This week on the podcast, I interviewed Seumas MacDonald about the importance of culture in the development of language, and about ConLangs (or constructed languages) in fiction.
Write a story where two or more characters come from different cultures and have difficulties understanding each other
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
This is an antidote to yesterday’s description-heavy story.
Make sure to make your characters sound like real people, not actors on a stage reading soliloquies.
Go!
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
Today’s prompt is all about a misunderstanding, and comes to us from the writer Wayne Anthony Conaway.
Write A Story In Which One Character Misunderstands Another, With Far-Reaching Consequences
Today’s prompt focuses on misapprehension – that is, interpreting something incorrectly. Too often, in fiction, every character communicates perfectly. That’s not the way it happens in real life.
Example: award-winning author Harlan Ellison once misheard a conversation at a party. He overheard a woman say, “”Jeffy is fine. He’s always fine.”” What Ellison actually heard was “”He’s always FIVE.”” That inspired the story “”Jefty Is Five,”” about a boy who never grows up.
Alternately, the misapprehension could be visual.
True story: when I graduated college, I moved to a southern town – one of those places where anti-intellectualism seemed to be the prevailing attitude. I met lots of girls there, but I was looking for an intellectual girlfriend. One day, while sitting in dingy waiting room, I saw a pretty girl outside. To my amazement, she wore a tee-shirt with the letters “”SPQR”” on it. SPQR stood for – in Latin – “”The Senate and the People of Rome.”” What kind of woman wore a tee-shirt that referenced Ancient Rome? I had to meet her! I rushed outside, saw the girl…and discovered that her shirt didn’t say “”SPQR.”” It said “”SPORT.”” The final letter was hadn’t been visible from where I sat! (I was so disappointed, I didn’t even speak to her.)
So that’s your prompt: misapprehension, either verbal or visual.
Born in Philadelphia, PA, Tony Conaway has written and ghostwritten everything from blogs to books. He has cowritten non-fiction books published by McGraw-Hill, Macmillan and Prentice Hall. His fiction has been published in eight anthologies and numerous publications, including Blue Lake Review, Danse Macabre, Rind Literary Magazine, qarrtsiluni, The Rusty Nail and Typehouse Literary Magazine.
His odder work includes co-writing the script for a planetarium production, and jokes performed by Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. He blogs at http://wayneaconaway.blogspot.com/ He was recently a guest on the Indy Writer Podcast, talking about writing short fiction.
[Note from Julie: if you want to know how to wow an audience at a reading, check out Tony’s advice here. I’ve never seen an author do better than Tony!]
Last night my local writing group held a Reading Night. It was a wonderful thing.
For one thing the participants got to read their stories to an appreciative audience who simply wanted to have fun (as opposed to sending their story to an editor or a critique partner who is looking for things to reject).
And for another, there were some experienced performers in the group, who gave feedback and tips on the actual performance part of the reading. Invaluable stuff.
Reading your work is something you’ll be called upon to do as published author, so practice the skill (very different from writing!) as often as you can!
Last night’s reading prompted this, er prompt, because so many of the characters came alive when they had a distinctive voice, a distinctive patois. One story featured a rising politician, who used all the kinds of phrases you might expect of a rising sleazebag politician.
Another story featured a 1968 California Happening dude, who talked just like you would expect (expertly performed by a man who looked the right age to have been there.)
These stories, more than all the others, stuck with me because of the authenticity of the character’s voice. And that’s what I want you to practice this week.
Give Your Character A Distinctive Voice
If you share you story somewhere (and here’s why you might not want to) post a link here so we can come and read it.
Leave a comment to let us know what you wrote about today, and how it went!
This month at StoryADay we’re going to focus on dialogue.
Gripping, realistic dialogue can bring a story and its characters to life. Writing great dialogue, however, takes practice.
Write A Story Told Almost Completely In Dialogue
Today we’re going to play with making your characters sound distinctive.
Write A Story With Lots Of Dialogue That Teachers Us About Your Characters
Continue reading “[Write On Wednesday] Your Character’s Voice”
This week, I’m recycling a writing prompt from a couple of years ago, all about slang, because it fits so wonderfully with this month’s theme of ‘backstory’.
(Also, because I’ve been on vacation and …)
Invented languages, or slang, are wonderful ways of establishing culture in your novel and of making sure your dialogue feels like dialogue and not ‘speechifying’.
I talked about this on the podcast recently. Check it out.
Read the full prompt here, then come back and leave a comment to let me know what you think. Did you read the linked article? Did it spark any ideas for you?
