Sharon Bala's Blog, page 11

This is the third post in a series about dialogue. Start here, if you’ve missed the others. Today’s focus is indirect dialogue (my personal favourite).

Indirect dialogue is reported in the third person so you get the feel of the exchange, without the actual words. In Susan Sinnott’s novel Catching the Light, Cathy is having trouble reading and is working with a tutor called Sarah who thinks she has dyslexia:

“Cathy had asked her father about her mother’s reading difficulties: were they really that much worse than Cathy’s? And he said yes, definitely. So she asked Sarah about that brain mix-up thing, dyslexia, and afterwards Dad said yes, Betty had all those problems too. So how did mom cover it up better than Cathy had? Dad said he wasn’t getting in to that, better ask mom.” — Susan Sinnott, Catching the Light

Like summary dialogue, indirect cuts to the chase without any tedious back and forth. It also allows you to speed through time and cover multiple conversations very quickly. In this one paragraph we are shown three distinct conversations. You can almost imagine Cathy zinging back and forth between a tete-a-tete with her father in their living room to a chat with her tutor the next day, back home with her dad later that evening. Efficient!

What differentiates this passage from summary dialogue? With indirect, unlike summary, you get a hint of the actual words characters say. You can hear them a little more clearly and as a result, have a better sense of their personalities.

Dad saying: yes, definitely. Betty had all those problems too. Then later, resisting Cathy’s questions, refusing to get into it, deferring to mom. All of that is very nearly direct dialogue. The reader can extrapolate body language, relationship dynamics and so much more from these short fragments. Now the author could have put these words inside quotation marks to indicate direct dialogue. But she’s chosen not to, presumably because she wants us to know that this is Cathy’s version of what her father has said. We’re getting her father’s words through her, not from his own mouth. It’s not 100% reliable.

Direct dialogue (which we will explore next week) gives you a character’s exact words. You are right there with them as they speak. But with summary and indirect dialogue, a character’s words are mediated through the narrator. There is a psychic distance inherent with summary and indirect dialogue that doesn’t exist with direct dialogue.

Imagine a friend is telling you about a fight with their partner. Your friend is the narrator and you are getting the story (and any words that were exchanged) second hand. Summary and indirect dialogue are like that. The reader is kept at a remove. I’d argue the remove is greatest with summary dialogue. Indirect can be almost indistinguishable from direct dialogue (Dad said he wasn’t getting into that. Better ask mom). Summary and indirect dialogue have their uses. But to get in close, to close the psychic distance, there’s no replacement for direct dialogue.

That is next week’s focus. Some thoughts on quotation marks, while you wait.

This is the second in a series of posts about dialogue. If you missed the first post, go back.

In my last post, I promised more practical advice on how to write dialogue. I also likened dialogue to a screwdriver and said there are three types, each with its own specific use. This post is about summary dialogue. My understanding of the three types of dialogue (summary, indirect, direct) is heavily indebted to Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. If you only read one book on how to write fiction, let it be Burroway’s.

Summary dialogue is condensed conversation. It conveys the gist of a conversation (or a whole series of conversations) without the actual words. In Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “War Stories” the adolescent protagonist has gotten in trouble at school for humiliating a classmate at recess. At home, the protagonist is questioned by her father:

“ ‘So what is this your mother is telling me?’ he asked, giving me another change to explain myself. I had the words this time and told my father about Anita and bras and the machination of girls. He listened without interrupting, stealing my pawns as I moved them on the board. When I finished, my story dangled in the air between us. Then my father began to tell one of his own.” — Lesley Nneka Arimah “War Stories” from the collection What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky

Imagine if Lesley had instead used direct dialogue, and had her protagonist tell the entire story of this recess drama and all the action and ill will that led up to it. She’d have needed more words, for one thing. Summary dialogue moves fast. If you find your pace is flagging, consider replacing direct with summary dialogue.

Pace aside, note what else this passage does. The narrator tells us her father listens without interrupting. That reveals character. They are playing chess and he’s taking all her pawns. That bit of action animates the scene and again reveals character. This is not a man who is going to let his young daughter win at chess to artificially prop up her ego. And then of course, he has a story of his own. At this point, there is a whole lot more direct dialogue. Because guess what? This playground drama is not the main point of “War Stories”. The real story belongs to the father. With the switch to direct dialogue, Arimah slows the pace right now to indicate that this, this is the important stuff. Pay close attention now. (If you want to know the father’s story or what happened at recess, read “War Stories.” It’s great!)

