I am thirty-two years old and this is the first time I have lived east of the Mississippi river (save for that disastrous six-month stint in the interior swamp of Florida when I was eleven years old-but that’s another story).

I am a Western girl-born and bred. And yet my relationship with my geography has always been complicated. Growing up in Arizona and Colorado, I was half-raised by my Yankee grandmothers who told me stories about ‘Back East’ and the family pedigree, whose roots trail back to the ships following the Mayflower. I listened and absorbed and when I visited Rhode Island or Connecticut, I was sort of awed by towns founded in the 1600’s, particularly since I was a product of Western Suburban Sprawl–those tract homes of the 1970’s and 1980’s that ate up prairie and desert and foothills. One of my favorite activities as a child was going to look at model homes with my grandmother. But I also grew up camping and skiing. I spent most of my twenties rock climbing and hiking up mountains and being always a breath away from wild land.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I was not raised on a mountaintop with a pack of wolves as pets and the ability to make fires with just a shard of glass and some half-wet kindling. (Leave that to my Alaskan friends!) And yet….the landscape, the short but vivid history of the West, the scale and grandeur and harshness and even the quick and neat carving of wilderness into the suburban—all of it was so much a part of me that I couldn’t see it.

When I moved out to Pittsburgh for graduate school, I was more than happy to be leaving Boulder, heading east, closer to where things were created, where they were happening.  I didn’t think I would miss Colorado in the least. But now, six months in,

I am yearning for it terribly, feeling a sensory longing for sunshiny huge skies and the smell of sagebrush (my god, that sounds cliché, but it’s actually true) and the tilted mountains right behind my house where, five minutes into hiking, I am completely alone. Part of this is the backlash to moving anywhere new to pursue a different life, but another part is plain culture shock, a hemmed in feeling that is as much psychological as geographical. But more importantly, I have– surprisingly–come to understand that I have been marked by the West in ways that I could not even imagine, most particularly in my writing life.

Now, much has been written about the myth of the West in the American psyche and its cultural and literary shadow (Marilynne Robinson writes about it smartly), but living out West, I never paid much attention to it. I knew that there was, particularly in writing and publishing circles, a sense that America is pretty much two coasts with a great expanse of nothing in between. I vaguely understood that there was western writing, but that’s not what I wrote—and I didn’t read much of it or engage with it critically as Western. Edward Abbey was always a favorite, but more for his politics than for a particular regional flavor in his writing.

And so when I arrived in Pittsburgh, I didn’t see myself or my writing as regional. Now I am reevaluating. Because I am being exposed to so much other fiction and criticism in workshops and classes, I am naturally thinking about my writing in relation to what I am reading, and am coming to discover that my stuff is different. And perhaps that’s not because of individualistic style or nuance, but because there are values, ideas, aesthetic preferences, and emotional connections that are unique to where I grew up. “Everyone who lives in the West,” Laura Pritchett writes, “is influenced by terrain, weather and nature.”  How can we not be? The land is big and beautiful and nature is harsh and unforgiving. Weather is dramatic—sunny and warm one day in January, a blizzard the next. So many people I know in Colorado engage with the land in ways that have serious consequences. They are willing to risk their lives to reach the top of the mountain, to engage with nature in extreme ways that are really conversations about freedom and wildness and what it is to be alive.

My writing is marked by this. The landscape is always an important part of whatever I write, a character that cradles my other, human, characters in the palm of her hand. Space is also integral. I often, reading back, find much silence and ‘empty’ physical and emotional space in my work. Some people tell me my stories start very slowly, the beginnings stretched out and contemplative, the ‘real’ writing not happening until a few pages into the narrative. And (I’ve heard this as a characteristic of other western writers) my characters tend to look outward instead of inward. They find meaning and closure through their engagement with each other and the world around them, they are always moving and contemplating, never just sitting and thinking. Their answers tend to be in the world, not necessarily just in themselves (even though what I write tends to be contemplative and quiet).

