and maybe a bit more.

I'm Michael Kent.  I want to be a writer.  It's something I've wanted for a long time.  I have all these stories buzzing around in my head, stories I've told myself, in one form or another, since I was in grade school.

I've tried at times to get some of them written down.  I could never do it, could never get it to work.  I couldn't stay with it long enough to get anywhere.

A year ago, I finally took a good, hard look at myself, and wondered, "Maybe I'm A.D.D."  I talked it over with my family doctor and he have me a diagnostic questionnaire to fill out.  Sure enough, I scored really high on it.  How about that.  I'm Attention Deficit.  He started me on the appropriate medication.

It was like a switch clicked on in my brain.  I could focus.  The 'get it done' center in my brain engaged.  I sat down in front of my computer, and I wrote.  The words poured out.  They haven't stopped.

Oh, they're sucky words.  Wanting to write, and finally being able to stay with writing, doesn't mean I have the skills to write.  This is definitely a learn-by-doing experience.  I'm reading about writing.  I'm reading other writer's blogs, about what they have to say about their experiences writing.  I've join an online critique group.  I want to learn the skills to be able to give these stories in my head the respect they deserve.

But God, am I having fun!