To see four excellent examples of a 100 word story, hop on over to the publisher’s site now. Or pick up the book from Amazon or request it from your local indie bookstore.
Today we continue our look at short stories as not-mini-novels and play with them in ways you can only play with short stories!
Write a story completely in dialogue
It’s probably best to keep this to two characters because it’s harder to have more than two characters, without attribution.
I want you to keep it straight in our heads, who’s talking, simply by the way they talk.
A guy who works on Wall St should sound different from a farmer from a rural area.
Don’t forget to leave a comment and tell us what you wrote today!
We’re changing tack today: writing in dialogue!
Write a story containing only dialogue
Leave a comment to let us know how this went. Was it easy? Did it feel almost-impossible? Did your dialogue sound realistic?
Conventional writing wisdom (these days) says that the mark of an amateur writer is to use colorful dialogue tags instead of a simple ‘she said’. Nevertheless, teachers continue to foist alternatives to ‘said’ on our children. Today’s assignment is designed to show you just how ridiculous that can become.
Have fun!
And, if you’re near King of Prussia, PA, tonight, come out to the StoryADay Live! “Un-Dreadful Dialogue” workshop hosted by the fabulous Main Line Writers’ Group!
The PromptWrite a story featuring lots of dialogue. Every time you attribute speech to a person you must use one of the ‘alternatives to said’ from the sheet.
(Click to enlarge)
Go!
Today we’re going to focus on dialogue.
Gripping, realistic dialogue can bring a story and its characters to life. Writing great dialogue, however, takes practice.
Write A Story Told Almost Completely In Dialogue
GO!
What form did you decide on? How did this go for you? Do you usually write a lot of dialogue or was this new for you? Leave a comment below or chat about it in the community.
We’ve been focusing on dialogue – from realistic to stylized.
Today we’re going to work on the thorny issue of dialogue attribution. Should you say “he said” or “he whispered seductively”?
How about neither?
Write a story that is dialogue-heavy but features no dialogue attributions at all.
You know what this looks like, right? Picture a fast-paced thriller where the protagonist and his boss are talking about the probability that the volcano will explode, or the Russians will invade. The conversation pings back and forth, snaking its way down the page without a ‘he said’ in sight. Or maybe it’s a romance where, one hopes, it’ll be pretty clear who’s saying what and to whom. But you never know…
How long can you make the exchange run before it becomes hopelessly confusing and you have to insert a stage direction?
(Remember, this is just a fun exercise.)
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
I don’t know if you’ve been using little or lots of dialogue in your stories up until now. We’re going to spend the next few days looking at dialogue issues, and play with a few different aspects of it.
Write a story that features realistic dialogue
When writing dialogue, remember that people don’t talk in speeches, not really. And they certainly don’t listen to each other. We interrupt, talk at cross-purposes and misunderstand each other all the time. Capture some of that.
When writing colloquially don’t go overboard with misspellings and missing letters to convey how people ‘really’ talk. Using ‘gonna’ and dropping the ‘g’ from ‘ing’ is fine if you’re trying to show that someone has a really strong accent, but invented spellings risk just making the reader impatient and irritated. Much better to try to capture the rhythm of a locale’s speech or use one or two tell-tale local words, than to try to transliterate a dialect accurately.
Remember to use sentence length to reflect how someone is feeling: short, choppy sentences for someone who is agitated; long, lugubrious sentences for contented fat cats.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
Today it’s time to work on our dialogue.
I’m a fan of the podcast Writing Excuses hosted by 3-4 working science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction/comic authors and occasional guests. Even if you don’t write in these forms, don’t let that put you off. It’s 15 minutes long and almost always inspiring.
The reason I mention this is because of their episode with guest Jon Scalzi who gave an excellent, and kind of hilarious theory of why dialogue often comes out sounding less than realistic. I recommend you listen here, but the embarrassingly-accurate gist is that writers spend a lot of time reading. That means that when it comes time to write dialogue we have a tendency to write it as if we are, well, writing it. We don’t tend to write how people really talk, with all the interjections, interruptions and selfishness of people in everyday conversation.
So lets try to capture some of that in our stories today. Let’s write how people really talk and not how we wish they would.
Go!
LET YOUR CHARACTER TALK
Tell a story where everything we learn about the character comes from the things they say.
Does what they say match up with what they mean? Iin what ways do they lie about themselves when the speak? How do people react?)
Tell Us About Your Character Through Their Voice
Go!
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