Summary dialogue is especially useful in a scene with three or more characters all speaking to each other, say at a party or a dinner. Here’s an example from Jamie Fitzpatrick’s The End of Music:

“They switch to red for dinner. Carter breaks the cork and has to push the rest of it in to pour. They drink and spit flecks of cork. Soon he is finding out things he never knew. His wife hates her hair and has never found a style that can minimize the expansive of her forehead and the impossible thick bridge of her nose. Also, even her most carefully selected shoes look absurd, big banks at the end of each leg.” — Jamie Fitzpatrick, The End of Music

This summary dialogue is multi-tasking. First, it reveals mood and setting. They have switched to red for dinner which suggests they were drinking white or something else before this. He’s broken the cork but they continue drinking. So they are not snobs but also the wine is not the key thing here so much as the company and the conversation. The line “Soon he is finding out things he never knew” suggests a level of inebriation, of letting loose. And then of course we learn some particular and quirky things about the wife. She’s not a point of view character. But in this summarized conversation, her inner life is revealed through her preoccupations.

Next week’s post will be devoted to indirect dialogue. In the meantime, here are some other thoughts on dialogue and characters who speak at cross purposes.

My writing group was exchanging emails about dialogue, why it flatlines and how it can be revived. Putting words in a character’s mouth - words that sound authentic and are compelling to read - is no easy feat. So the next few posts will be devoted to the dialogue. Five posts in total, one every Monday, beginning today.

There are no hard and fast rules for good writing and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or ignorant. But there are guidelines that will serve you well 75-90% of the time. Note the spread: 75-95% of the time, you can safely defer to the playbook. The other 10-25% of the time, you’re better off improvising or breaking the rules. Caveat aside, let’s begin.

To start, here are The Port Authority’s collected thoughts on good dialogue:

1: Characters should talk to each other, not the reader. Don’t use dialogue simply to convey information that you think the reader needs.

The last part of that sentence is important. Often, what you think the reader needs is quite a bit more than the reader actually needs. Restraint is part of the discipline of writing. Leave room for the reader to use their intuition.

As a manuscript evaluator, I see this a lot: Character A says something that Character B surely already knows. Can the dialogue be prefaced with the phrase “as you know”? If so, delete.

2. Pay attention to how you and people around you speak. Rarely do we formulate our thoughts in smooth, complete sentences. We speak in fragments, double back, pause, hesitate, um, ah, jump from subject to subject, use slang, drop inside jokes and so on. If two characters are speaking too fluidly they are going to sound like sociopaths or robots. Now maybe your story is about sociopathic robots looking for love in a post-apocalyptic world. If so, as you were. Otherwise, delete.

3. Less is more. Three lines of dialogue at a time is usually plenty. I like to write lots and lots of dialogue in a first draft and then cull it back later. As someone who reads my own and other people’s drafts for a living, one thing I’ve noticed is there is often a gem of a sentence lurking in a paragraph of dialogue. Liberate the gem. Delete the rest.

4. Delete the inessentials (“Hello. Nice weather we’re having. Those Leafs, eh?”). Go straight to the juice. (See #7)

5. The best dialogue has a thrum of tension. Perhaps it’s right at the surface - characters at each other’s throats, airing pent up grievances. But often it’s an undercurrent, a frisson that electrifies some mundane chit chat. Our best teachers are stories. Pay attention to how other writers pull off this trick. Short fiction is a good place to start. The excellent ones are chock-a-block with barbed dialogue.

6. If Character A wants something from Character B (let’s say it’s the answer to an important question), Character B should not oblige. Leave things unsaid. Leave someone wanting.

7. Related: If Character A isn’t quite sure what Character B knows BINGO! Now you’re getting into the realm of subtext. The best dialogue exists on two plains: there are the words that are being said and all the unsaid stuff lurking underneath, the unspoken elephant in the room, ill will or discomfort. All of this non-verbal material is subtext. And subtext is ripe. Subtext is the juice.

