(Find more Killer Writers conversations here.)

“Writing has changed a great deal since you started.”

 “I wrote my first eight books on a 1958 manual, portable Olympia—solid steel. I started out in the newspaper business in the 70s, tapping away on a typewriter. We had copy paper and carbon paper. We had paste pots with a little brush stuck down the middle—cut and paste. It’s all different.”

“There’s something to be said for that tactile experience.”

“When I was doing magazine stories, I’d have pages all over the floor of my apartment living room, and I’d be on my hands and knees trying to figure out where everything went. To this day, when I’m working on a book, I have chapters laid out on the floor because I’m trying to find if I’ve duplicated something or if I should move something. I still print and edit. I print it out every day. I just finished yesterday hand-editing the draft that I’m doing. For some reason, I can’t really edit on the computer. I have to hold the manuscript in my hands and duplicate the reading experience. I see things when I’m reading the manuscript that I don’t see on the screen, including typos. I think it was on Facebook, a young writer was asking the other day, ‘What are you supposed to do, print out the whole book? And then you have this giant stack of pages?’ And I was like, ‘Well, you kind of do it chapter by chapter.’ I felt like I was from another era.”

“Or another planet. You started as a newspaperman?”

“Yeah, I was doing paid summer internships in Southern California for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook chain, covering city council meetings when I was 19. I’ve just always been a writer. I’ve been a writer in lots of different formats—magazines, television sitcoms, screenplays—and my ultimate goal was books. It took me a long time to work my way to getting my first novel published.”

“And it did well, your first novel.”

“Yeah, it did. Not as well as Hoagy did, but my first novel was actually a coming-of-age novel called Kiddo. It got a rave review in the Sunday Times Book Review. I got my own page with my picture and the whole thing, but I didn’t marry a movie star, and I didn’t become a millionaire. My first murder mystery, The Man Who Died Laughing, was based on an experience I had. One of the things I did along the way was ghostwrite a memoir of a real-life murder in the late 70s that took place in New York. It was a major tabloid murder. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember this, but it was Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“He allegedly killed her in Room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel, knifed her in the bathroom. It was her mother’s story. I learned a lot from that experience. That’s how I got the idea of a young novelist who had achieved great success, married a movie star, and then got writer’s block, fell on his ass, snorted everything away—his marriage, his career—and as a last-ditch fallback, his agent talked him into ghostwriting a memoir of a famous comic from the 1950s. It was called The Man Who Died Laughing, and it was nominated for an Anthony Award.”

“That was your first mystery.”

“Yep. My editor, Kate Miciak, called me up, and I said, ‘What’s an Anthony Award?’ And she said, ‘It’s awarded every year at Bouchercon,’ and I said, ‘What’s Bouchercon?’ I didn’t know anything. I wasn’t part of the mystery community at all. It didn’t win, but my third one, The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald, did win an Edgar Award and an American Mystery Award. At that point in my career—this was the late 80s—I would sit down every day, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was doing. I really didn’t. After I won the Edgar, I realized that I actually did know what I was doing. I just didn’t realize it.”

Check out David Handler’s The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home Again here:

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“Let me ask you a couple of questions, then, about knowing what you’re doing. A lot of our readers are writers-to-be, and they want to avoid plot dumping—which you don’t do. You’ve got snappy dialogue moving the story forward. When you first sit down to write a scene, do you start with what needs to be said, or with who’s saying it?”

“It varies from book to book. I try not to crowd too much. I’ll try to keep the pacing going, and whatever will keep that going and move the story along.”

“You carry a lot of the story in the dialogue.”

“I do. I write pretty good descriptions. My prose is good, particularly in the Hoagy series, but my strength has always been dialogue. That’s why I got paid a lot of money to write TV—because I wrote good comic dialogue. But in a weird sort of way, I feel like a bit of an impostor as a mystery writer, because I don’t really consider myself a crime writer. I consider myself a writer of character fiction. I create interesting, smart characters—people I’d want to know more about, or people who have a lot of secrets. I create this ensemble. It’s a story about these people, and somebody ends up dying. I don’t start with the murder. I start with the characters.”

“You start with ensemble first.”

“That’s the most important thing for me—coming up with my ensemble of characters. What is going to happen? I don’t quite know how I’m going to get there, but I have a basic thumbnail idea. I know pretty much who’s going to die and why and who did it, but the fun part is creating all of the different characters and their interlocking relationships, interlocking pasts, their motives—and making them all plausible.”

“In your dialogue, there’s a lot of emotional subtext. How do you say what needs to be said between the lines without beating the reader over the head?”

“I do a lot of trimming. I just try to be as low-key about that sort of thing as possible. When I first started out, I used to try a lot harder to be funny. I was coming out of TV, where you were used to doing five jokes to a page. My dialogue now tends to be a little more reflective.”

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“And you accomplish multiple things at once.”

“You have to. One of the things you have to learn how to do is to accomplish more than one thing with your dialogue and your description. You’ve got to get heart in there, in addition to humor and information. If you’re not moving the story forward, then the scene has no purpose.”

“And you use yours to plant clues, give misdirection, suspicion.”