This last tendency is one that other writers and readers who grew up in the West tend to understand easily, while eastern readers and writers are always calling for my characters to ‘think’ and ‘express’ more. John R. Milton, editor of the South Dakota Review, believes that “eastern writing tends to be compatible with Freudian thought, whereas western writing “seems to lie within the sphere of Jungian influence”. James Work describes the difference well. He says that while eastern fiction “tends to begin with a character (“Call me Ishmael”) and then turns inward to explore his/her psychological tensions, inner turmoils and mental tempests” western writers “begin with a character in conflict and then move outward into the environment. The environment starts acting like a character while the protagonist moves toward it and interacts with it… You can see the difference in Cormac McCarthy. Noticing that the main character in All the Pretty Horses has lost his father, is disillusioned by his circumstances and has only one friend who is another coming-of-age male, you are tempted to have ol’ Cormac lie down on the Freudian fainting couch and examine his feelings about his parents. However, the personal inner stresses of these two Texas boys fade out. Their lives open into the landscape of the Mexican border country. They become mythic, archetypal figures. They act out the pattern of “separation, initiation, return” that Joseph Campbell described. The focus begins with them and reaches out into the environment”.

Learning the characteristics of my writing style and the influences that have shaped it has been an important part of discovering the particularities of my talent and capabilities as a writer. I believe that there are strengths to writing from an interior place in which nature and the physical world hold just as much interest and importance as the individual interior monologue. In which the word ‘loneliness’ has ‘strong positive connotations’ in Marilynne Robinson’s words. In which people exist in worlds that are bigger than themselves and each other. Knowing that this is an important part of my voice, I can protect it and help it to thrive in ways that allow readers to understand and share with me its beauty.

I’m going to Prague this summer in order to check out the Libri Prohibiti, which is an archival research library that collects Samizdat and exile literature.

For those of you who don’t know, Samizdat was a dissident form of literature that arose across the Soviet bloc, in which people secretly reproduced state censored publications ( by typrewriter, carbon copy, or small self-bound books). One of my favorite books, The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, was circulated in just such a fashion, as were the early poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Vaclav Havel’s famous The Power of the Powerless. Being caught creating or possessing censored literature was severely punished in all Soviet bloc countries, so the stakes were extremely high.

I became interested in Samizdat on a trip to Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 1999 and it features prominently in my novel Hello Sparrow. One of the most interesting aspects of the movement was the way in which what circulated varied from country to country based on the differences in state power, state control of culture, and historical self-awareness of the people of each country–for instance, in Czechoslovakia, political tracts and essays that reinforced autonomous Czech culture were popular, while in the U.S.S.R. and Poland, fiction and poetry (both satirical and tragic) were widely circulated.

The Libri Prohibiti includes more than 29,200 monographs and periodicals, about 2,900 reference resources, and over 5,000 audiovisual materials.  I hope that being able to read the papers and books, interview some Czech writers during the Prague Writer’s Festival, and visit with professors at Charles University will help create a more solid, historically accurate, foundation for this novel.

Since my interest extends past Samizdat–to all exiled texts and authors (Eduardo Galeano is a favorite, as is Edwidge Danticat), I am looking for connections and clues between the two. Likewise, I am fascinated (as a writer of literary fiction) with the state of the publishing industry in the US, the corporate bookstores hold over publishing houses, and the lack of a true underground forum for literature, and the parallels to state censorship in Soviet bloc countries. I have many questions I hope to explore!

BTW: Here is an interesting article on a self-published author who staged a guerrilla reading of her work at a Barnes and Noble in NYC last month. It makes me wonder if this is a burgeoning movement? Are we seeing the real rise of underground literature in the US? One can always dream…

_Annie Dillard

I’m back. Much has changed in the few months I have been away. I have moved from Colorado to Pittsburgh, PA to attend the MFA graduate program in writing. I love the program and everyone I’ve met through it. The city? Well, I’m still trying to explore–hard to do when it is raining ice. Yes, you heard me correctly. Raining ice. The weather is definitely hard to get used to, as are the french fries on the salads and the maze of city streets, hills, alleys that end in brick walls, streets that end in rivers, and bridges that form complete loops from which one can never escape.

What I am excited about is writing on here again more regularly, about all sorts of topics–sharing quotes and books I love, interesting information, short stories as I get them written, pictures, and more.

Ready, set, go…

Permaculture is one of my favorite gardening philosophies, and though it is an incredibly simple and understandable series of concepts–revolving around mimicking the way that plants grow in nature, paying attention to the landscape around you for clues on how to best implement growing techniques, and creating relationships with plants and animals that are mutually beneficial–many people think that permaculture is very complex or that it works okay for farmers but isn’t applicable to backyard gardeners. “Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture”  will quickly disabuse you of that notion.  Author Toby Hemenway, a professor at Portland State University in Oregon, provides an easy to read and informative  understanding of permaculture principles and how to apply them to building and maintaining a sustainable permaculture practice in your home yard. With both beginner and advanced practices and plenty of pictures and diagrams, this book has enough information for novices and master gardeners alike. I highly recommend “Gaia’s Garden” as a must read before you plant your garden this spring and go– to guide for all the seasons to come.

