The Blank Page

The strange thing about fiction is this: Every single thing you write is a lie. All of it. Every last word. Once you understand this, you must also understand that the success of your story depends on your lies telling the truth. For your lies to tell the truth, your words must describe certain truths that are familiar. This brings me to the killer of prose.

Adverbs.

Adverbs don’t tell a reader anything, and more often than not they are far more deceiving than truthful. When you write that someone “walked vehemently”, you are not showing your reader anything. In fact, you’re telling UNtruthful lies. People can walk vehemently, this we know, but how, is the question. Instead of copping out and writing lazily (some adverbs are unavoidable), you must show the reader how something is done. This is where adverbs are deceiving.

Vehemently can mean a couple different things. Was this person walking with some intense feeling and conviction, say, on their way to fulfill their destiny? Or, were they simply walking with force, as in a march, maybe? Don’t be flat and just tell your reader some vague, far-stretching action. You have to show them. Instead of: “Mark walked vehemently into the darkness.”, say something like: “Mark stepped into the darkness with purpose, his conviction echoing off the ashen walls with each forceful step.” Now, that isn’t perfect either, but you get the idea, and you can tell the manner in which Mark was walking.

Summary: You’re no longer in kindergarten. Telling is off the table and it’s all show from here, baby.

Advice: Download a free program called SmartEdit. It will scan your work and list every adverb as well as cliché phrases and overused words.

Now. On to dialogue.

Dialogue is where realism really counts. If your dialog isn’t believable, your characters can’t possibly seem real. A common mistake I see is people thinking they have to come up with some special tag every time someone speaks.

Take this for example: “I hate you,” John hissed. Most amateur writers will think nothing is wrong with this. Two main things make this a failure, though. First: If it is already established that John is the speaker, you should absolutely, not f-in’ ever use John’s name. “He” is completely fine here. The second problem with this is the hiss part. There isn’t a single s in that sentence. You can’t hiss without making an s sound. The best tag here (and believe it or not, almost always), is a simple “he said”.

It’s difficult for new writers to grasp the simplicity of that. They often feel it’s overdone. It’s not. And trust me when I say that most readers will waft their eyes over it and not think twice.

Now, what is a better way to write that little piece of dialogue? Well, if you originally wrote hissed, I would assume that John said what he said with malice. Instead of just telling someone that, it’s much more effective to show the reader that he said it through clenched teeth, or whilst slamming his fist on the table. Maybe spit seeped from between the cracks of his grinding teeth as he accentuated the transfer from the t sound in hate to the y sound of the you. I don’t care how you do it; you’re the writer.

Also common is the addition of adverbs to dialogue tags. “John yelled violently.”

Yuck.

Like I said before: Showing is the name of the game. Do it with beauty and you will have your readers. The job you must do, is to find that happy medium between too much detail and too little. Too much drowns the reader. You want your reader to see truths to them with their own eyes. If you describe how someone said something angrily, you want them to remember what that looks and feels like to them, personally.

Evoke emotion at all cost. Even if it means sacrificing yourself.