“Without hitting people over the head. I worked with some amazing people when I was doing movies. I wrote two projects with William Goldman, and one of the things he taught me is that if you’re not moving the story forward in each scene, then the scene has no purpose.”

“Even the funny scenes?”

“We used to get into arguments. Remember L.A. Confidential? One of the most famous scenes is the Lana Turner scene. Kevin Spacey and Guy Pearce are at Formosa Café, and Pearce thinks the woman is a hooker pretending to be Lana Turner. Turns out she’s really Lana Turner. She throws a drink in his face. Hilarious. Bill said that scene should have been cut because it didn’t move the story forward. And I said, ‘But everybody loves that scene!’ He didn’t care. He was a purist.”

“Something that struck me in The Man Who Swore He’d Never Go Home Again is how distinct your characters’ voices are.”

“I make notes about each character before I start writing the book.”

“You don’t even need dialogue attributes. The voices are that clear.”

“It’s really important to write good characters. That’s what I try to focus on—making them individual.”

“And you make them sympathetic—even the murderer.”

“Yeah, I don’t write monsters. I think we’re weak and greedy and want things we can’t have, or think we should have, or carry a grudge. I try to make the murder an outgrowth of a character’s flaws and weaknesses. Over the drafts, I work on making them as fleshed out as possible.”

“This is book sixteen in the Hoagy series. What was different this time?”

“I went all the way back to the beginning—before the before, in a way. When Hoagy walks into the Blue Mill Restaurant in Greenwich Village and sees Merilee. They lock eyes, and their lives change. Lulu the basset hound isn’t even in the picture yet. Merilee’s about to pick her up in a few days.”

“So even after all these books, you’re still discovering new ground.”

“I got to explore Hoagy’s childhood. We knew almost nothing about it before. His family had operated a brass mill in Connecticut for five generations. But we didn’t know why he and his father hadn’t spoken since high school. I also brought in his childhood friend and high school sweetheart, Maggie McKenna. She calls to tell him the town librarian—who really saw his gift early on—has died. That librarian was a big figure in his life.”

“Sometimes writers turn dialogue into soliloquies. How do you know when to divide it up?”

“I’ve written like 34 books. At this point, it’s instinct. I just know when something needs to be broken up—or when we don’t even need it.”

“Do you ever break the William Goldman rule and keep a line just because you love it?”

“Yeah. I’ve got running gags and Lulu things I can’t resist. But I’ve learned to pare them down. A little bit goes a long way. That took me a long time to learn.”

_____________________________

David Handler is the Edgar Award-winning author of several bestselling mystery series. He began his career as a New York City reporter. In 1988, he published The Man Who Died Laughing, the first of his long-running series starring ghostwriter Stuart Hoag and his faithful basset hound Lulu. http://davidhandlerbooks.com/

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(The 7 Rules for Picking Names for Fictional Characters.)

Ravenna has a suggestion: “May the snow cover your sins.”

I stop in my tracks, extend both hands toward her, smile, and nod emphatically. “YES!”

That’s exactly what they say. In this culture, there will be blood. There will be a trail of dead bodies. Ravenna’s idea is that the people are saying to one another, “May you get away with murder. May the kinsfolk of those you slay not come after you.”

A broad-shouldered man cloaked in furs, a scar crossing his face from hairline to jaw, turns at the ramp of his longboat and squints back through the snow and the wind that knifes across the fjord, whipping his beard into black flame. “Little brother!” he roars: “May the snow cover your sins!”

A younger version of the first man holds up an axe. “May it pile deep over yours!”

The students work, week by week, on the geography of their fantasy worlds . . . the peoples and creatures, the history, politics, economics, language, cosmology, religions, folk sayings and superstitions, the fine arts. Students decide that the artistic expression of the desert-dwelling Toogs is to stamp, all in unison, with their broad, flat feet in elaborate rhythms on the sand, hundreds of Toogs together in the percussive music of their people . . .

And then they write, giving their ideas embodiment in stories—that is the goal.

Another day, a student is working on a cover letter for a submission. He reads, “In this scintillating and suspenseful story, . . .”

Gently, I stop him there. “No, wait a second,” I say. “Don’t call your work scintillating and suspenseful. Let the editor be the judge of that.”

This is not the stuff of the typical classroom. In my course, students are asked to write a scene in which the protagonist and the villain are fighting hand-to-hand atop a moving train. In another of my classes, we use a roomful of vintage, manual typewriters to practice concentration and deep focus, away from the beeping handheld screens, the Internet’s torrent. Always, we address practical concerns faced daily by working fictioneers.

The students have come to our school for the performing arts to learn from professionals in the field. In our department, Writing and Publishing, students want to learn from teachers who regularly do those things. We’re able to teach what we do in our real lives.

An old, cynical adage says, “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.” I would correct that to say, “Those who can should also teach,” because we need a next generation of those who can.

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This assignment—to write the piece you’re reading—was hard. It led me to a self-evaluation. Am I qualified to teach these things? Do I know what I’m talking about?

Well, I’ve been selling my stories and novels to traditional markets for a quarter-century. I’m not a household name, for sure. There’s no danger of being swarmed by screaming fans wanting autographs, or having to elude paparazzi. But when I did the math, I realized that, between first publications, reprints, audiobooks, e-books, libraries, book clubs, and the passage of time, some part of even my modest oeuvre has reached many thousands of readers. And that’s something—that’s miraculous and humbling.

