Karen Sandler

Category: The Writing Life

  • Dialogue vs. Scene

    When does dialogue constitute a scene? If two or more characters are talking to one another about elements of the story they’re featured in, is that a scene? And if it is a scene, how much of it can we include on the page without interspersing it with action?

    To me, a scene is where something is happening. It’s a visual depiction of that something. It must be pertinent to the story and move it forward, but if there’s something important to your story, I fervently believe it should be shown and not talked about.

    Of course, dialogue does have its place. I recall learning (back in the Dark Ages when I first started writing) three rules about dialogue. Dialogue should do one or more of the following:

    •     Convey character
    •     Reveal information
    •     Move the story forward

    So, yes, you could have some number of characters in a room talking, characterizing themselves with their word choices or tone (e.g., using plenty of slang & f-bombs, or more erudite language), revealing information (e.g., that they saw Col. Mustard in the library with a hammer), and moving the story forward (e.g., I’m pregnant, and you’re the father). But if it’s just folks talking in a room, is that really the best way to use dialogue?

    The issue is really how much of your book is dialogue in a static place and how much is action that either leads into that dialogue, or action that follows that dialogue. If your story is fast-paced, with your characters constantly in peril, it’s great to have scenes in which they can take a breather, to sit together and just talk and regroup. James Rollins Map of Bones is a good example of that. Rollins places his characters in one dire situation after another, but there are revelations that they have to have time to chew over. So they get to safety and work out what those revelations mean, providing the reader with information, characterizing the characters, and moving the story forward.

    Here’s a dialogue example from my book, Tankborn. I’ve taken most of the action out of the exchange between Kayla and her nurture brother, Jal:

    “Tala’s out,” Jal said, “cleaning Spil and Zeva’s flat.”
    “Then we have time to change and get the river sludge out of our clothes.”
    “What about this?”
    “I’ll doctor it. If she asks, you slipped climbing down the riverbank.”
    “If she’s tired enough,” Jal pointed out, “she might not even
    notice the scratch.”
    “She’ll notice. She just might not have the energy to push it.”
    “Tala shouldn’t have to work so hard.”
    “You volunteering to stop eating? We could save plenty of dhans not paying for the kel-grain you inhale.”
    “I mean, the trueborns should give her a new baby so she won’t have to clean flats.”

    As written above, it’s not really a scene at all. It’s just two talking heads. Here’s the same excerpt with the action included:

        When Kayla slipped into the twenty-ninth warren, Jal was waiting for her by the stairs. “Tala’s out,” Jal said, “cleaning Spil and Zeva’s flat.”
    Kayla brushed past Jal and up the stairs. “Then we have time to change and get the river sludge out of our clothes.”
    “What about this?” Jal tapped the scratch on his cheek.
    “I’ll doctor it. If she asks, you slipped climbing down the riverbank.”
    “If she’s tired enough,” Jal pointed out, “she might not even notice the scratch.”
    “She’ll notice. She just might not have the energy to push it.”
    Jal crowded up past Kayla and walked backward up the stairs. “Tala shouldn’t have to work so hard.”
    Kayla slanted a look up at him. “You volunteering to stop eating? We could save plenty of dhans not paying for the kel-grain you inhale.”
    Jal gave Kayla a poke. “I mean, the trueborns should give her a new baby so she won’t have to clean flats.”

    With the interspersed action, the dialogue becomes a scene. Not so much a whizbang high-action scene, but we get a sense of place, and a sense of the relationship between Kayla and Jal, as well as revealing information about their nurture mother, Tala.

    If you’re a writer, how do you handle dialogue to avoid the dreaded Talking Heads Syndrome? If you’re a reader, what do you think of dialogue that’s independent from action? I’d love to hear others’ opinions.

     

  • RTW – Fairy Tale Remake

    This week, YA Highway‘s blog prompt is to name a fable or story we’d like to see a retelling of. We’re also encouraged to be creative and come up with our own version.

    I have always been fascinated with fairy tales and fables. I even played around with an updated retelling of Cinderella in one of my romance novels (His Make-Believe Wife, under my pen name, Kayla Russo).

