This week: Nice and Quiet in the Library Edited by: Annette  
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QPdoll  offers a short story contest where you are challenged to write to a prompt with no dialogue or inner dialogue.
Stories, novels, newspaper articles, and more pieces of writing usually include three elements: Narration (what is there to see), action (what are the characters doing), and dialogue (what are they saying).
All three of these feel normal in a story. And they are. But it's possible to do without one of them and still have a great story. |
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Nice and Quiet in the Library
Silent storytelling can be very impactful. It is being done by many cultures and in many languages. Practice telling a story by leaving dialogue out right here on the site. "No Dialogue Contest-CLOSED" doesn't let you say or ask anything. Anything at all. Not even in your mind. Your story has to live in the narration and action only.
Writing, by nature, has to describe to the reader everything that they should see in the story. Some writing advice even tells you to have characters describe things to avoid passive voice info-dumping. At the same time, forcing you to stick to narration only will be a great exercise in concise writing.
We have some great examples in film. Some of you may know Gromit, Wallace's dog who does not bark or speak, but acts through his facial expressions. Some TV shows choose to have child actors without lines so that they can concentrate on their actions to tell the story. British filmmaker Andy Lambert chose to make a series of shorts "Writing in a World Without Dialogue - Show Don't Tell" in which he imposed three rules onto himself: no dialogue, no camera moves, and only one shot.
As you tell your story without dialogue or inner dialogue, you are making your audience work a little for their entertainment. However, you can do so without them feeling as if they are doing the work. Think of it like giving them two plus two. A fully told story with dialogue and everything there to read in plain sight would be like giving them four. Instead, you give them two and two. All the elements are there and they can easily assemble them. It will be up to you to place the two and two in a way that reading the story is entertaining, makes sense, and creates a complete picture.
What happens if you take a big red balloon into the library and pop it? |
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I received these replies to my last For Authors newsletter "The Spoken Word"
Beholden  wrote: I'm quite sure that many, even within WdC, would consider that I speak as though I'm the written word. Most of the time, I write the way other people speak. The way I speak is an odd combination of where I grew up, education and a passion for grammar. People say I'm pompous but that's only because they have a different mix of influences from mine. Writing dialogue is merely a matter of mimicking the way you can hear the character speak.
Thanks very much for including my story, Hornetz, among your Editor's Picks.
Beholden
Mimicking the way you can hear the character speak can work, but it can be hard to understand for readers that don't understand a certain dialect. Unless you only mean grammar and contractions. Those are free game.
Mary Ann MCPhedran  wrote: AN EXTRACT FROM MY BOOK Lighthouse.
the Palace pronounced the Pailis by the people who lived in the Scottish mining town. Tommy MCGee moved into one if the houses on Miner's Row in the Pailis.
The house belonged to the coal mining industry.
Tommy wogked in the mines, down the pit, under ground digging coal.
Another A POEM with Scottish voibe.
THE RAG MAN
The rag man comes down oor street
He blows a trumpet
no notes just a bleep
OOr Rose's dress looks sweet
playing houswives in the street
Gu I think it's seen its day
so to the rag man
I will give it away
Oh oor
Rose's looking oot the windie
Oh she's kicking up a shindie
I think I better run so far
So I ca eat my candy bar.
note - oor means our
windie -window
shindie- anger
Don't you think the moment you have to explain what a word means, it might be overdoing it? If you had such words in dialogue, it might make sense to the reader. If you write in dialect, you will have only the most invested readers go the distance with you. Casual readers who want to get absorbed into the plot will not want to read like in a text book, checking the footnotes.
Lilli  wrote: This is a wonderfully helpful newsletter for me and anyone that reads and digests it will truly benefit!
Thank you for your kind assessment of my newsletter.
Rhymer Reisen wrote: This is such a good newsletter! I’ve found myself torn lately between trying to get the dialogue and idea so perfect, I lose the characterizations. Your permissions here are appreciated. I recently entered a competition where dialogue tags other than “said” or “asked” resulted in subtracting points from my piece. This was very clever, very sharp!
Keeping your dialogue tags to "said" and "asked" is a good exercise to reign in excessive speech taggery. But I don't recommend it as a hard rule for longer short stories or novels. There should be a little flourish, a little individuality.
wdwilcox wrote: When judging The Dialogue 500 I've seen people changing the color of the words to indicate who is speaking; I've seen people just drop using quotation marks, or starting new paragraphs for each person speaking. Then I've got to decipher who said what. The idea of the contest is to practice writing dialogue, it doesn't mean you create a whole new way to write it and forget the rules of writing altogether.
This perfectly describes: You have to know how to break the rules to break them properly. In a "normal" story, speech tags are a necessity. In "The Dialogue 500" , writers are urged to do away with them and still make sense. Not much sense in just throwing basic grammar rules out with the bathwater.
hbk16 wrote: The dialogue enhances the vivacity and the credibility of a story. That is why it should be natural. The dialect might be used indeed and it enhances the credibility of the dialogue indeed. It is a technical issue for the authors because there is no academic reference for dialects. It is a big issue.
A big issue indeed.
Bikerider  wrote: Your June 11th For Authors newsletter is filled with good information. There is also non-English dialogue. There is a lot of confusion about how to handle the translation. Jeff Shaara has written extensively about WW II. When a German or Japanese character is speaking, Shaara doesn't bother with using their language, he writes the dialogue in English. He places a note at the beginning of a novel stating that he is confident that his readers are intelligent enough to know that a German General is speaking German and a Japanese soldier is speaking Japanese. It does make it easier to read his excellent historical novels.
I like Jeff Shaara. Now I might just go and find one of his novels. I think it would be OK if he inserted the occasional German or Japanese exclamation and then the translation right after it. I always like it when writers do that. But I also understand that just because I like that little extra color, not everyone would enjoy it. At the end of the book, you want to know what it is you read.
There was also another reply to my previous For Authors newsletter "Outline!"
oldgreywolf on wheels  wrote: An outline (from our school days) is a _tree_ mind map.
You may or may not find a _radial_ mind map to your liking.
The Brain Technologies has an excellent mind map for writers; however, it doesn't seem to work with LINUX. But if you're a macrosux user, it's available.
These are good tips. Thank you for sending them in.
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For Authors: August 04, 2021 Issue [#10906]
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