8. Imagine a tool box. You’ve got a hammer, a wrench, a tape measure, a couple of screwdrivers, pliers, a drill and so on and so on. In your writing tool box you’ve got narration (a voice in first, second, or third person conveying a story), exposition (background information conveyed by the narrator), time shifts (flashback and flashforward), action and so on. Dialogue is only ONE type of tool.

Where many writers - even published, established ones - go wrong is they forget there’s a whole box and grow too reliant on a single tool. That tool is usually direct dialogue. (Groan) Listen, a Robertson screwdriver is handy but you can’t build a whole house with one. Also, there are other types of screwdrivers! There are other kinds of dialogue too: summary and indirect. Direct dialogue is the easiest tool to use poorly. Summary and indirect dialogue to the rescue.

9. Ideally, dialogue is hard working. Great dialogue does more than one thing: reveals character, advances plot, dials up tension, adds to the mood etc etc. But writing dialogue that multi-tasks is not easy. The good news is, you don’t need dialogue - especially direct dialogue - as much as you think. Circling back to the first point (Don’t use dialogue simply to convey information), sometimes you don’t need dialogue at all. Use a different tool. The reader needs to know something? Give it to them via narration or exposition.

You might have noticed that most of this advice boils down to: delete. In the next four posts, we’re going to pick up our pencils, lick the lead (gross), and get into how to actually write good dialogue, including a discussion of the differences between summary, indirect, and direct. Meantime, here are some other thoughts on dialogue.

2019.

2019 got off to a rocky start. For reasons I still can’t fully articulate, I fell into an anxiety spiral in the first half of the year. It felt like one of those Escher paintings where you’re climbing stairs to nowhere that never end.

It began during a quiet period, when I was home and not travelling, not even really doing much book promotion, supposedly stress-free. That’s when the anxiety crept up. All stealthy like. Like a bank robber. To steal my sanity. And for a long time I didn’t realize it was even anxiety. Or rather, I knew I was anxious but also, I thought I was dying. Because these are the wholly rational thoughts anxiety produces. You. Are. Dying. Now.

Helpfully, my best friend pointed out that mortality is the human condition. We’re all dying, Shar, she said, then grinned at her own cleverness because she’s perverse like that. We were having cocktails at Sassafraz after one of my events and I told her I was putting those words into my next book as revenge.

Sometime in the spring, I realized I wasn’t actually dying. Or at least, not right this second and not any faster than any other mostly healthy person my age who occasionally eats kale and zones out in spin class. There was nothing much wrong with my body except a screw had come loose in my head. So then I cast about for the cause. Objectively and subjectively, life was grand. What can be wrong when all your professional pipe dreams have come true? What can be wrong when you have a nice life with people you love in a safe country with free healthcare? What is there to be anxious about?

I’m having a mid-life crisis, I group texted my friends. It’s fucking tedious. Six months and I’m getting it out of my system.

Turns out, I’m the person who gives her midlife crisis a deadline. I’m also the person who does her homework. I took up meditation (Calm is a really excellent app by the way). I began each morning by thinking of three nice things from the day before. I read a bunch of research articles about anxiety and had a long, long chat with a friend who is a cognitive psychologist. I went to one deeply unhelpful and condescending therapy session. I took all my bad feelings and channelled it into my work. I wasn’t totally sure any of these things were getting me closer to a solution. I still felt like an anxious thrumming ball of awful.

And then, one day in September, when I was coming to grips with things and feeling genuinely better, I was listening to Rebecca Traister talking about her book “Good and Mad,” how its unexpected success had lengthened her book tour and how stressful that was and how the fall out was intense, irrational, anxiety. Hello. What’s that? Anxiety caused by book publication? DING DING DING. And yes, let me just acknowledge this is peak first world/ fortunate author problems.

Tom, my doctor, some other people probably, had suggested that perhaps it was publication and publicity and the whole whirlwind of the previous year that was to blame but until I heard another author mirror back my experiences, it was impossible to believe a good thing could cause bad feelings. As Daniel Lavery likes to say, life is a rich tapestry.