You know that bump on the upper inside corner of your middle finger, the one you got as a kid from all the cursive handwriting in school? Do you still have it? Did you ever? Experts now say that the ‘writer’s bump’ or callus is almost completely disappearing, what with the rise of computers and the fact that students no longer seriously learn the Palmer method of cursive handwriting in school. Which got me to thinking–has the rise in using computers to type affected the quality and/or output of creative writing? In what way has it changed what we write and are there benefits to switching back to longhand?It seems that the switch to keyboard writing has actually changed the way we think. The act of typing accesses both sides of our brain–the creative right side and the analytic left– equally, allowing our words to come more quickly and efficiently. While this might be great for writing an essay or transferring notes, something is lost in translation when typing creative work directly onto a computer or typewriter. Now, I’m no luddite–well maybe I aspire to be one one day, but not yet–I appreciate the computer as much as anyone–obviously. I like the ease in which I can edit, the quickness with which I can copy down the thoughts flowing from my head, but I do think adopting longhand again can be a powerful tool in your writing repertoire.

Writing longhand is slower and accesses primarily the creative right side of the brain. When organically writing, thoughts come slower and we are more deeply connected with what we are writing. The words tend to come from a deeper, more emotional place in our psyche.

While writing my last novel, I naturally devised a method of switching typing with longhand writing that allowed me to write ten hours a day. I would begin the day with a cup of coffee (and a cigarette–I was still a smoker then) outside on the porch with a spiral notebook. I would take thirty minutes or so (sometimes it turned out to be two hours) and just jot down notes about my characters, descriptions of scenes, back dialogue, dreams—ideas that I wasn’t necessarily going to include in my manuscript, but that were useful for building atmosphere. Then I would go back inside, sit down at the computer and write. Whenever I got stuck and didn’t know where to go next with my writing, I would take that notebook and go back outside. Miraculously, the words seemed to flow when I was writing organically–sometimes a whole scene would suddenly spark to life on the page. After the words petered out, I would go back inside and type them out and continue on. I would sometimes alternate between the writing styles up to ten times.

So many of us never write longhand anymore (or never really did for the younger set) that it is an act of novelty that can shake you out of writer’s block. I highly recommend, as I’ve said before, taking a small notebook with you everywhere since you never know when creative inspiration is going to hit. Practice using that notebook and suddenly your subconscious becomes primed for the creative stimuli all around you. Ideas will begin to emerge from the most random places, I guarantee.

Finally, I think there is something sacred about the permanency of the written word. It’s an organic process. Seeing the words we write with our own hand connects us more deeply with the ideas and images that we are trying to convey. Many professors of mine warned against taking lecture notes on a computer. Sure it’s easier and faster and you get every word, but what you lose is the cognition that comes with longhand. The slightly slower brain process of writing by hand allows the material to be processes as you write and input into long term memory. It’s been shown that people who take notes by hand retain more information for a longer period of time.

The same, I believe, is true for creative writing by hand. A novel or even short story is a complex structure of symbols that evolves as you go. Being able to process what you are writing and remember it easily is extremely important in piecing your story together. It allows more flexibility and a deeper understanding of your work.

So go retro. Get a notebook. Buy a journal and just write. Your grandmother would be proud of you.

Want something quick but razor sharp and very  unique? Look no farther than Mary Robison.  I tore through her newest novel “One D.O.A., One on the Way” this week and picked up another– “Why Did I Ever”– because I was so impressed. Reminiscent of authors like Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie, Robison’s minimalist style is an exercise in gorgeous wordsmithing. There’s also a veneer of southern gothic in these books, probably due to Robison’s upbringing in Mississippi and her professorships at southern universities. “One D.O.A., One on the Way” captures the chaos of post-Katrina New Orleans in appropriately fractured mini-paragraphs, building the tension so sneakily that we are shocked by its inevitable conclusion.

“Why Did I Ever” is its worthy predecessor, having been the book that pioneered Robinson’s minimalist style (suffering from an extended case of writer’s block, she scrawled the novel on index cards and then strung them together). It’s protagonist, named Money, dictates the slow crumbling of her word, the violent assault of her son, and her long drives to nowhere. Written with an elegance and sharpness that literally takes my breath away, I am racing through this book, unable to put it down at night.

Robison is an accessible writer, her books hauntingly unique. At least once as I read these books, I closed my eyes in jealousy at a wickedly perfect or perversely beautiful sentence.

