Dialog Takes Two...

Writing is a solitary occupation.

It can also be a mutually interactive task, involving two or three people.

It is often both of these, at different times in the life of a work of fiction.

Dialog is one of the most powerful tools for moving a story forward. It can reveal the personalities of the author's characters. It can reveal the setting of the story. It can detail the ebb and flow of action and reaction, move and counter-move, thrust and parry. Done well, it can almost tell the story by itself.

So - you've written a story, or a scene from a story. The only thing missing is the speech of the two characters to put flesh on the bones of this plot. You sit solitary in your writing place, and you put speech into the mouths of these characters. This is a delicate process. Too much dialog, and you'll lose the reader's interest. Too little, and the story will only be half-told.

Finally, you're done. The dialog is polished and ready for the reader's gaze.

Or is it?

There's one sure-fire way to determine if this is in fact the case. Here the solitary, brow-furrowing act of writing dialog is turned into an interactive event between the author and one or two trusted confidants. These can be beta readers, critique partners, or just good and savvy friends.

Invite your partners to read the dialog with you, to speak it and see if it works. Does it sound natural? Is it stilted? Are the words appropriate for the time or the speakers? Does it flow, or just sit there?

It's a well-established principle that reading a story out loud can reveal things about the story that reading it to oneself will not. Hearing the words causes the brain to process the language in ways that differ from the processing of words seen by the eyes. Hearing dialog is a good way to reveal the quality of conversations in the story.

Thus, the solitary act of fitting words to the story can be changed into a communal activity if we invite others to participate in a sort of readers theater. What was done by one, can now be done by two or three, and make the object of all this attention better in the bargain.

So, to this, what do you say?

Reboot

Reboots are in fashion now.

We've seen a reboot of Star Trek. Conan got a remake. Star Wars is about to get a new vision courtesy of J J Abrams.

It's time this blog got rebooted as well.

Old content will remain on here for a bit longer, and then, well, reboot. I'll still be writing about writing, the practice, the business, and the context in which it fits.

There's too much going on in my life that doesn't contribute to the quality of that life. I'm in the process of pruning the tree to make the fruit that it does produce better, tastier, and more valuable. Together we'll see if that's what happens.

Step One

Last time, I wrote a fanciful account of how the mystery dog destroyed my data by chewing on the power cord of my computer. Fortunately, our cat hasn't learned to read, so that particular scenario isn't likely to happen.

The consequence of such an occurrence, however, is all too real. Data loss from any number of causes happens all the time. Because our data is truly the most valuable thing we have on our computers, it's worth protecting. And because it's of a different order than paper records, the protection method has to be appropriate to the task.

Protection of data can be thought of as an attempt to prevent corruption or deletion of the data. If the bits that make up my manuscript get scrambled because of, say, the power surge I mentioned earlier, the data is no longer in a useful form. It may be possible to retrieve parts of it, but as an entirety, it's not so useful anymore. If the medium which holds those bits of my manuscript data, gets damaged or destroyed, I'm in a far worse situation. My data, though made of bits and bytes, resides on some physical medium. Destroy the physical, and you've destroyed the virtual.

Let's address that second type of damage to my data first.

Too Long Away

OK, so I've been away longer, far longer, than expected. I really have no excuse. Well, no excuse except for the dog that chewed on my computer's power cable. That's particularly annoying, because I don't even have a dog.

Anyway, the dog chewed on the power cord to my laptop. The computer screen flashed and then went dark, even as the dog lit up like a 50-pound furry sparkler. I hadn't realized that my laptop drew that much current.

So, to make a long story short enough to be interesting, the computer was DOA. Doggy electrical trauma was not something it could have survived, I guess. The dog was singed around his muzzle and, oddly enough, his hind end, but otherwise all right. Well, whenever he got near a floor lamp, it did tend to get really bright, but otherwise, he was OK.

Convince Me

So - I have failed abysmally to meet my own goal of doing daily posts. Perhaps I should just admit defeat, and try to post something when I actually have something to say. Sounds like a good idea, right? That's the way we'll proceed from here then.

Anyway, I blogged elsewhere today about how we come to believe something. I was asking how we come to accept one proposition rather than another, and what role an authority figure may have in that process. I offer no answers to this question now. I was more interested in seeing if I could spark a discussion about the nature of this whole sequence of coming to believe something as true.

Discipline

I've missed posting anything for the past few days. This illustrates an important fact about writing for publication.

If you don't write, you can't publish. If you can't publish, then you may want to reconsider your choice of "writer" as a career.

Writing is no different than any other intentional activity in that it's a discipline. You have to do it every day. If you're not writing, you're not a writer.

So - more discipline going forward. It becomes a task, doesn't it? Like a job. Yep, that's pretty much the nature of a discipline.

This short reminder brought to you by a (self-imposed) task master.

Long Short Story

Once upon a time, there was a young man.

He wanted to be a bard. He was studying to be a wizard, though. He had been told by a person he thought wise that he was cut out to be a wizard. Wizards were respected and had power. Bards were enjoyed, so long as they told a good tale and sang a good song.

He wanted to be a bard especially because he was finding he wasn't a very good wizard. This put him in a quandary. If he finished his wizard studies, nobody would hire a bad wizard. He would have wasted all his time studying to be something he couldn't be.

If he stopped studying wizardry, everyone would know that he hadn't been meant to be a wizard right away. There would be some embarrassment, but there would be no wasted time.

Even as he studied to be a wizard, he wondered what he should do. Then the idea came to him.

He would try his hand at being a bard, during his wizard studies.

So, he read books about what bards needed to know. He contacted people who hired bards, and told them some of his stories. He sang his tales as well as he could, knowing what he knew.

It turned out he wasn't a very good bard either.

Some of the people he sang his tales to were curt and short with him. "Get away, kid. Don't call us, we'll call you!" they shouted. He knew that wouldn't happen.

Others, though, were very much different. One in particular actually took him aside and told him where he needed to work on his tales and his songs. It was very reassuring to have one of the famous persons who hired bards actually take time to help him.

Years passed. The young man had finally decided that it was time to stop studying to be a wizard. He met a wonderful girl and they wed. After that, they had a baby boy. He had some problems, but he outgrew them and became a very smart young man himself. And he and his wife had babies as well.

The urge to be a bard never left the young man. Now he was a much older man. His wife had always wanted to be a spinner of tales herself. She found a group of women who wanted to do the same, and they met once a month and learned from each other. Sooner or later, each of them would spin a yarn that would get noticed. They began to become well-known for their tales. And the old man was impressed.

He finally was asked to join the group of women, to help do some things that no one else wanted to do. It wasn't the kind of invitation he had imagined, but he was able to spend time with smart women who were good at telling tales. And something happened as he met with them month after month.

He found himself wanting to become a bard. Now, old bards aren't very much in demand. A fact like this had never stopped the old man. Things change, and this might change as well.

He remembered how the famous bard hirer had taken time to help him. He recalled what he had learned from the women as he had gotten to know them. And he realized that he still wanted to tell tales and sing songs to others, to take them to places other than where they were and help them see things they had never seen.

So he resolved to learn how to do this telling of tales and singing of songs as well as he could. He determined to be the best old man bard that he could be. And he found a way to tell tales and talk about telling tales and converse with other bards about tales and their telling. And he began to put his words together, and perhaps tell some tales and talk to the other bards. And so it goes.