This week I was listening to John Green, whose fourth novel, The Fault in Our Stars, went super nova in 2012, talk about his own success and its resulting fall out. His issues, like his success, are so much more intense than mine ever were, but much of what he said, about the bad that comes married to the good, was familiar.

All this to say, if you are an author on year two of an even mildly successful book, feeling crappy for no good reason, it’s not a mid-life crisis. It’s not a catastrophic illness. It’s success. This is what it feels like.

And also! Importantly! It will pass.

ps. I’ve been silent on here because I’ve been working hard on some things, including draft two of a new novel. Regular-ish blog posts will resume now the once.

Last week, I finished a first draft of a BRAND NEW NOVEL!

First drafts are the toughest part of the process for me, wrung out after much grinding of teeth, head banging, whinging, and despair. Getting to that last paragraph, the final visual image, the last four words (words I’d scrawled in my notebook months earlier in a moment of inspiration, words my pen has been galloping toward all along), that accomplishment was momentous. And then, I converted the whole thing, all 90,000+ gloriously hideous words, into a Word document and emailed it off to my writing group.

Novel, the second. Draft, the first.

It was 3:30pm on Friday and I was JITTERY. Possibly because I’d been working on that last scene for six straight hours, which is not a practice I would recommend, but I was desperate to get the thing done and needs must. Or possibly because feeling feverish, twitchy, mildly panicked, and simultaneously relieved is par for the course at the close of a first draft. It’s been a while - five years - so I’ve forgotten.

There comes a point where a draft feels like a gremlin on your back, when you can’t wait to be rid of the thing, send it off to an editor or agent or fellow writers. Anywhere really, just offload the problem and have a reprieve. All Autumn, I’d been dreaming of Friday and a break from this damn book that is riddled with flaws I don’t know how to fix and all its accompanying anxiety. And finally, Friday came. The draft went off into the internet ether. Cue the celebratory weekend. Cue the homemade pizzas and the first Christmas party of the season, cue the gently falling snow out my picture window as I baked gingerbread cake with cream cheese icing. Cue books by the fire. So. Much. Reading.

Predictably by mid-day Saturday I was missing my book.

One day in July 1984 biathelete Kari Swenson was abducted in the mountains. I heard her story the other night while making dinner and listening to the podcast Criminal. I was struck by Kari’s ordeal but also left thinking about craft because there is a lot we can learn about storytelling by paying attention to the facts of this story and its construction.

If you haven’t heard this episode yet, please have a listen because the rest of this post is one long spoiler. Then come back and we’ll take the thing apart like a clock and figure out what makes it tick so well.

I want to make one thing clear: Kari Swenson is bravery personified. To say nothing of tenacity and grit. She was shot point blank in the chest and had the presence of mind to save herself by slowing her heart down. And then, after it was all said and done, she threw herself into training and returned to competition. And Alan Goldstein was a hero. I was moved first and foremost by their courage and humanity.

But as a writer there’s a mercenary instinct that kicks in any time I encounter a well constructed narrative.

First, note the classic three act structure.

Act one introduces Kari and Alan and establishes setting. The action begins when Kari, the protagonist, heads off for a cross country run alone in the mountains. Next, comes the inciting event: meeting two terrifying men.

Act two is focused on the abduction and the search crew’s efforts to find her. The tension is rising, climbing toward the peak of Aristotle’s arc. Kari is chained to a tree. Alan, introduced in act one, bursts in to save her. Alan is shot and killed. Kari is shot in the chest. This is the climax.

Act three takes us through the aftermath. Kari is rescued and survives. Moreover, she trains hard and returns to competing in biathlons. The abductors are caught and sentenced to jail.

So far, so conventional right? As a story this one is perfectly satisfying.

But then comes the sleight of hand, that moment when the story surprises us with an unexpected turn of events that, in hindsight, was predictable.

In this story, the WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW moment, comes when we realize that a whole bunch of people have got the heroes and villains mixed up.

At first, I was outraged. A young woman is abducted and shot in the chest and a man is shot dead in the face and the murderers are valourized by the media and people all around the world. How is this possible?

But then as I thought about it more, as I remembered gender politics, and the Rape of the Sabines, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Freemen on the Land, libertarians, and the Cult of Cheeto Jesus, well in hindsight the public’s love affair with a couple of unwashed white male terrorists is par for the course. CAN I GET AN AMEN?