    I’d actually intended to write a few more fairy tale-based romances, and had even started one based on one of my favorite fairy tales, Rumpelstiltskin. It was to take place in a modern-day wrecking yard (where old cars go to die). The woman who owned the wrecking yard would discover an odd little man wandering around the yard. I don’t remember the details, but likely it was something like the woman would have to figure out his name to find love.

    I ended up completely jettisoning that version of the idea. I did go on to write the book, which was originally published by Berkley as Unforgettable, but is now available as The In-Between (again using my pen name Kayla Russo). The little old man was replaced by teen ghosts, Laura and Johnny. Rather than figuring out their names, the heroine (and hero) have to figure out how Laura and Johnny died to free the dead lovers from their bondage on earth.

    I’ve had another idea cooking for a long while that likely will never see the light of day. In that story, a fairy godmother appears in the apartment of a hard-driven, type-A woman. But before the fairy godmother can grant any wishes, she has a heart attack and drops to the floor. Just before she dies, she transfers the mantle of fairy-godmotherness to the type A woman. Now the woman has to be fairy godmother, which of course ruins her life.

    So, what are your favorite fairy tales and fables? What would you like to see retold?

  • Oh, Microsoft Word, How I Love and Hate You

    This week, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday prompt is, What word processing program do you use to write your manuscript, and can you share one handy trick you’ve learned in that program that has helped you while you write?

    As you’ve probably guessed from the emblem to the left, I use Microsoft Word (on a PC). And from the title of this post, you might have inferred that Word and I have a bit of an uneasy relationship.

    You might think that my issues with Word arise from my being one of those writers who’s computer-phobic, more comfortable writing longhand or on a typewriter. Ah…no. I was thrilled to give the typewriter the old heave-ho when we bought our first home computer in 1983 (a Kaypro II running WordStar). I’d been working as a software engineer for six years by then, and had an MS in computer science from UCLA. So I had (and still have) strong opinions about how intuitive a software user interface should be (very intuitive, IMHO). Yes, Word remains a very powerful tool for word processing (I’m a thousand times more productive using Word than I was at a typewriter). I do continue to use it, but I confess that at times I wish it were a live thing so I could give it a good, hard poke.

    Taking a calming breath now. As much as I use Word and appreciate its functionality, I do wonder how people with no computer background cope with some of Word’s, shall we say, less intuitive features. For instance, when I’m working on my first draft, I like to write my chapters as individual files, then stitch them together into one big file when I’m ready to edit. To accomplish that, I first do a SaveAs for my first chapter (or prologue), naming it something like Awakening draft. Then I scroll to the end of that chapter and insert a section break using Page Layout/Breaks/Next Page. I then go into the header so I can turn off Link to Previous. My running headers include the chapter number, and if I don’t turn off Link to Previous, the chapter number in the header for the new chapter will be the same as the previous one. Then I use the Insert/Object/Text from file to drop in the text of the next chapter. I run through this process for each chapter until I have the complete manuscript.

    Easy-Peasy, right? You followed all that, didn’t you? I guess you would if you already knew how to do it, but if you didn’t, you might be a bit at sea tracking my instructions. And this process has changed slightly with each new version of Word.

    I’ll tell you something I really do like about Word, though–tables. I use them for everything from organizing my agent submissions, to keeping track of my page/word count (both on a daily/weekly basis and overall count), to chapter outlines, to worldbuilding. Here is a nifty table I used to develop some of the backstory in Tankborn:

    Loka Population

    So, yes, I have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft Word. And yes, I often rant and rave about it to my poor beleaguered husband. But please, don’t make me work without it. 🙂

  • RTW – My Favorite Book I Had to Read for School

    Today YA Highway‘s blog prompt for Road Trip Wednesday is What’s your favorite book you had to read for a class? First of all, school of any kind was a mighty long time ago for me. We did have books back then. Yes, they were paper bound between covers, not on papyrus scrolls. But it’s a little hard for me to remember which books I read for pleasure, and which ones I might have been assigned to read.

    But I did happen to read quite a wide range of books in 10th grade. We had the best English teacher ever, Mrs. Luckensmeyer. She was definitely a factor in me becoming a writer. One of our weekly assignments was to fill two pages in our composition books (front and back of the two pages), which really inspired my creativity.

    I also loved how she had us do book reports. We were free to pick any book we liked from the school library. After reading it, we would hand it over to her in a one-on-one session. She would then flip through it and ask random questions about the book.

