Q&A: Dialogue, Experimenting during Revision, and Stopping (or Not Stopping) to Fix Pace.
The pick of the Itch of Writing Ask Me Anything Chats
Almost every week, usually on a Wednesday, Itch of Writing supporters and I have an Ask Me Anything Chat. The way it works is that I start a chat thread some days earlier, and it’s open for all supporters to drop their questions in whenever they want. Then at the appointed hour, I get stuck in and answer as many as I can in the time, and anyone who’s around is welcome to drop in, and join in the conversation.
This is the third of an occasional series which, with supporters’ permission, collect and lightly edit some of the most generally useful questions and answers to be shared more widely. (I always redact any exact details of individual projects).
If you’d like to be part of our weekly Q&A, just head over to the Itch of Writing Subscribe page, and become a supporter or a super-supporter. You’ll not only be able to join in and gain other benefits, you’ll have the power to start a chat of your own whenever you like!
Q: Beginner novelist here. I’m having enough fun writing every day to wish I’d started at 33 rather than 53. My question is this: I’m about halfway through the story. I know that pacing will need a lot of work. Should I finish the first draft entirely before editing anything substantial?
Emma: Hooray for fun! SO important to hang on to. I think writers vary (do I ever not say that?) - some will go back and fix it now, figuring out how to do this pacing thing a bit better, before they carry on with that new knowledge.
Others will not want to interrupt their like-a-reader forward movement through the story and will carry on for now, and then be able to take an overview of the whole first draft and story, and sort out pacing from that broader perspective.
You may have realised in reading those two which feels right to you.
But there is a hybrid approach, which suits me, so it could be worth a try. You could pause, read through what you’ve got, and make problem-finding notes to bring your sense of what it needs into sharper focus, but not actually do the close-up problem-solving work. After that, you go back to the place you paused, and write forwards from there as if you had solved the problems behind you... Worth a try?
Original Poster: I like the hybrid. I think it will also satisfy the itch without being too disruptive.
Emma: Yes, that’s why I evolved the hybrid version to deal with all sorts of problems that I was feeling as I read, but it would take a lot of fixing: a not-built-right character, say. If you have a live, urgent sense of something that’s not working, then it’s good creative-process-sense to work with that while it is live, rather than just making a note ‘Character X is very bland’ and going back to where you were for the next few weeks. On the other hand, it’s also good creative-process-sense to keep moving forwards... Good luck!
Q: Thinking a lot about dialogue these days but not sure if I’m thinking about it the right way. Podcasts and books have me breaking it down into units of contemplation, decision and reaction. Then feels like I’m losing the flow and rhythm of the exchange, bogged down in analysis and emotional calculus.
So…when you’re writing and editing dialogue, what are you listening for? Things that make you go ‘Oh no, this isn’t working’ or ‘Well that’s a nice piece of dialogue’.
Emma - that sounds as if it could be useful, or it could be very prescriptive, and, as you say, mean you lose touch with your innate sense of how people actually talk to each other...
FWIW, I usually know where I need the dialogue to end up, in terms of action (broadly interpreted: decisions and revelations, not necessarily heading out to battle). I just think of it all as action - someone says something because they have a want/need, and someone else reacts.
Another super-fruitful way to think of dialogue, if you want to get down and detailed with it, is as the actors do. In my drama days it was called ‘intentions’, but now they call it ‘actioning’, which is much better.
Essentially, every piece of dialogue exists because the character is trying to make something happen, consciously or unconsciously - and the task is to assign a verb (must be a verb) to it. So, ‘to persuade’, ‘to annoy’, ‘to seduce’. And, of course, the hearer has some kind of reaction to that, which you label with another verb: ‘to override’, ‘to ignore’, ‘to extract [money]’...
But in terms of what I’m listening for - chiefly that it sounds natural, including breaks, half-sentences, Tell-y things, hesitations... That’s including historical voice, where readers’ perceptions are rather different: they want it to sound ‘foreign’ in once sense, but not clunky.
But, also, that it’s not just chat-by-the-yard. I can write three pages of two people chatting while one of them makes the coffee, and it can sound very naturalistic, but be completely pointless from the storytelling point of view. Having said that, as a playwright friend of mine said, people much of the time are not saying what they actually mean. It can be trivial - A child says ‘When’s supper?’ and the parent says, ‘The biscuits are in the tin’...
And of course there's the whole subtext thing. Chekhov - one of the great short fictioneers, of course, as well as one of the great playwrights - said that people don’t have fights and heartbreaks and seductions and arguments, they have dinner. It’s just that all the other things go on underneath ... That’s what makes great dialogue, I think: the sense that it’s about a whole lot more than just what it’s apparently about.
Q: When you’re revising a draft, what is the balance for you between redrafting/experimenting with text, and thinking about plot, character etc in the abstract? Does one come before the other, or do they move forward together? This is a kind of follow up question from your recent excellent feedback session on the start of my novel (an investment I would recommend to all fellow supporters) but I think we’d all be interested in how this works in your own case.
Emma: In my case, a hard-copy read-through generates
a) lots and lots and lots of inline scribbles with everything from typos and ‘right idea wrong words’ to notes about saggy middles and missing motivations and
b) a ‘Bits’ list of things which I know need doing or worries that have arisen, but which are not prompted by a specific bit of text. I basically work as briskly forwards through that hard copy, dealing with each thing in order, and then the Bits list.
Obviously when I get to a note which is about big carpentry, I’ll focus on that, wherever it takes me. Which does mean I’m sometimes I’m fixing typos and sorting out clunky phrases in sections which are going to move or be cut. But I’m a bear of very little brain, and get in a muddle about who knows what about who, if I don't do it in the same order as the reader will read it.
If there’s something that really can’t be fixed there and then - maybe something depending on research I can’t do from my desk - then I add it to a new Bits list, or just pull out the page that note is on, and leave it lying around to remind me.
Once I’ve dealt with absolutely everything, I read the whole thing through on screen, ironing out everything else I come across, including the slips you always introduce while editing. I use Track Changes, so I can always review my decisions, usually in the mode where you don’t see the changes, just a line down the side of the screen. That way it all looks smooth, but actually isn’t: at any moment I can click and review exactly what I’ve done.
Then when my mind thinks it’s all done, I print it out, read it over ‘like a reader’, and discover what I didn’t see last time round... Probably with most projects I’ll do three or four iterations of that before anyone else will see it.
Original Poster: Thanks Emma that’s very clear and helpful and I can see that hanging on to a sense of the order of things in the current draft is really important.
Another Participant: This really resonates for me too. If a problem is minor and doesn’t stop me writing on (e.g. clunky wording, dialogue needs polishing, research into someone's job) then I make a note in the text or my Notes doc and keep going - swatting aside the pesky procrastination pixie. However if solving a problem is key to moving on productively & fruitfully (e.g. what is really motivating a character) then I stop and do some more thinking/workshopping about this character. In the interests of honesty it can sometimes take me a while (and no little bravery) to realise which is which and the course of action I need to take!
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