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Imagine it: a vast stadium with an uncountable crowd in the stands (if all those readers over time could be in one place), and you’re on the stage front and center—every pair of eyes in those stands has read your words, enjoying the gardens you’ve planted.

“But that’s you,” you say.

Fair enough. First of all, maybe you’re a lot farther along in your career than I am, and you’ve already stopped reading this essay. But maybe you’re just starting out. Maybe you’re still dreaming, still finishing that first project. Consider: We all start out having published nothing. And we all have the undiscovered road ahead of us, a keyboard under our fingers or a pen in our hands. Does success take time? Yes, usually. Does success depend on numbers? No—not in my experience.

You know what means more to me than numbers? Here’s one thing: the fact that I became a frequently-published writer in Cricket, a magazine my mom started getting for me from its first issue. I met Marianne Carus, the publication’s founder, who gave me my first break as a writer. I met other Cricket editors; I became lifelong friends with some. One in particular taught me to see what’s actually on the page, not what I thought was there. As a writer, I got to a point where I was working with these editors, sharing their vision, helping to bring good stories to young readers around the world. That means more to me than numbers.

For each one of my published books so far, I’ve heard from a great many fans I don’t know, who aren’t obligated to like my writing. New messages trickle in, bringing me great encouragement. A few such readers have told me, “This is my favorite book of all time”—not just their favorite of my books, but of all the books they’ve read. That’s worth more to me than numbers.

And the thing worth most to me, along with living my dream of making books and stories, is getting to pass on that love to my students and helping them with their craft. They’re all learning, in one way or another. Now and then, one of them reads an original work aloud, and it resounds. The rest of us sit in awed admiration.

In our classes, we hone the tools of fiction writing. We work on natural dialogue, sensory description, vivid action, purposeful language . . . symbol and flashback. Foreshadowing. We work on trimming the excess. We approach a published story like mechanics, looking under the hood to examine how and why it works. I tell them to go through life as collectors, with a notebook handy, because some of the best stuff in stories is stuff you can’t make up. It’s what you hear in the bus station, in the theater line, at church, at a yard sale. We work on writing not just what we know, but on writing what we want to know, what we’re passionate about, what we love. We often read our work aloud to one another, not because it’s an assigned task, but because it’s what we want to do. We write because we want to wow the audience—we yearn for those laughs and gasps of surprise . . . and best of all, those tears when a moment is not necessarily sad, or not only sad, but when it has wings—when it’s beautiful.

Long ago (yet not so long), as a high-schooler myself, I heard the writer Paul Darcy Boles describe writers in this way: “We are all storytellers, sitting around the cave of the world.” I already knew then that I wanted to rise and take my place before the dancing fire. Now new storytellers rise and join me, our shadows huge and dark on the cave wall. New and old storytellers, we raise our voices in turns, bringing forth tales only we can tell.

Check out Frederic S. Durbin’s The Country Under Heaven here:

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(Using Internal Dialogue to Reveal Character.)

That’s not to disparage witty banter between fictional friends and family members, of course—the more WB the better, I always say—but there is something special about two strangers gently and flirtatiously goading each other into mutual smiles, and then mutual feels. It’s one of the things that makes us readers smile goofily at the page, after all.

But how do you write it? Do you have to be a naturally funny person to get it right? Read on for a few quick tips on verbal sparring that could make your next rom-com zing.

1. The tease

I think of teasing as the cornerstone of witty banter. Perhaps the heroine is stick-shift challenged as in my new release Worst in Show or the hero eats his sandwich with a knife and fork like in my debut Love at First Spite, both of which are situations that lend themselves well to a light jab. Find those spots and go for it. Think about what you’d tease your sibling or your friend about (or perhaps there is something your younger self did that you now laugh about) and use those situations to your advantage.

There is a caveat here, however. Whether your love interests already know each other or have just met, whether they are friends or enemies, on some level they must like each other for the tease to land as witty banter. They might not know they like each other just yet, but the underlying feeling still needs to be good-natured. Without that, a tease can quickly sound rude, lose all playfulness, and create a power imbalance. A good way to ensure this doesn’t happen is to also include…

2. Self-deprecating digs

No one likes a person who can only dish it out. One of the main functions of witty banter is to build a quick connection and familiarity between the lovers on the page. After all, as authors we only have so many chapters to work with. 

Characters (like people IRL) who can joke about their own shortcomings are more likely to be perceived as relatable, humble, and friendly, and consequently, that primes us to interpret their teasing as benign. It also adds another quintessential ingredient to the relationship—vulnerability. So why not let your MC crack a joke about her terrible cooking (who doesn’t remember Bridget Jones and the blue soup?), let her love interest agree with a teasing remark, and then build on that, perhaps with another ingredient of witty banter, namely…

3. Puns

My rom-coms tend to be on the more light-hearted side of the angst spectrum, so while I know they’re not for everyone, I love me a cheesy pun. Case in point, Leo in Worst in Show makes liberal use of them as his online alter ego, engaging Cora in a riddle battle that speaks to her childhood nostalgia and thus sets her at ease. Since witty banter adds an aspect of cleverness to the characters, puns are also a great way to show off their quick thinking and situational awareness.

