Good Tools

Exercise Your InkTank

Narrative Perspective
It’s often said that one good measure of a writer’s strength and ability is his or her handling of narrative perspective. Failures or breaks in point-of-view are problems common to the beginner; they’re also very noticeable because they disrupt the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. (When the perspective fails, we’re all suddenly very aware of the writer behind the writing, floundering.) As we develop as writers, we become more aware of the conventions. We learn by doing. And once we gain some fluency, it becomes less about screwing up and more about the ways in which we can make tools like point-of-view work even harder for us.

One of the most useful maneuvers a storyteller can master is the ability to offer the reader a look around a first person narration: No one in the office was talking to me. They couldn’t handle real fashion. Also, they were jealous little barn hens.

One of the most complex maneuvers in the storyteller’s arsenal is the use of free indirect discourse: Brie was wearing the black gown to the office again, despite the looks. Her grief costume, they called it. Could she help that the season’s lines were austere? Could she help that belted cell phones passed for accessories there? One day, they’d regret the taunting. They’d get down on their knees and beg her to reform them.

Dialogue
Good dialogue is a bit of paradox. When we say dialogue seems “real” what we really mean is that it’s an effective fraud. It’s free of the stink of artifice. If it were actually true to life, it would be wrought with backward sentence structures and littered with umm’s and err’s and ahh’s. When dialogue is informational, we know it’s fake—it’s advancing the writer’s agenda—and without some surrounding exposition or narration, dialogue can seem like a pair of disembodied voices in an empty white room. If dialogue doesn’t move the storytelling horizontally or vertically, it can feel clunky and out of place. And if we’re not invested deeply in the world of the story, dialogue can seem off or inaccurate or just plain wrong. A lot of folks think that writing good dialogue is about finding just the right thing to say. But maybe it’s really about timing and rhythm:

“I thought you weren’t talking to me today.”
“I’m not. I’m too embarrassed to be talking to you.”
“Well, I don’t know why you’d say that.”
“You know exactly why I’d say that.”
“Explain it to me.”
“You’d like that. It would give you a chance to feel justifiably hurt.”
“What do you mean?”
“Right now you’re just fake hurt. You’re the kind of hurt people do when they know they’re wrong. It’s a kind of trap.”


X+Y=Style
People tend to think of a writer’s style as his or her voice and there’s no question that voice is an identifying factor, but even writers who use a “transparent,” rather than “voicey,” kind of language have distinct and recognizable styles. A writer’s use of narrative perspective and treatment of dialogue can have a whole freaking lot to do with the overall feel of the writing. Developing your style of dealing with these elements can be much more important than an especially brilliant turn of phrase. Just by taking a quick look at how different people deal with the same basic scenario, we can see how personal style can emerge from these kinds of choices. Take one of the perspectives at the top and a chunk of dialogue from the bottom and write a scene. Change the language as much as you like.