In Greek mythology, the muses were the nine daughters of the god Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory.  They were thought to inspire the creation of literature and the arts and transmit the knowledge of poetry, history, dance, astronomy, music, and comedy. Their legacy is threaded through modern language with words such as ‘museum’, ‘musing’ and ‘amused’.  It is, however, most apparent in the seriousness that artists and writers give to finding ‘their muse’. What does this mean and how can finding your muse improve your writing?

The muse is really the mysterious creative process that brings us the deep seated seeds of inspiration. It is the mixture of your talent, determination, experience, imagination, and dedication all brewing in your subconscious and then bursting forth as song, word, dance, image….it is the primordial creativeness that makes us feel so free. And it can be cultivated.

How do you welcome the muse?

Many writers find it easiest to visualize the muse as a person, either imaginary or real and they write as if to that person or from her. For Robert Graves she was the White Goddess, for Dante she was Beatrice. William Blake’s poem Jerusalem was dictated wholly by his muse.  Other authors use their characters as their muses, having whole imaginary dialogues with them, create a rapport with a relative or friend who has passed on, or write as if to someone who is alive but distant–an author whose work they esteem, an old lover who always made them feel creative, a particularly supportive friend.

Other writers use place as a muse. They recollect  a place that was particularly conducive to their creativity or one that reminds them of their childhood (their grandparent’s house maybe or a particularly loved vacation spot). Still others create an imaginary cave or room in their head where they imagine going to write.

The use of animals as guides and muses in indigenous storytelling goes back thousands of years as does the calling on more celestial beings such as angels.

The important part, whatever or whoever you choose your muse to be (and try to have this come up spontaneously), is to create a clear image of them or it in your head.

So sit with whatever it is that makes you feel inspired and spend a few minutes a day before you write visualizing your muse. It’s also good to visualize them when you are exercising, driving in the car, waiting in line, going to sleep. You don’t have to do anything in particular–just bring up what the person looks like, sounds like–the details of a place or feeling of an animal or spirit. No pressure. But what this will start to do is create the space in your unconscious for writing and inspiration to exist. With your muse, you prime your pump of creativity and access your talent and drive much more quickly.  Creating a relationship with your muse is one of the most important skills you can create for prolific writing and can actually bring you surprising knowledge and ideas you didn’t know existed within you.

‘Writing Down the Bones’ by Natalie Goldberg    was one of the first writing books I ever  read    and it is still a go to    reference when I am  in  need of support and sustenance.    Both a  practitioner of Zen and a writer, her tips,  stories, and exercises are rooted in an  expansive and inspirational view of the self as    artist and a deep connection with life. This is a  great guide for those who write as an act of self  expression, discovery, and healing. It’s very  free form though I always found the exercises  to be extremely helpful to get me started when  I was stuck with writer’s block. Her other books  on writing as well as her memoirs are worth  picking up as well.

Brenda  Ueland’s ‘If You Want to Write: a Book About Art, Independence, and Spirit’ is, to me, the ultimate writing book. It is a must read for beginning writers, for those who have been discouraged, and for those who are looking to revisit what creativity really means. A journalist, author, and all around extraordinarily interesting woman, Ueland’s guide offers up several points to consider when writing but it’s also very supportive of everybody’s creativity. One of my favorite quotes by Ueland is “I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on  a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten, – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another. ”

This third book is one that helped me understand the balance of writing. ‘The Writing Life’ by Annie Dillard is, like all of her work, clear eyed, unsentimental, meaty–a resource that I come back to in order to remind me why I write, who it’s for, and both how thankless a task it can be and how beautiful a life it creates. If you haven’t read anything by Dillard, please go out and find either ‘Holy the Firm’ or ‘Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek’  and immerse yourself in the perfect individuality of the ordinary world she presents.

I once had a dance instructor who changed my life. His name is Nii Armah Sowah and if you live in the Denver/Boulder area I highly recommend that you get to know him. He taught an African dance class at the University of Colorado and was the first person who taught me that we are all made to dance. Our bodies are made to move, he taught, our voices are made to sing. To pass judgement on dance and singing is to limit our self-expression and our ability to connect to others. It was an amazing idea and has stuck with me ever since.

Recently, I started thinking about this in terms of writing. I critique and ‘fix’ writing for a living, but I also believe that, like dance and song, writing should be accessible for everyone, regardless of ‘talent’. It seems sometimes that we are so focused on the publishing aspect of books that we completely ignore the process of writing and the many gifts it can bring.