Now, early in a relationship, innocent word puns might feel most natural, but as the romance arc progresses, might I suggest its more risqué cousin, the double entendre? Perfect for upping the flirting game, witty banter with double entendres lets the characters entertain the possibility of moving beyond friendship and tests the romance waters by how their sparring partner reacts. Cue light blushing and meaningful gazes. They might even extend the repartee through intentional misunderstandings (is she talking about cucumbers or cucumbers?) or, my favorite…

4. Surprising honesty

Characters engaged in witty banter must be prepared for anything, but some of the best dialogue comes from one character responding in an unexpected way. Admitting faults, feelings, and/or desires in response to, say, teasing about mismatched socks will take the conversation in new directions that keep both the characters and the readers guessing. Honest communication is energizing, sexy, and inviting—great primers for witty banter.

So why not mix and match? Let your hero and heroine tease a little, twist some words, make a suggestive pun, then bam—truth bomb! Not only will it keep the dialogue fresh, but it infuses the relationship with vitality and forward motion. Because in the end, what we really want is for the two to get to know each other better and to find out how they fit together, and you can’t do that without honesty!

5. Speed

My final tip is more about the craft of writing banter that flows than about its contents. Witty banter runs like water. It’s quick, it’s snappy, and it doesn’t contain excessive information. For me, that means I scrap most dialogue tags. No “he said” “she said.” We typically know who is talking anyway, and if needed, an action beat does the trick—a sassy tilt of the chin, a raised eyebrow, or maybe a suppressed smile to avoid letting your rival know you’re melting a little at his wordplay.

I also highly recommend scrapping first names in dialogue, and never more so than in the banter-y kind. If only two people are conversing, their words (and, if needed, an action beat) should make clear who is talking, and if you listen to conversations around you, most people do not use first names when talking to their friends and partners. It just doesn’t sound natural.

Which brings me to my concluding recommendation. If you want to write witty banter that readers will love, read your dialogue out loud to yourself. It should be concise, roll off your tongue, and make you smile. Bonus points if you read it to someone else and it makes them smile. That’s when you know you’ve really done it—you’ve nailed your witty banter.

No pun intended. 

Check out Anna E. Collins’ Worst in Show here:

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(Using Internal Dialogue to Reveal Character.)

I recall taking a writer’s workshop in which we were taught to consider what a character’s likes and dislikes might be—what they might like to eat and wear, their hobbies, their activities, and even to make a list of these likes and dislikes. While I don’t typically write all this out, I become quickly familiar with my characters’ likes and dislikes as I spend more time writing about them and writing their dialogue. As they interact with other characters, the contrast between these voices and the interplay and dynamics between them also help me to define their individual personalities even more clearly.

As a new writer, who has also been a psychotherapist for more than 25 years, one of the most challenging things to learn is that one needs to express the character’s inner voice outwardly. They can’t just be thinking and thinking some more. No one’s interested in that. It’s like watching a movie, there needs to be action, and that action needs to express who each character is. The action may be quiet or loud, small or expansive, but it needs to exist on the page to keep the reader engaged in the narrative.

Developing a character’s voice is akin to an artist’s first sketches of each subject in their painting—first they draw and paint with broad strokes, later developing the sketches with paint in much greater detail as they continue to progress with the painting and spend time with their subjects. For me, I definitely do not have each character all worked out in the beginning of the story, but I do have a strong sense of each of them which then becomes more developed over the course of the story. That’s where a fair amount of editing takes place, not just in the story itself, but in more clearly defining who the characters are. 

For example, in Klara’s Truth, Klara’s cousin, Hanna, is a character I went back to many times. While she is quite suspicious of Klara’s motives upon initially meeting her in my final story version, this was not the case at first. While it felt like Hanna’s heightened level of suspicion of Klara made sense for the tension and suspense of the story early on, it later became more important for the characters and the story for them to get along.

Check out Susan Weissbach Friedman’s Klara’s Truth here:

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The character I spent the most time developing was Klara, the protagonist. I knew she had a lot of potential inner depth, but that she would start out with a strong lack of awareness about herself and others, possessing a great emotional void due to her lack of nurturing relationships in her life up until that point. Once she meets her Aunt Rachel, her late father’s sister, who is immediately sincere, warm, and loving with her, she slowly begins to thaw. This thawing happens in steps which together multiply Klara’s willingness to even consider being open. 

As Hanna slowly allows her guard to come down, spending more time with Klara and even warming to her, that’s another step forward for Klara. Discovering her father’s deep love for her before his death when she was only six years old is another important step in Klara’s process of emotionally unfreezing while beginning to connect and trust others. These steps then prepare her for a possible romantic relationship with Filip which she flip-flops over several times, having tremendous difficulty making this type of consistent emotional commitment.

I knew I wanted Aunt Rachel’s character to be maternal and loving toward Klara—the mother she never had, and I knew I wanted Filip’s character to be patient and caring, while still setting appropriate limits of what he was willing to tolerate in Klara’s hot and cold behavior. I was also cognizant of making most of the characters in Klara’s early life disconnected and aloof, like her mother and grandfather. Although, I did want her to have an experience with a loving adult, her father, even though it was only for a short time, which she could later remember.