Conventional stories (Red is stalked by a wolf in granny’s clothing, then saved by a passing woodcutter and lives happily ever after) are fine. But the stand-out stories, the ones that stay with us, that we re-tell to our friends, and dissect in long shouty blog posts, those stories have something more happening. Which brings us to…

Most stories have external stakes (will the protagonist get out of this alive?) and emotional stakes (will she thrive?). In Act Two the external stakes are front and centre. In Act Three the external stakes are resolved and now the emotional stakes become important. Eventually those stakes are resolved as well and we share that moment of elation when Kari gets pulled up to the podium by the third place competitor.

But exceptional stories, those ones that resonate far longer and make us really think (or in my case silent scream in my kitchen and now here on the internet) are the ones that have philosophical stakes.

What does society value - a young woman’s life or that of her abductors? Do we care more about the man who died to save his friend or the outlaws on the run? All through acts one and two, going into act three, I didn’t think basic morals (the philosophical stakes) in peril. I assumed Kari and Alan were the heroes and the two psychos who shot them were the villains. Bet you did too.

Then: surprise! Society is immoral. Oh wait…we already knew that.

If the abductors were black do we think for a second they’d have been valourized? What is broken in human nature that makes us root for certain evil men? What about the narrative of the wild west and the whole long arc of the western canon and pop culture and Barbara Walters? Who is to blame and also how and when are we going to put an end to this bullshit? One reason this story is so powerful is that we are left with more questions than answers.

There’s more architectural detail that I noticed in this story. Note that the story is framed by the present. The episode is bookended by present-day Kari looking back on this one episode of her life. That was a conscious structural choice the storytellers made. In one way, it deflates some of the tension. We know from the jump that she’s going to live.

But go back and listen to the first beats of the story. What do you hear? Breathing. Kari breathing. And shooting. Lovely foreshadowing. This is an intimate opening too, one that puts us right into her body as she talks about the athleticism involved in her sport, the importance of breathing. If this was a fictional story, I would say: note the attention to detail. Remember: character is king.

At the climax of the story, what was foreshadowed takes place. She’s in agony from the gun shot wound and realizes death is close. Here at the crucial moment, she returns to her training and slows down her heart beat. This ability to control her breathing, combined with her athleticism, is what ends up saving her life.

Three act structure + external and internal stakes = perfectly fine conventional story. Philosophical stakes + turn of events that is simultaneously unexpected and predictable = exceptional story.

There is an architecture to every narrative, an unobtrusive but vital structure that holds the whole story together. Learn how to spot it and your writing will improve. If you’ve got a story that could use some architectural assistance, I can help. I moonlight as a manuscript evaluator which means I give constructive feedback on works-in-progress. Character and dialogue, plot and structure, it’s all my jam. I’m taking bookings for 2020 so get in touch for more info or a quote.

BIG NEWS first: Last week, The Boat People landed on the 2020 International DUBLIN Literary Award Long List. Established in 1994, this is the most valuable annual award for an English-language work of fiction. Books on the long list were nominated by librarians from 40 countries in Africa, Europe, North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand. Librarians, as everyone knows, are super heroes. So knowing that they chose my book is incredibly special. Also special is the fact that I’m on here with Melissa Barbeau and Susan Sinnott, who are not just my friends but also fellow Port Authority Writing Group members. (Incidentally, the other day Tom said to me: “Did you realize that The Port Authority has the word author in it?” Shamefully, no I didn’t.)

The DUBLIN Prize has a mega purse. €100,000 for the winner. But with 156 titles it is literally the longest list (see what I did there?) so I’m not entertaining day dreams of fame or fortune. As always, I’m just happy to be HERE.

The other big news - which I can finally make official - is that we’ve sold German translation rights for The Boat People to MITTELDEUTSCHER VERLAG. I say we like I had something to do with it but no, it was Stephanie Sinclair and the team at Transatlantic who did/ are doing all the hard work. German edition coming in 2020.