Memoir in particular is a wonderful way for all of us to use writing as a tool of self expression and community building. It’s very accessible, both to write and to read and really has the ability to change our lives.

Now first off, memoir is not autobiography. It is not so much concerned with the straight facts of your life as it is with how you’ve experienced that life. As such, it can be incredibly freeing. By writing memoir you can access all the ’selves’ you have been in the past–daughter, student, friend, teenager, toddler, lover, mother, father, sister, brother, employer, employee, rambler, traveler, hiker, lunatic—we’ve all lived a thousand different lives, like the facets on a diamond. By bearing witness by writing these experiences, we can draw closer to ourselves, can let go of situations that have been haunting us, free ourselves from the ghosts of people who no longer are in our lives, break bad habits, or engage ourselves in new adventures. When we sit with ourselves free of the fear, anger, sadness, or even joy of past experiences, we start to know who we are a bit better. When we share what we write with others we start to create authentic relationships.

Writing memoir takes no special skill other than a willingness to delve into your own truth, your own experience. It’s good to start small to perfect this truth telling, detail oriented, emotional form of writing. Here are a few exercises to help you on your way:

The list: One of my favorite exercises. Take a piece of paper and number it 1 through 25 on the left. Then write down the names of twenty five people you have known in your life. Don’t think too hard, but just imagine back through your life and jot down the names. Then next to each name write two or three words that pop into your head to describe that person–it can be a physical description, how you met them, what they meant to you, something unique about them. Again, don’t think too much. After you are done, take a look at the list and pick out a few that you feel emotional about or really remember well. Write about that person or the situation that comes to mind–just write, don’t edit. See what comes up and why.

Firsts and Favorites: This exercise is great. Write about: Your first memory, your first humiliation, the first time you ever got hurt, first time somebody broke your heart, first time you remember being truly happy, first kiss, first place you remember travelling….and then write your favorites: The best grade you ever got in school, your best friend, your favorite dream, your favorite food as a child, your favorite memory, your favorite activity as a teenager, your favorite person ever, your favorite outfit. Again, take a look at your lists and see if there is anything calling out for you to write about it….

Conversation: Sometimes it’s hard to create narrative around memories and experiences at first and so writing dialogue can be a great way to start accessing these places in your mind. Think of somebody that you have unfinished business with or somebody who you miss a lot and will never see again. Imagine that they are sitting there in front of you, open and willing to have a conversation. Write down what you want to say to them. Write down how they respond. Don’t think about whether they would really respond that way or not, just write! After, read through it. Chances are you will remember more about them or will feel a letting go…

Links

If any of these exercises spark your interest, try writing more about the memories that stand out in your life. Write for yourself. For inspiration, I highly recommend listening to the StoryCorps project on NPR–amazing true stories that remind you that we’re all walking through this world together.

Dialogue is one of the most important tools in your author’s skill box.  Done well it will bring your characters to life and anchor your prose. It will subtly tell your story gracefully. Unfortunately, dialogue is one of the hardest aspects of fiction to pull off well. Maybe it’s because we think it should be easy–I mean we have conversations every single day, putting them down on paper seems second nature. Or maybe it’s just that we’re uncomfortable with dialogue because we’re not sure what its purpose is in our story–we know we should have dialogue, that it’s useful, but aren’t quite sure why. So we stick it in and hope it works.

Whatever the reason, you shouldn’t sweat it because with some practice dialogue will become your best friend. Here’s how

The Four Problems and the Exercises that Will Fix Them:

Stilted Language: Of all the problems with dialogue, this one is by far the most pervasive.  The biggest killer of good conversation is unnatural, stilted language. We’ve all read that book where we end up rolling our eyes, thinking to ourselves, “Gimme a break, no one really talks like that” right? Well have some compassion because it’s easy to do. In my opinion, stilted language comes from–not enough revision (you just quickly put your thoughts down in the form of dialogue and don’t revise to make it more natural), not enough experience, or not enough understanding of the differences between author and character (you’re putting down dialogue as yourself and not your character).  Here’s a few exercises to help you create more natural dialogue:

1. Eavesdrop: I know your grandmother said it was rude, but c’mon, nobody likes a polite writer (unless it’s Henry James).  Sometimes we talk so much and it’s so natural to us that we don’t really understand how it works. So spend a week just listening to HOW people have conversations–the way they share information, the cadence of their speech, and how their personalities come through in what they say. But you want to know the biggest secret, the one that will turn your dialogue into the masterpiece of your work? Listen to what is really being said underneath the words and listen to what is not being said. Dialogue imparts information, but we humans are sneaky social beings. We seldom come right out and say what we really feel or mean. We evolved to be mostly non-confrontational. After you spend a week or so eavesdropping (and hopefully taking notes) think about your own characters and for each conversation they have, ask yourself–what are they really after here? What are they really saying. And leave clues.