Writing this brings more acute awareness to me about just how intertwined my characters’ voices and the story are. For me, each moves the other forward. I did not start out with an idea about exactly how this story would evolve or end, and I did not begin with a concept of exactly which qualities each character would or wouldn’t have. As the book progressed, I found that each of the characters’ voices became fuller and more varied, less two-dimensional and more three-dimensional. 

While Klara is the clearest example of this evolution, I believe that each character possesses both strengths and weaknesses, some possess more strengths while others possess more weaknesses, but it’s not simply one way. I think this more accurately reflects real life. While this can make things more confusing for all of us, it also makes them much more interesting.

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(50 Reasons for Your Characters to Be Stuck Together.)

The romance should start with a strong emotion—attraction, desire, or even dislike. That, along with a villain with a strongly motivated and intelligent plan, will get the ball rolling. The fact that the hero and heroine need each other to solve the mystery is what will drive the story as they get to know each other. At each stage in the chase, the hero and heroine get closer to each other, they learn about each other, and discover how to leverage the other’s strengths to stop the bag guy. They start with affection which will grow into love and happily ever after in a stand-alone book. (Or at least happily for now.)

In a series that features the same two main characters, like Kit and Sam in my San Diego series, the end of each book needs to see them growing closer. They hold each other after a near-death showdown with the villain. They share their first kiss or a first date. They meet each other’s parents. Their commitment to the other person and to the growth of the relationship is progressed with every story. When they’re finally together as a couple, they’ll need to learn new things about each other in every book. They’ll need to lean on each other in different ways.

They need to grow individually and as a couple.

Romantic tension itself is escalated through increasingly intimate touches, through dialogue and shared history (or secrets) and their growing yearning for each other. But in a romantic thriller, including the element of danger is critical and that danger needs to be personal to the MCs. The romantic tension is ratcheted up as the villain gets closer and closer. The MCs want to protect each other, to keep the other alive. Even if it means being willing to sacrifice themselves for the other.

The danger they face must be personal. The bad guy is either targeting one of our main characters or someone they care about. The risk of injury or death is high, but the stakes are even higher—too high for our moral-high-ground MCs to even consider walking away.

Now, the “someone they care about” doesn’t have to be a family member or even someone they know personally. In Cold Blooded Liar (San Diego #1), Kit cares about each teenage victim of a serial killer. Her sister had been the same age as the victims when she was murdered. This is personal for Kit.

That Sam cares as well draws Kit to him. He’s earnest and compassionate. He’s a good man who shares her values. That starts softening her heart, prepping her for romantic feelings. Then she learns that Sam has suffered loss as well. It’s a moment where they grow closer, where their stories begin to braid together.

This is an example of a quiet moment. Every thriller, romantic or not, needs the quiet moments. They can be pockets of time where the characters share secrets or where they share physical intimacy. (I’ll get to sex in a bit.) The quiet moments can be scenes where the characters’ families and/or friends get together for simple family dialogue, maybe some light-hearted humor. These moments are important because they give the reader a chance to breathe, to process all the murder and tension that’s come before.

And then you immediately hit the reader with something harsher and even more dangerous. The lull makes the ensuing danger even more tense because they’ve had a chance to relax and because now the hero and heroine have even more to lose.

Check out Karen Rose’s Cheater here:

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A few words about the villain. He or she needs to be real to the reader—a three-dimensional character the reader will fear and come to understand, even as they hate him/her and wish that they’ll be caught and punished. I want my readers to think, “Yes. If I were evil, that’s exactly what I’d do.”

The villain has to be smart, perhaps even smarter than either the hero or heroine alone. But together, the MCs have the arsenal to win. The villain has to be a few steps ahead of the MCs until towards the end of the book when the MCs gain ground—because they are working together, using what they’ve learned about each other. This is what makes a tight romantic thriller.

And as they work together, the MCs feel their bond strengthen. Again, as their relationship grows, they know they have even more to lose if the villain is successful. One or the other (or both) will be willing to do whatever it takes to stop the bad guy, even if that means self-sacrifice. And knowing that, knowing that their romantic partner might not survive the take-down of the villain ratchets up the romantic stakes. “I’ve just found you, I can’t lose you now.”

And now, the sex scene. You don’t have to have one, but I like to read them, and I like to write them. No two couples will have the same physical dynamic, so the sex will be different in each book. When they have it and where they have it will also be different in each book. 

Be careful with the when and where. If bullets are flying all around them, doing the deed seems frivolous and downright dangerous. Use one of those quiet moments to introduce sexual intimacy. Find a lull when they’re waiting for lab results or maybe even believe they’ve caught the bad guy, only to find later (after they’re done) that there’s a new victim. Then they must work even harder to take down the bad guy and, again, the stakes are higher as the bond is now deeper.

Ratcheting up the romantic tension and the suspense should happen in concert, like a dance. The stakes must be personal and the MCs must grow together to defeat the villain and make their corner of the world safe again. And at the end, they have their happily ever after.

The post How to Build Romantic Tension in a Romantic Thriller Scene appeared first on Writer's Digest.

