Rules of dialogue

A few thoughts on dialogue, which should mimic the rules of conversation

 

* A lot of the time, we do not speak in correct sentences/we often use short sharp phrases.

* Keep your dialogue crisp - we can tell a lot about a person in a short snap of conversation.

* We interrupt a lot.

* We assume a lot. Not ‘Your brother has been murdered.’

‘What, my brother Brian?’

‘Yes, that’s him. Your only brother. The younger one. The one with the brown hair.’ Keep it realistic.

* Dialogue must take the story on. Only write small talk if you need to, ie showing how tedious a person can be. If you don’t need it, don’t write it. Make sure each word does a job.

* Do not pack dialogue with extraneous information. Don’t write like this:

‘I saw William, although everyone calls him Bill, my neighbour of ten years in Acacia Avenue, in Darlington, and observed that he was his normal glum self, to which we - that is my wife, Edith, and I - have grown accustomed in the weeks since his wife left him for a younger man and filed for divorce. I assumed that the darkness which seems to have assailed him since then has not lifted.’ If you need to slot in that information, find a way of doing it more subtly: ie “Saw Bill this morning. His usual gloomy self. The divorce really has knocked him backwards.’

Whatever you, it has to sound real

 

John Dean

Creating characters

I am teaching a course on characters and came across this quote from Bill Eaton: “Some writers start thinking about their story in terms of a plot; something to give them a map to write by. Others will not start writing until they have a setting for their piece established in great detail. Personally, I think the best starting place is in the characters you are going to write about.

“According to the great American writer F Scott Fitzgerald, "Character is plot, plot is character." There is no fiction without characters, so this seems to me to be the ideal place to begin.

“Stories do not exist in a vacuum. It is through the interaction of characters with a variety of needs, situations and personalities that stories emerge and develop. Get a few characters together, give them conflicting motivations, don’t give them a chance to escape and you will have a compelling tale in the making!”

Me, I start with place but character follows very quickly and I am one of those writers who takes them from real life.

In the same way that you can base characters upon yourself, you can use your observations and knowledge of others as starting points.  Perhaps as little as a snippet of overheard conversation, or a hair style, or bits of several people mixed together, can be enough. By fusing these traits together the sources of your character will be left behind and a new person will emerge.

 

John Dean

A Breach of Trust to be published

My latest novel, A Breach of Trust (Hale), is out on January 30. A crooked businessman suffers a fall at home and there is no reason to think it is anything other than an accident until after he dies when information comes to hand which points towards murder.

Detective Chief Inspector Blizzard and his team are brought in to investigate and attention quickly focuses on the controversial closure of a local factory amid claims of widespread fraud.

To solve the case the detectives must enter a world in which passions run deep, threats and intimidation are rife, and hatred is never far from the surface.

ISBN 978-0-7198-1431-0

PRICE £19.99

FORMAT 234 x 156mm hardback

About the author

John Dean is an award-winning journalist from Darlington, Co. Durham. He has twice been named North-East Freelance Journalist of the Year and also Environmental Reporter of the Year. His previous novels include Strange Little Girl, The Railway Man, The Secrets Man and To Honour the Dead.
John Dean

A sense of place

Following my previous blog on place, a few more thoughts. Whether it be a gloomy city or a stunning hillside, a glass-strewn council estate or a majestic waterfall, something about my surroundings triggers ideas.

Let me take you back several years to a hillside in the North Pennines in an attempt to show you what I mean. I was on a family holiday and we were staying in a village on the Durham/Cumbrian border.

There was a play area in the middle of the village and every evening my two children would go for a swing and I would wander out to keep an eye on them - they had gone past the ‘Dad, give me a push’ stage but had not quite reached the stage where they could be left alone.

In such circumstances a person has a lot of time to think and, as they swung, so I found myself staring at the hillside opposite.

Something about the hill’s slopes and its late evening shadows, the way the buzzards hunted across the ridge, the sound of the sheep bleating and the distant barking of a farm dog, worked their magic on me and by the end of the week, an idea was born, eventually turning into The Dead Hill, my seventh crime novel published by Hale in 2008.

I returned to the area for the next books in the series, To Die Alone and To Honour the Dead (also Hale), and once again used the real landscape, the hills and the ravines, towns and villages. Currently, I am writing the fourth in the series, again inspired by the surroundings.

I use a similar approach to my John Blizzard series for Hale, this time set in an urban city setting. Hafton is a bit of everything, the river and the terraced streets from Hull, housing estates from the North East, rural villages from East Yorkshire, the hospital in Darlington. Mix them all together and you have Hafton and that inspires me.
　

John Dean

Inspired by where you live?

As I have said in previous blogs, I have always believed that a writer is influenced to some degree by where they live and work.

Yes I know it is a gross generalisation but I am sure that a writer writing in a dark, cold country produces different fiction than one in a bright sunny one.

Certainly if you look at the great Scandinavian and Icelandic crime writers their work is influenced by their surroundings and darkness permeates their work.

I can only speak from my own experience. I write best in Winter. I also write about a fictional city called Hafton. Sited in the North of England, it is based in part on a real city which most appeals to me in winter, when the streets glisten with rainwater and darkness falls early, casting long shadows.

The result is work that deals with dark themes and I believe they emerge from the darkness of the city.You can offer your thoughts on our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/inscribemedia

John Dean

Great opening lines

As so often, I have been thinking about the importance of the first line in short stories, indeed in any fiction, a recurrent theme in my teaching of writers.

A busy and harassed judge/editor/agent reads so much that anything that makes them notice you has got to be good. Look at these examples, which came in the top 100 of a poll of all-time great openings.

* Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

* It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984

* It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

* I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

* Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial

* If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Each one draws you into the story right from the off. Do that and you have given yourself a great chance of success, assuming your story lives up to the promise of the opening lines, of course
John Dean

What makes good writing?

What makes good writing? I think good writing is good writing because it triggers responses in its readers. Readers say ‘I have been in that situation, ‘I know someone like that’, ‘what a terrible thing to be faced with’ etc etc.
If readers feel like that, it means that they are being drawn into the story. They stand next to your characters, they fear for what is about to happen, they simply must know what is on the next page.
If a reader does not really care what is happening in the story then you have lost them and your story has failed but if they feel part of it, they are experiencing the sheer power of the writer.
That’s a terrific thing to achieve - and the way to impress publishers and competition judges.
John Dean