Also coming to Germany in 2020: me! I’ll be part of the Canadian delegation of writers at the LitProm festival in Frankfurt in January. I’ve got two events on the docket so if you’re in Frankfurt the weekend of January 24th, come say hi! Canada is the Guest of Honour Country at the 2020 Frankfurt Book Fair so there will be a good number of Canadian authors toodling around German festivals next year.

Speaking of travel, I was at the Singapore Writer’s Festival at the beginning of November. Canada was the Country of Focus at the festival this year (are we having a moment?) so there were nine of us representing this big, beautiful land.

Language and the Refugee Crisis panel

And friends, let me tell you: Singapore knows how to throw a literary festival. The audiences were big and generous and asked the most astute questions. The programming was provocative and varied. Author care was exceptional. This is a HUGE festival yet somehow the volunteers had memorized all our faces and greeted us by name. ‘Course, as my mom pointed out, this is all very on brand Asian ….hospitality, excelling at homework, doing the maximum.

I was on stage for three events. (Note to festival organizers: if you’re bringing in an author from far away, schedule us for multiple events please!) A career highlight came at my last event. It was a panel on Language and the Refugee Crisis and I shared the stage with moderator Greta Georges, playwright Huzir Sulaiman, and political cartoonist Chris Riddell. During our conversation, Chris improvised illustrations that were projected onto a huge screen behind us. What fun!

Pico Iyer (right) musing on Autumn in Japan

But really, one of the best parts of festivals is meeting one’s literary heroes and I took advantage of my pass to check out a few events including two featuring travel writer Pico Iyer. He’s just as thoughtful and engaging on stage as you might expect from his writing. And, bonus, he’s also a genuinely lovely human being.

On January 2nd, it will be two years since The Boat People was launched into the world. It’s been non-stop touring and promotion since. Readings, speeches, book signings, on-stage conversations, chats with readers and fellow writers. Very few authors get to hog the spotlight as much as I have these past two years. The Boat People has been an unbelievably fortunate book and every day I remain gobsmacked by my luck.

“What are you working on now?” Lovely readers, kind interviewers, beloved family and friends, please, please, please, let us call a moratorium on this question. Because the answer is one or more of the following:

Promoting this book I just published.

Nothing because I’m paralyzed by publication anxiety and/ or writers’ block and/or creative fatigue

I’m working on a new book and I don’t want to talk about it.

I was in the audience at an event last year where the question was posed to Claire Cameron. She said that she had in fact been talking so much about her book-in-progress that her publicist pulled her aside and asked her to stop.

It can feel like a jinx to talk about the project you are working on. For one thing, you never know if the story you’re writing on will make it off the hard drive (the novel I was working on for a year and a half got abandoned last Fall). For another, we often don’t know what the final thing will be, what form it will take. This is the nature of creative work. In a project’s early stages we are just sniffing around, doing a bit of background reading, following our noses and delving into some subject or fleshing out a character, without any idea where the work will lead. Characters and storylines and themes get abandoned. Stories change and evolve from one draft to the next. You set out to write a coming-of-age tale set in 15th century China but what gets published is a dystopian space travel fantasy.

And finally, most of us are private and protective of our work. When a novel is in progress, it is so fragile and unformed, it feels like I need to hide it from direct sunlight and prying eyes, nurture it alone in a dim room and give it time to fully form before casting it out into the world. As much as I want people to read my stories and buy my books (and help me pay the bills, please and thank you), it is a gut wrench sending anything into the world, to be judged and discussed. When The Boat People hit the shelves, I bid it adieu. God speed, first novel. That book, those characters, they don’t belong to me anymore. I can’t control how they are experienced or read or understood, whether the story is loved or hated. The book and its characters belong to readers now.

But the new thing I’m working on, it is all mine. For this interval of creation, anyway. So forgive me if I’m not ready to share. With any luck, it will be published one day. And then it’ll be yours.

via Murray the Nut

If procrastination was a sport, writers would medal. Going to the gym, cleaning the toilet, de-frosting the freezer, in-box zero, baking, scrolling instagram …these are novice moves. A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon search engine optimizing this website. A new low or levelling up?

But there’s another, more insidious, way we procrastinate. We avoid the difficult scenes.