When you take this online writing workshop you’ll discover how to write dialogue that advances your story’s plot. Plus, examine examples, formats, and tips for writing dialogue. Build your creative skills through weekly lectures, reading and writing assignments, and group critiques. You can also expect to read Write Great Fiction: Dialogue by Gloria Kempton. By the end of this workshop, you will have all the tools and resources you need to create convincing dialogue.

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Writer’s Digest Guide to Better Writing

Sometimes, the best way to improve your writing is to go back to basics, to revisit the things you should have been paying attention to in your high school English classes (we won’t tell!). Whether you’re writing freelance articles for publications, editing your novel draft, or trying to write more professional emails, the Writer’s Digest Guide to Better Writing offers more than 50 techniques, strategies, and grammar rules with practical, real-world examples to help improve your writing. Additionally, you’ll learn to tell the difference between the grammar rules that need to be followed for the sake of clarity, and those that can be broken or played with as you develop your writer’s voice.

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If you don’t know what that means, I don’t blame you. I don’t rightly know what it means, either. “Blink” has meant about what it means today—a quick fluttering of the eyelids—since at least the 1330s. Blinking is something that eyes do, not something that takes a direct object. If we dig deeply enough into the Oxford English Dictionary, we can find a transitive use for blink—“that dog never blinked a bird in her life”—which means to turn away from, or to avoid, which is roughly how it’s being used in the line of dialogue above. But that usage is from 1742, and it’s from a specifically sporting context. It is not from 1692.

(Katherine Howe: On the Golden Age of Piracy.)

Yet, if you recognize that phrase, it’s likely because you have read it in The Crucible. Arthur Miller used “blink” artificially, as a verb that takes a direct object, but more importantly he used it as a signifier, a performance of archaic speech that was not, itself, archaic. It is supposed to jar on our modern ears, to indicate to us that the text is operating in a different time. We accept Miller’s invention of “I cannot blink it” because we are willing to trust him, to participate in his representation of Salem in 1692. The phrase’s wrongness, or meaninglessness, might irritate a historical novelist (ahem), but it achieves its larger purpose: situating the reader within a remote period of time, without obscuring its intended meaning. Any writer working in a historical period not her own will confront a similar challenge—the balance of writing dialogue that seems historically accurate, while still being decipherable to the reader.

I say “seems” deliberately, because in some instances, words have older usages than we expect. But in many respects, the actual historical accuracy of a given piece of dialogue is irrelevant to the writer’s project. It’s no use to argue that “cool” has meant classy, fashionable, or attractive since 1918, for instance. If a writer were to deploy “cool” that way in dialogue in a story set in 1919, the word would fail. It would feel like an anachronism despite not being one. But the feeling is enough—a reader would trip over “cool” in 1919 and in so doing, be pushed out of the story. The writer would have sacrificed verisimilitude for accuracy.

One path toward writing effective historical dialogue is to read primary sources that contain historical dialogue. Abigail Williams, in the course of the public examination of Rebecca Nurse during the Salem panic, says “Yes, she beat me this morning.” Rebecca Nurse replies “I can say before my Eternal father I am innocent, and God will clear my innocency.” Spend enough time in the primary sources of Salem, and the speakers’ voices emerge clearly—historical, yes, but not with the stiff formality or fakeness of a Masterpiece Theater performance. People living in the past were people, after all. They used slang. They felt emotions. Rebecca Nurse comes across as more formal, more reflective and educated—“You do not know my heart,” she says at one point—because that is what she was, an older woman, long a member of the church, accustomed to a certain degree of authority. Abigail comes off as a child, enraged and disempowered, which is what she was, being 11 years old and bound out to service—“she beat me! She hurt and pinched me!” In most cases, spend enough time reading and studying the way people actually talked, and the dialogue will come naturally.

But not always. In some cases, the emotional impact of a way of speaking in the past won’t necessarily translate in the present, and for a writer of historical fiction, emotional impact is key. The best example I can think of which grapples successfully with this problem is Deadwood, the HBO series set in a Gold Rush mining camp in the 1870s.

On Deadwood, every other word seems to be “cocksucker.” It’s the lingua franca of this extralegal settlement of grifters and swindlers. People shout it at each other in rage, they mutter it in resentment. And because the word is so evocative, so visceral, even our relatively jaded—or perhaps inured—21^st Century ears never fully acclimate to it. Each use of “cocksucker” shocks us, reminding us that we are absorbing a story set in a lawless place, among desperate and often dangerous people. But it also feels period-appropriate. It’s not an insult we commonly wield today. We mutter enraged curses under our breath at people who cut us off in traffic, but most of us—I’m willing to bet—don’t mutter “cocksucker.” The word accomplishes what the show’s writers need it to do, by shocking our sensibilities while also rooting us in the story’s moment in time.

However, I wouldn’t call Deadwood’s use of “cocksucker” accurate exactly. More accurate, if we trust what the sources have to say, would be to have the characters say, “God damn” or “God damned.” That’s how this population of people would have actually talked, peppering their discourse with casual curses of a more explicitly Christian variety. But our sense of the impact of “God damn” has changed in the past 150 years. While we might still live in communities that caution against taking the Lord’s name in vain, for the most part “God damn” or even “goddam” is a curse that has lost its power to shock. It doesn’t stop us short anymore, not the way it would have in the 1870s. (Recently I slipped up and used the phrase “God damn” in an upper school assembly at a high school in the South, and it took me a minute to understand why the kids all tittered when I said it.)

