So many suggestions and rules from very talented people. Some I’ve followed, but some I’ve ignored. The following are my rules and they work in every situation.

First, avoid using dialogue tags as much as possible because it’s true that you don’t need them. Second, I restrict myself to only three dialogue tags: said, asked, and the occasional exclaimed. Third, always structure the sentence so that the dialogue tag is on the inside, between the quote and the speaker regardless of which comes first.

With those restrictions, only nine combinations are possible. With help from the cast of the 1976 television series Alice, let’s explore them.

Pictured from the left: Flo, Alice, Mel, Tommy, and Vera

A. Dialogue Tag then QUESTION

• In a gravely voice Mel asked, “Alice, did you charge that guy for soup?”
• “Not yet.”
• “You make sure you do. This is a diner, not a soup kitchen.”

B. QUESTION then Dialogue Tag

• “Alice, did you charge that guy for soup,”  asked Mel in a gravely voice.
• “Not yet.”
• “You make sure you do. This is a diner, not a soup kitchen.”

C. QUESTION Alone

• Flo interrupted. “Hey Mel?”
• “Yeah?”
• “Kiss my grits,” exclaimed Flo.

D. Dialogue Tag then STATEMENT

• Alice said, “I want Tommy to have a future.”
• “Doesn’t he like Phoenix,” asked Vera.
• “There aren’t a lot of opportunities besides driving a truck.”

E. STATEMENT then Dialogue Tag

• “I want Tommy to have a future,” said Alice.
• “Doesn’t he like Phoenix,” asked Vera.
• “There aren’t a lot of opportunities besides driving a truck.”

F. STATEMENT Alone

• In a gravely voice Mel asked, “Alice, did you charge that guy for soup?”
• “Not yet.”
• “You make sure you do. This is a diner, not a soup kitchen.”

G. Dialogue Tag then EXCLAMATION

• Flo interrupted. “Hey Mel?”
• “Yeah?”
• She said, “Kiss my grits!”

H. EXCLAMATION then Dialogue Tag

• Flo interrupted. “Hey Mel?”
• “Yeah?”
• “Kiss my grits,” exclaimed Flo.

I. EXCLAMATION Alone

• “Well, Sugar, I’d let you have the sandwich for free but…” said Flo gesturing behind her toward Mel.
• “You stow it!”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/melodycampbell/2656648042/

I think journeys are common in stories because they echo our own travels through life. As we navigate life, we make decisions and choose between alternatives. Sometimes we know the consequences of a choice, sometimes we don’t, and sometimes we know where a choice will lead but don’t care.

Notice how even the language used to illustrate this point is loaded with journey imagery? Travels. Navigate. Lead. It is difficult even to find neutral words.

To illustrate: What is the core difference between the atheist and the believer? Between the naturalist that thinks life’s origin is explained by evolution or the Christian that trusts in the existence of a Creator? One has chosen to believe in the existence of God and the other has chosen not to. What a difference that single choice makes in the life of a person!

Life is a journey, choice is powerful, and the future beckons to us all.

It’s an age-old problem: How to share information in a novel without readers picking up on your clues until the reveal at the end. Here are some strategies I’ve picked up on:

1. Hide clues in plain sight.
   • Duh. Most people are not that observant and rarely see what is right in front of their face.
   • If you include information in the form of a list, always bury the most important part in the middle. People notice the last thing in a list best, the first next-best, and the middle last.
2. Share clues out of order.
   • If you know that John has access to Love Potion #9 (A), Love Potion #9 actually causes explosions (B), and an explosion destroyed the rebel headquarters (C),  then it’s reasonable to conclude that John is responsible for blowing up the HQ (A -> B -> C). Many crimes in detective novels are constructed by the writer this way whereas the hero often learns A, B, and C in REVERSE order. The crime (C) comes first, then the method (B), with the connection to the culprit (A) arriving only at the end.
   • The drawback of this method is that it excludes any kind of surprise ending. Avoid this by changing the order: Share (C) and (A) with your reader while withholding the crucial (B) that links the two to stretch out the suspense or setup a twist.
   • For longer chains of clues (A -> B -> C -> D -> E) you can get very, very creative. Just don’t get so complicated that readers can’t follow the chain.
3. Establish a secondary purpose for something already included.
   • In the book Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, the mind game program that Ender periodically interacts with is used to explain how the buggers communicate with Ender at the end of the book. However in the sequel, it must ALSO be the source for a sentient computer program.
   • We humans like our loose ends packaged up into nice, neat little containers. Card surprises us by killing two birds with one stone. It’s efficient and it’s always unexpected when done right.
4. Share something trivial or common or innocuous that has important consequences when taken to its logical conclusion.
   • In Agatha Christie‘s murder mystery play The Mousetrap, a couple is having an anniversary at the beginning. Taken at face value, it tells the viewer about their relationship. At the end of the play it is revealed that they were hiding anniversary presents from one another which led to an explanation of the bigger mystery. Christie was a master of this technique.
5. Add in misdirection.
   • The most famous form of misdirection has to be the Red Herring – a false clue mixed in with the correct ones to lead its interpreter to the wrong conclusion. Red herrings can be left accidentally or purposely by actual culprits or sympathizers.
6. “Make the reader think they know what’s going on, even though it isn’t.” - Adam Heine on Holding Back Surprises – Author’s Echo
   • “Scooby-Doo was a master of this … for 7-year-olds. If your audience is any older, you’ll have to get more creative. The trick, I think, is to believe your own lie as you write it.” – Adam Heine on Holding Back Surprises – Author’s Echo
   • This form of “[m]isdirection has a lot of flavors, but I like putting the knowledge out there only to have the MC [Main Character] interpret it for the reader … wrongly. If your reader is bonding well with your MC, this can work well (as long as your MC isn’t being stupid – which is a very relative term!).” – Susan Kaye Quinn on Holding Back Surprises – Author’s Echo
7. Have an expert argue against the correct interpretation.
   • Humans tend to focus on experts in novels as in real life. When a character takes a stand against something, the burden of proof is on them as a person. Thus the focus moves away from evaluating the evidence to evaluating the expert. Make the expert believable and you will have deceived the reader.

Note that you can also combine these techniques for even better results. For example, place a shotgun on the back wall in your opening scene (hidden in plain sight). Readers won’t be looking for a gun (shared out of order) until someone gets shot in chapter 4, but you can bet they’ll remember it’s there in the last chapter if you’ll only remind them where it was the whole time.

Get creative!

Image Source: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/artsandentertainment/cyrils-magical-mystery-tour/338627

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 34,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Christian suspense author Mike Dellosso gave a talk of the same name at the 2011 Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writer’s Conference (BRMCWC): Is Christian Fiction an Oxymoron?

Well, is it?

It’s a difficult thing to define but you’ll find my answer at the bottom of this post. My answer in turn is based on another slippery definition: What does it mean for a story to be Christian?

I posit that Christian stories contain an element of redemption. No more, and no less. Examples:

• When a high school basketball star becomes pregnant during her Junior year, she must choose between a future with the child, adoption, or abortion.
• After an inner-city detective discovers his partner has been taking payoffs, he must choose between friendship and duty.

Now, what is redemption? What does this quality look like in fiction? I think of it as an opportunity, a choice presented to a character to do the right thing – or not. This is often a choice between bad and worse rather than good and evil, an agonizing decision colored in smoke and shades of gray.

So if being Christian means there exists an element of redemption, what of horror?

Most people would define horror as being that which elicits fear in the reader. But suspense often induces fear too so I find this definition lacking. I tend to separate horror from suspense along the lines of hope and meaning. In horror, there is a general lack of hope or expectation of meaning behind whatever is going on. However in suspense, there is generally a very good reason why the bad guy is doing bad guy things which is revealed by the end. Plus, the good guy is expected to be triumphant at the end of the story. Not so with the horror.

By the way, these should not be confused with Thrillers where we get to watch the villainy happen as it were over the antagonist’s shoulder. Someone on The Kill Zone Blog defined Thrillers as mysteries in reverse: Mysteries start with a crime and thereafter follow the detective working through clues to determine whodunit. By contrast, thrillers often begin with a credible threat and then follow the protagonist questing to prevent it from being executed.

