It always amazes me where I find lessons in writing. They're everywhere if you just pay attention. Today's lesson was about not taking the easy out when you're writing insults into your dialogue. What insults, you ask? You know, when your character calls someone a f**ker or a motherf**ker or even a sumbitch. That's the easy way out, the lazy way, some would say.
It was a conversation between my grandsons that put this thought into my head. Here's the conversation, a bit paraphrased as I can't remember what they were arguing about, only the last line that drove the lesson home.
"You're so stupid."
"Well, you don't know what you're talking about."
"Everyone knows."
"I don't"
"You're in second grade, if you don't know, you should go back to pre-school." This from the one in kindergarten.
And yeah, the coffee flew all over the front of my shirt. It was just the perfect insult, coming from the younger brother, that left the older one totally speechless. Which made me think, why don't writers try for this sort of comeback more often. Why do we think that the shock of a curse word is more effective than a simple, well-aimed insult?
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind a little cursing in a story, if it fits the character, but some writers tend to over-do the foul-mouthed characters. Yes, foul language is a part of everyday life, but do we need to go that route in our writing? Let's face it, most of the dialogue we write isn't the way real people talk. It would drive readers mad if you wrote the way people really speak with all their little ticks, like adding "ain't it" at the end of every sentence. That's in my region, I expect you've got others like it in your area.
So, the floor is open. What writing lessons have you learned lately? How do you stand on the use of "dirty" language in a story? Or, what tricks do you use to make your dialogue come to life? We're open to any and all writing topics today.
7 comments:
Good question.
I try to only use foul language if a particular situation calls for it. Like if the characters are in a nasty fight/argument.
Otherwise, I dip into the vast reportoire of insults/comebacks I've developed over the past couple of years while participating in the chat rooms (where swear words are strictly verbotten).
If that doesn't work, I simply ask myself what would I realistically say to someone in this particular situation.
One lesson I'm starting to learn, is how to properly gap my stories. In other words, not make them look like a blog post. I found with all of my writing, I was making breaks whenever I moved on to another scene, which I found was really breaking up the flow of the story.
I have tendency to use a lot of swear words when I'm writing then I have to go back and cull them out. Not so much F**k but hells and damns tend to trip off my fingertips with the greatest of ease.
I don't understand about your breaks, G. when you switch scenes you need a break to a new paragraph. Sounds like you're having trouble with transitions from one scene to the next.
Possibly.
But I think I have problems with transitioning within a particular scene as well.
Most of what I write for stories, I have a tendency to make too many breaks in just one scene.
I'm not sure if I'm still making sense or not. A good example would be the post I just left. If the first three paragraphs were just one scene, wouldn't it make sense to put them together?
That would depend on what you want to achive with your scene. If you want to create suspense or tension you would just keep going with no breaks leaving the reader a bit breathless. If you want to relieve the tension in the scene a paragraph break could do that.
For me, I just write the story then when I edit, I either pull paragraphs together or make a break as the story needs. Much easier to do when you're done writing the first draft because at that point you have a better idea of what you want the story to do.
Makes sense.
Seems like I've been doing bass-ackwards for the past four years or so.
Thanks for the tip.
If I write a story set during the pulp era up on through the fifties, I keep as "clean" as Hammett, Chandler or Ross Macdonald would have. It's a fun challenge every once in a while, to write around things, as the screenwriters had to do to circumvent the Hays Code.
I love the old movies where they talked around what they really wanted to say. It says a lot for the writers that they could get so much innuendo past the "morality patrol" and still get their point across.
I wrote a whole series of stories using that type of writing but finding a home for them in the mystery world is almost impossible, especially since they were humorous. But I had a great time writing them.
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