When writing the dialogue in A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself, my challenge was to create the sensation of reading an 18^th Century adventure story without creating a replica. Actual 18^th Century books can be a bear to read, with great blocks of text unbroken into paragraphs, sprinkled with repetitive Biblical references, and all dialogue recounted. When Hannah finds herself in amongst a lot of dangerous pirates in 1726, I block out all the instances of “damn” because that’s what would have happened in an 18^th Century text, but the dialogue and setting is written with the immediacy that a 21^st readership demands. Verisimilitude takes precedence over accuracy. The reader’s sensation, both emotional and historical, is of greater importance than the fidelity to the archive, even if my gut instinct, as a historian, is to privilege what the primary sources have to say. But the reader will out. The book, this book, is what matters.

I could not blink it otherwise.

Check out Katherine Howe’s A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself here:

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The post On Blinking and Cocksuckers: Notes on Writing Historical Dialogue appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Tip #1: Relate. 

Let’s start by addressing what banter is not. It isn’t a dialogue assembly line to produce comebacks and one-liners, nor is it mean-spirited or cruel. Think of banter as a communication style for making clever, lighthearted small talk. Instead of trying to be smooth, consider creating relatable dialogue.

Think about moments where you commiserate with a friend over something “ordinary” like spilling a drink while at an important meeting, or someone stealing your parking spot. What is your reaction? Mostly likely it is colorful, vibrant, and from-the-gut. Take your characters and apply similar, honest reactions by exaggerating their words and feelings. Use their reaction to show the reader they can take a bad moment and poke fun at it.

These “we’ve all been there” times are significant in storytelling; they are like handing out humor to your characters without requiring much comedic legwork. What topics might characters “get” each other from the get-go? Think about movies, songs, food, there are hundreds more examples, a diehard country music lover will have clashing opinions if her date only listens to rock. You’re creating conflict from the topic, not pulling words out of thin air.

Check out Emily Duvall’s Trading Places here:

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When dialogue is grounded in common experiences, your audience can identify because they’ve had that conversation themselves. And like a good joke, you should never need to explain the punchline.

Tip #2: Create Intimacy. 

Writing banter isn’t just for main characters with romantic intentions. This playful word exchange is for everyone. The 60-year-old, the angsty college student, or the middle-aged mom too tired to edit her words can all be characters with sharp tongues. Look at all your characters in a scene, what sets apart your main characters from everyone else? It’s intimacy, personal interaction.

You want your two main characters to have a series of small moments which can spur dialogue that’s just theirs, a private joke, a nickname, or a topic which sparks conflict. Conflict is a good thing, it pushes your characters to be who they are, say the wrong thing, and act like they feel.

Imagine Character A is having a rush-out-the-door morning and realizes as she’s about to board the commuter train that she put on two different high heels. Stressed, frazzled, and now she will miss an important meeting. She says to herself, “Great, now I have to rush home.”

Character B is on the train holding the doors and overhears, jumping right into the scene and adding fuel to the fire by saying, “Too bad you didn’t wear at least a running shoe.”

This example gives characters a private joke between them, unshared by secondary characters. Character B is making fun of the situation without hurting Character A and gives them a bond to reference later in the story. Sass is just saying what a character feels in the moment to prove they were paying attention.

Tip #3: Scene Matters. 

If you think of dialogue as a layered process, consider how the scene comes into play. Treating banter like a fine-tooth comb will move the story along.

If two acquaintances are debating about cat versus dog ownership, there is a ton of room for coy comments, but make sure you use conversation intentionally. A page of dog/cat discussion might be your best work, but where are you going with the story? Slipping in coy comments should be used as a mechanism for revealing character vulnerability and foreshadowing.

Another trick to livening dialogue is to use questions instead of statements. “You’re saying since I’m a cat owner, I’m high maintenance?” Character A says.

“You said it,” Character B remarks. “Not me.”

We don’t know Character A’s life story, but maybe Character A is hinting at a sensitive subject, the way she views herself. Character B treads lightly, using her words to not get herself in trouble, she realizes there might be more to this comment. Playful teasing can break up a difficult conversation if applied gently.

Tip #4: Read Aloud. 

Warning, this next tip might induce levels of discomfort. When your eyes glaze over because you’re staring at a string of dialogue for too long and nothing is working, level up and dust off your acting skills and—gulp—read aloud.

Sometimes the best way to smooth out the right line is by getting out of your comfort zone and working out the verbal kinks by speaking. If you expect your characters to speak naturally, put their words into practice. You might surprise yourself at how fast scene dynamics like body language, facial expressions, and dialogue change when you go off the page. The most amusing moments in your story might come from this exercise.

Don’t sweat if writing the perfect dialogue is an uphill battle, start small. Layer in one of these elements to quick start your scene. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all for creating banter, most of it comes with re-writing until the words work, but if you’re stuck, find relatable moments, create a memory just for the main characters, and use words intentionally. And if all else fails, read aloud. 