So, is Christian Horror an oxymoron? Can something with a redemptive quality lack meaning? Yes, by having the chooser make the wrong decision, especially the wrong eternal decision. What’s more frightening to a Christian than a sinner rejecting the offer of salvation?  This dooms them to hell, a very frightening thought.

Attribution:
Image from http://www.mixcloud.com/black-buddah/literature-mystery-thriller-horror/

On June 26, 1956, C.S. Lewis replied to letter from an American girl named Joan with advice on writing:

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us the thing is “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please, will you do my job for me.”
5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite

From: C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children, p. 64

Or if you prefer a transcript, visit http://wetranscripts.livejournal.com/49969.html

Wow! It was so worth 20 minutes of my time.

A trope (in a story sense) is any plot, character, setting, device, or pattern that we recognize as such. It’s kind of everything, from the unassuming farm boy to the rebellion against an oppressive government to the wise mentor to the chase scene in which the car smashes through a pane of glass being carried across the street.

Tropes are what make stories run. A story is not good or bad based on whether or not it has tropes. ALL STORIES HAVE TROPES. A story is good or bad based on how those tropes are used.

What we like about tropes is familiarity (“Yay, ninjas!”), excitement (“Oo, the hero’s going to get all awesome on the badguys!”), and especially when our favorite tropes are twisted in interesting ways (“I did NOT see that coming”).

What we don’t like is when tropes are predictable to the point of boredom. That’s when a trope becomes a cliche.

via Author’s Echo: Tropes vs. Cliches.

Sometimes reality really is stranger than fiction.

1. Write the sentence, not just the story

Long ago I got a rejection from the editor of the Santa Monica Review, Jim Krusoe. It said: “Good enough story, but what’s unique about your sentences?” That was the best advice I ever got. Learn to look at your sentences, play with them, make sure there’s music, lots of edges and corners to the sounds. Read your work aloud. Read poetry aloud and try to heighten in every way your sensitivity to the sound and rhythm and shape of sentences. The music of words. I like Dylan Thomas best for this–the Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait. I also like Sexton, Eliot, and Brodsky for the poets and Durrell and Les Plesko for prose. A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone’s writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.

2. Pick a better verb

Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb. You know the ones: Was, did, had, made, went, looked… One-size-fits-all looks like crap on anyone. Sew yourself a custom made suit. Pick a better verb. Challenge all those verbs to really lift some weight for you.

3. Kill the cliché.

When you’re writing, anything you’ve ever heard or read before is a cliché. They can be combinations of words: Cold sweat. Fire-engine red, or phrases: on the same page, level playing field, or metaphors: big as a house. So quiet you could hear a pin drop. Sometimes things themselves are cliches: fuzzy dice, pink flamingo lawn ornaments, long blonde hair. Just keep asking yourself, “Honestly, have I ever seen this before?” Even if Shakespeare wrote it, or Virginia Woolf, it’s a cliché. You’re a writer and you have to invent it from scratch, all by yourself. That’s why writing is a lot of work, and demands unflinching honesty.

4. Variety is the key.

Most people write the same sentence over and over again. The same number of words–say, 8-10, or 10-12. The same sentence structure. Try to become stretchy–if you generally write 8 words, throw a 20 word sentence in there, and a few three-word shorties. If you’re generally a 20 word writer, make sure you throw in some threes, fivers and sevens, just to keep the reader from going crosseyed.

5. Explore sentences using dependent clauses.

A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you’ve already written. Often the story you’re looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.

6. Use the landscape.

Always tell us where we are. And don’t just tell us where something is, make it pay off. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character. Look at the openings of Fitzgerald stories, and Graham Greene, they’re great at this.

7. Smarten up your protagonist.

Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.

8. Learn to write dialogue.

This involves more than I can discuss here, but do it. Read the writers of great prose dialogue–people like Robert Stone and Joan Didion. Compression, saying as little as possible, making everything carry much more than is actually said. Conflict. Dialogue as part of an ongoing world, not just voices in a dark room. Never say the obvious. Skip the meet and greet.

9. Write in scenes.

What is a scene? a) A scene starts and ends in one place at one time (the Aristotelian unities of time and place–this stuff goes waaaayyyy back). b) A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted. c) Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next. Make something happen.

10. Torture your protagonist.

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

via Janet Fitch’s 10 rules for writers | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times.