    Okay, this would probably be terrifying for those students who never actually read the book. You couldn’t fake one of Mrs. Luckensmeyer’s book reports, like you could if you did it in written format and referred to Cliff’s Notes. But I thought her book reports were great. (Did I mention I was kind of a teacher’s pet?)

    So I read some pretty interesting books. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, for instance. And the one that I think was my favorite of the ones I read in her class because it was just so darn weird.

    Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I remember it being a little horrifying (a guy wakes up transformed into a cockroach!), a little gross (the guy is injured and starts turning all gooey and pus-filled!), and a little (a lot) bizarre (who turns into a cockroach anyway?).

    Not the usual kind of book a 14-year-old reads. But at that point in my life, I was choosing books by their title. The title was cool, so I grabbed it off the shelf.

    I later read plenty of classics–Dracula and Frankenstein, most of Mark Twain, plenty of science fiction and fantasy. But Kafka’s Metamorphosis has stuck with me all these years. It still gives me a chill just thinking about that man-to-cockroach transformation.

    So how about you? What favorite books do you remember fromschool? Creepy, wonderful, heart-wrenching? Have you read them since, and do they hold up? Let me know in the comments.

  • My Father’s Daughter

    Years ago, my mom told me a story about my dad that was both funny and telling. Early in their marriage, my dad decided to paint the picket fence surrounding the house they lived in. The thing is, he didn’t just get out a can of paint and start painting. He had to figure out a better way. As my mother told it, he spent more time rigging up a contraption to hang the paint can around his neck for handy access than he did actually painting the fence.

    I am so my father’s daughter, luckily with some modifications. While I have that same compulsion to find that “better way” to do a task, I resist that urge when the straightforward way will do. But I can come up with thingamajigs with the best of them.

    For instance, I’ve been spending more hours than usual at my computer working on the developmental edit for Awakening, the sequel to Tankborn. I was ending up in a fair amount of pain by the end of the day. Not only was there some carpel tunnel type inflammation, the pressure on my wrist bone from my mouse pad and laptop led to quite a bit of soreness.

    So I put on my thinking cap (the one I inherited from my dad) and considered options for protecting my hands. I went digging through my fabric supply in the garage and came up with some black fake fur I’d used to create some stuffed animal or another. I started out by just cutting a couple rectangles, then folding them in half for extra padding. Resting my hands on those made a world of difference to my comfort.

    But I still had a few issues. How did I keep the rectangles from unfolding? How did I keep the pads on my wrists? Once they were on my wrists, how did I keep them from slipping too far down my arm?

    What you see here is what I came up with. I stitched the rectangles into squares. I added a piece of black elastic to hold the guards to my wrists. Then, to keep them from slipping down, I tied on a couple of hair bands. Hmm, I suppose I should have looked for hair bands in black to keep the same color scheme.

    This is how they look in action. They are dorky looking in the extreme, but since I had all the material on hand, they were free to make (and not too time consuming). Plus, they work just fine, at least to pad my wrist bone. As a protector against carpal tunnel syndrome, they suck, but that wasn’t their purpose.

    For that, I had to rearrange my work space. I use a laptop, and I could never get a very good wrist angle while typing on the keyboard. Not to mention with the screen being down at desk height, my neck was having issues with my head constantly tipping down to see the screen. So I did two things. One, I got an external keyboard with its keys laid out in a slightly more ergonomic way. It allowed me to a) have my forearms level with my wrist (essentially parallel to the floor) and b) have a comfortable angle between elbow to fingers as I type rather than straight on.

    The second thing I did is elevate my laptop. This allows me to look at the screen straight on rather than tipping my head down. I feel rather smug that I didn’t have to buy the rack it’s sitting on. It was tucked away in the garage (because we never throw anything away), just waiting for a brilliant idea to put it into use.

    What you can’t see in the pictures is that I have a drawer open on the mouse side, and a board on top of it to give my arm support when I’m mousing. All of these changes have made a big difference in my comfort as I make my way through my manuscript.

    Unfortunately, my cats tend to thwart my ergonomics when they lie in my lap and drape themselves across my arm. Casper here isn’t as much a problem as Tenka, who suspends half her 14-pound body across my left arm. Ouch.

     

    But I think my solutions are pretty cool. And I think my dad would be proud.