You know the ones I’m talking about. You’ve brought characters together to have a knock-em-down-drag-em-out fight but just as the tension rises, you panic and fade to black. Or: something horrible happens off stage and the reader is informed of it after the fact.

As a reader, nothing is more disappointing than being cheated of the juice. But as a writer, I’ve been guilty of wimping out.

There were several scenes in The Boat People that were not written until late in the game (read: until my editors forced my hand). The scene where Sellian is born, the one where the UN leaves Mahindan’s hometown, the one where Priya and Charlie take Sellian somewhere he doesn’t want to go (I won’t spoiler the book and say where). Consistently, readers tell me these were the most gutting scenes, the ones that made them cry, the ones they won’t forget. I’m proudest of those scenes. They were hard work but that’s not why I love them. I love them because they are the scenes where stakes were high and characters were in peril and therefore, they contained the most emotion. Emotion is a story’s heart beat. If the emotions are dialled down, if you let the characters off easy and nothing they do is fraught, your story will flatline.

The odd thing about those scenes was that I always knew they took place in the timeline of the story, I just didn’t think they were necessary to show. Unconscious procrastination is insidious: we don’t even realize we are avoiding the hard work.

We create characters we love and then we can’t stomach making their lives hard. So we don’t write those difficult scenes. Instead, we write a whole bunch of unnecessary material. We add side stories and secondary plots, create minor characters and let the big, bad stuff happen to them. Deep down we know the story is flatlining and we try to breathe life into it by padding it with all this extra stuff. We procrastinate by writing.

Here’s the foolproof way to write your story faster: identify the scenes you are avoiding and get them over with. No excuses. March that character down the gangplank and push her into the shark-circled waters. Now, the climactic scenes need not be ones of injury and death. The big scene could be a character telling his parents something they don’t want to hear. Or a character having tea with the Queen of England and dropping the cup. Or kicking the corgi under the table by accident.

Figuring out the scenes you’re avoiding isn’t always easy. It helps to have another writer or a blunt friend read your work. Even better: hire a professional to help you with your manuscript. If neither of these are options, here are some signs to watch for on your own:

Is a minor character getting more action than the protagonist?

By the end of the story, who has experienced the most change and transformation? If it’s not the protagonist that’s a problem.

Are confrontations/ fights avoided or resolved too quickly?

Is life a little too easy for the protagonist? Do they bounce back too quickly and/or un-harmed from every set back?

In a tense scene, where were the characters physically in relation to each other? Long distance fights don’t have the same punch as two characters having it out face to face.

What action happens off stage?

What scenes made you squirm/ want to walk away? Did you wimp out? Did you end them too soon? Be honest.

Remember: stakes + peril = emotion. What is at stake for the protagonist? Have you put them in peril? Are the stakes and the peril present on the page? Count the words. Make sure you’ve devoted sufficient time to your protagonist’s discomfort. Don’t procrastinate on your own discomfort. Sweating, the shakes - these are solid signs you’re doing the hard work. Bonus points for tears.

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. I’m taking bookings for 2020. Get in touch for more info or a quote.

via Toothpaste for Dinner

If you haven’t read The Boat People and don’t want spoilers, save this post for later.

I’ve received approximately 700,000 questions about The Boat People’s ending. So many that I addressed the ambiguity in my FAQs. Dear Reader, You be the adjudicator, I essentially said. Do Grace’s job. Decide Mahindan’s fate.

Bill Selnes, a lawyer and reader in Saskatchewan, took me up on the challenge. Friends, this is really, really good. Fan fiction of the highest order. Bill has written an imagined judgement and you can read it on his blog Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan. And there’s a bonus post script where he tells us how Mahindan and Sellian are doing now.

In a book club recently, I tried to explain (probably incoherently) that The Boat People doesn’t belong to me anymore. It’s out in the world, being read by total strangers. Each reader brings their unique perspective to the book and the story changes subtly each time it is read, by each new person. One of the pleasures of being an author is knowing that your characters are out there living their own lives, separate from you, totally out of your control. Whenever readers tell me about their experience of the book, how they feel about this character or that, it’s a bit like receiving a dispatch from the other side, Mahindan et. al sending messages via emissaries. In Bill Selnes’ imagined universe, Mahindan and Sellian are thriving. And I’m really glad to hear it!