2. Revise. Our rough drafts are the placeholders. They are where we get our characters and story down on paper. Going back and revising is especially useful with dialogue. We aren’t rushing so much or so involved in the process and so we can step back and do the real work. When revising dialogue, it’s helpful to really imagine the scene, imagine the people talking to each other, how their sitting, their body language, if they slept well the night before, what they are worried about. All these characteristics will help you imagine a better scene for dialogue. Revise and revise until it sounds natural (but not jargony or too slangy–you are writing for posterity here!)

3.  Knowing the difference between you as an author writing and your characters who are speaking is key in writing dialogue that is natural and not stilted. Completing the exercise from last week on getting to know your characters will help immensely here. If you are a twenty year old college student writing words for an eighty year old French philosopher, then you’re really going to have to immerse yourself in characterization, in the speech patterns of older European intellectuals (or Russian babushkas, or streetwalkers in the Bronx or whomever!) and write from their point of view. Remember, writing is just acting for introverts.

Exposition: This occurs when you are trying to tell too much of the story in your dialogue. You know this is happening when one of your characters goes on and on about the plot or when the dialogue feels very controlled or forced. Dialogue should ask the reader to explore the feelings and motivations of the characters and should not lead them about my the nose, pulling them where you want to go in the story.  A good way to filter exposition in your dialogue:

1. Examine every conversation or monologue that is more than a sentence long for each character. Often, exposition will go on and on.

2. Try an exercise in which you are writing a dialogue in which each character says no more than three or four words each time. This will sometimes help force you to keep dialogue about relationships and feelings and not about informational plot recaps.

Filler:  This one is especially easy for a novice writer to engage in. We are just so happy we are actually writing, that the words are flowing. We get nervous that we won’t have enough or we get stuck and use dialogue as filler, meaningless words that don’t really move the story forward. And we know that if the story is not continuously moving forward then it’s twirling around listlessly, reading to go down the toilet. The good news is that filler is easy to spot and fix:

1. Examine all your dialogue and ask is this absolutely necessary for the story. Does it really examine the characters in a way that needs to be part of this story.  Now, this doesn’t just mean ‘does this examine the characters’ because we could write a thousand pages of dialogue about what our characters are like and 998 pages of that will not be integral to our story (another great reason to do the character exercises from last week and get it all out before you write your book or story). This means–is this conversation absolutely necessary, and if so, is it furthering the story to the best of its ability. If the answer is no, then revise or cut it out.

2. Ask again, what is the motivation of these characters. Always ask this. Every scene, every dialogue, every description needs to have motivation behind it, it needs to have a WHY. Asking, with dialogue, why the characters are having this conversation, why are they having it like this, why are they trying to impart information to each other will help to cut filler. If you can’t answer your Whys, then it’s filler, my friend.

Modifier Overuse: This one is perhaps the most common and it is a mask for weak dialogue and imprecise words. Now this falls into two categories: overusing adverbs (he said haltingly, she said angrily, etc.) and using dialogue modifiers to show emotion or direct action (he explained, he whispered, she stammered). The problem with both of these is that they are lazy. If your dialogue is strong enough, the words you use precise enough, then you don’t need the modifiers and they only serve to coerce your reader into feeling or believing something. And that leads to heavy, unnatural writing that seems amateurish. Plus it’s just annoying. So ways to fix this:

1. Again, take out most of your modifiers and see if, by the dialogue alone, it’s obvious what the character is feeling.  If she is explaining something, she might use different words than if she were yelling something, right? Find those words. Be precise.

1. 2. Look at the action that is accompanying your dialogue. Often, the key to good dialogue is keeping it simple and showing the intention with physical action. Up to seventy percent of our communication is nonverbal, taking place in the form of body language. Show this! For example, instead of ’she whispered’ it might work better to write ’she leaned in close and said…’ . The more you can show instead of tell, the stronger your writing will be.

Remember, writing that works is writing that allows the characters to live fully. That means they have motivation, agendas, quirks and flaws.  The author’s job is to impart all of this with a light hand, allowing the relationship between the reader and the characters to be as close as possible without you.

Try these exercises and let me know how they work for you! Do you have any tips for writing interesting dialogue? Let us know.