The post There’s Banter for That: 4 Elements to Upgrading Dialogue From Sweet to Sassy appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Writing Dialogue That Sings

Dialogue is one of three narrative tools to move the plot along and reveal character (in addition to description and action). Each character must speak with a unique voice—an amalgam of style, tone, intonation, and word choices. (And it must be formatted and punctuated properly.) In this live webinar, you’ll learn what you need to write dialogue that rings with truth.

You’ll be able to use Jane K. Cleland’s four standards of excellence to guide your own writing: (1) creating individualized character voices; (2) determining when to summarize, and when to write the scene; (3) layering in meaning with subtext; and (4) adhering to professional standards when it comes to the mechanics, such as properly using tags, punctuation, and formatting.

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Outlining Your Novel

Writers often look upon outlines with fear and trembling. But when properly understood and correctly used, the outline is one of the most powerful weapons in a writer’s arsenal.

With the help of the book Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success by K.M. Weiland, you will learn how to write an outline as you explore what type of outline is right for you, brainstorm plot ideas, and discover your characters.

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Enter the Self-Published E-book Awards!

Writer’s Digest’s 11th Annual Self-Published E-book Awards honors the best self-published e-book(s) in eight of the most popular categories with $5,000 in cash, a featured interview in Writer’s Digest magazine, and a paid trip to the ever-popular Writer’s Digest Annual Conference in New York City.

In addition to $13,000 in total cash prizes, all entrants will receive a brief review of their book from one of Writer’s Digest’s competition readers.

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Listen to the Latest Episode of “Writer’s Digest Presents” Now!

In the seventh episode of season two of the “Writer’s Digest Presents” podcast, content editor Michael Woodson sits down with author and instructor Jane Friedman to discuss her recent experience with fraudulent books being published under her name that she didn’t write.

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The post Writing Dialogue That Sings appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(50 Reasons for Your Characters to Be Stuck Together.)

And keep in mind that when I say that your characters should meet that the meeting may not be planned. I can meet an old friend at the grocery store, even though I wasn’t planning to see them. However, it’s totally fine if the meeting was planned as well.

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If you want to learn how to write a story, but aren’t quite ready yet to hunker down and write 10,000 words or so a week, this is the course for you. Build Your Novel Scene by Scene will offer you the impetus, the guidance, the support, and the deadline you need to finally stop talking, start writing, and, ultimately, complete that novel you always said you wanted to write.

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Here’s my attempt at a meeting between two or more characters:

The sun’s rays were slanting across the tops of loblolly pines as a compact blue car pulled up to the gravel parking lot with the guitar of “Voodoo Child,” by Jimi Hendrix, blaring into the atmosphere. When the car came to a stop, the passenger door swung open and out popped Abraham. He shut the door and walked around the front of the car waiting for JJ to finally turn off the car and exit the driver side.

“So you’re not going to enter the competition,” JJ continued.

“No,” Abraham agreed. “I’m not entering the competition.”

“But you’d probably win,” beamed JJ as they both started toward a walking trail.

“Yeah, well,” Abraham started, but then he just lifted both his hands in front of him and twisted his wrists slightly so that the palms of his hands were turned toward his face. 

“Yeah, well,” continued JJ, “I think you should at least try.”

“Trying is lame.”

“Lame is not trying.”

“Whatevs. I’ve got better things to do with my time than win art competitions.”

Just then, a loud noise startled JJ and Abraham. It came from the trees, and it didn’t take long for them both to realize it was a laugh. An evil laugh.

“Don’t tell a lie, Honest Abe,” called the voice. “You can’t win, and you don’t have anything better to do.”

“Stephen,” questioned JJ as she peered at the approaching shadow.

“None other, gorgeous.”

“What’re you doing hiding the woods, creep,” asked Abraham. “Spying on JJ now?”

“She wishes. Actually, I was waiting for you, Honest Abe.”

“Sorry to say, but you’re not my type.”

“Ha. Ha. Heh,” said Killer as he pulled something from his pocket. A knife.

Abraham watched as Killer lifted the knife up in the air, and he knew what was about to happen. Call it his super power, but he often knew what people were going to do before they did it, and Abraham instinctively knew Killer was about to use that knife on him.

“Run, JJ!”

“What?”

“Run,” repeated Abraham. “Get help.”

“Stephen!”

“Listen to Honest Abe,” agreed Killer. “We’ve got business between us.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” answered JJ.

At that moment, Killer lunged toward Abraham and pointed the knife at his stomach, the tip landing somewhere along his left side. The pain was immediate as Abraham instinctively backed off. JJ screamed. 

Even Killer seemed a little stunned for a moment, but it only lasted a moment. In another moment, his lips curled into a smile as he seemed to realize he was in charge of this situation. Nobody would stop him from having his retribution.

“I’ll show you what happens when you embarrass me,” Killer said.

Abraham wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He just wanted JJ to get out of there as he looked down as his shirt and hands getting more and more wet. JJ needed to get out of here. Get out.

As Abraham waited for Killer to move in on him, he heard footsteps quickly approaching before hearing a loud thud. Abraham fell back and saw Max standing over Killer with a giant tree branch. And JJ ran to Abraham’s side still screaming and saying something that Abraham couldn’t quite make out before everything went dark.

The post 2023 Character-Building Challenge: Day 7 appeared first on Writer's Digest.