Getting to Know You

To write believable dialogue you need to be a good listener.  Eavesdrop.  Notice how people really speak when they’re getting acquainted, and how it varies depending on the culture, income bracket, education, and age of the speaker.  This used to be easy—folks would chat on buses, while standing in line at the bank, just about anywhere.  But today people are texting or tuned in to their ear buds, and you hear conversations much less frequently.  It takes effort to find random snippets of dialogue.  Sometimes you’ll hear people visiting in a forced social gathering where it would be rude to pull out a cell phone or speakers, such as at a funeral, a bridal shower, or at a dinner party.  And, occasionally, you’ll discover folks who simply choose to be gregarious and get to know their seatmate on an airplane, or other shoppers in a market. 

            Watch how strangers get to know one another.  It usually involves one of two styles.  The first style is where people ask one another questions.  Where are you from, what do you do, how old are your children, how do you know the bride, have you ever vacationed here before, and so on.  We’ve all seen this and done this.  But the second style is the odd one I want you to observe.  It consists of people talking about themselves in a ping-pong style, asking no questions whatsoever.  Back and forth they carry on in this self-absorbed method of revealing themselves, unaware that they haven’t once expressed interest in the other person. Here’s an example of two women talking:

            “I love when it rains like this.”

            “Oh, not me.  I’m a sun girl.  Give me hot over cold anytime.”

            “Oh, I can’t stand the heat.  I love to wear sweaters and jackets.”

            “I was raised in Arizona.  I don’t think I owned a coat until I was 20.”

            “Oh my gosh.  I was an Army brat and moved all over the place.”

            “Not me.  I like a hometown where you can stay put.”

            “That would have driven me stir crazy.”

            Notice no one ever asks the other what kind of weather they like, or what kind of clothing, or whether they like moving.  But it’s offered up in “I” statements as a way of showing how they differ.  It could also reveal things they have in common:

            “This reminds me of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

            “Hey, me too—that’s one of my favorite movies.”

            “I just love Audrey Hepburn.”

            “Oh, I know, right?  She was the best.”

            From time to time you’ll hear people tell about their lives and opinions in a series of competing statements of one-upsmanship, even escalating into a quarrel:

            “These are the best mountains for skiing, hands down.”

            “Oh, but they’re nothing like the dry powder in Utah.”

            “I’ve skied there, and I think the Alps have the best snow.”

            “Well, I’ve skied all over the world, and I’m telling you the best snow on earth is in Utah.”

            Many people don’t really want to understand, so much as to be understood.  They want to argue their position, be right, and then sit back, self-satisfied.  Making friends is not as important as making their point.  They could go months without asking another soul a question that shows real caring or interest.  Is it a good way to get to know people?  Not really.  But it’s the only way some people roll.  And knowing this will make you a better writer.  Your characters won’t all speak the same way, but the way that’s consistent with who they are inside.  And if one of them is self-centered, this is probably the way he’ll respond when trapped in a conversation with someone entirely new. 

SIck of Comparing and Contrasting?

            I don’t know about you, but I used to groan (an inner, quiet groan) with agony whenever a teacher assigned a “compare and contrast” essay.  To me, this meant busywork—taking two things (poets, movies, cars, foods, whatever) and then tediously describing how they are alike, and how they are different. As if any fool can’t see both.

            Painstakingly I would describe the similarities.  Then, equally painstakingly, I would outline the differences.  No detail left behind.  Ugh.

            And for years I never understood why we had to point out the obvious.  And then I grew up a bit.  One day I realized this skill is not just handy when choosing one author over another, or when writing an opinion piece about why one politician’s plan is better than another’s.  It’s a life skill.  You use it with every decision you make.

            In short, it’s brain training.  We compare and contrast every day—which bread to buy, which friends to pick, which interests to pursue, which activities to schedule.  You cannot make an informed decision without knowing the pros and cons.  Being able to analyze similar and different choices, helps you make wiser decisions.

This exercise also helps us connect ideas together, read with more comprehension, and analyze life’s perplexities.  It helps us organize our thoughts as we listen and speak, it helps us classify and sort, it expands our knowledge, and it enriches our vocabulary.

But the skill of being able to compare and contrast is not just for reading or decision-making.  It’s essential for writing.  Much of what we tell our readers is new to them— sometimes this is the whole reason they’re reading.  People like fresh ideas.  They like to learn new things, “see” new places and cultures, and encounter characters and concepts they’ve never encountered before. Yet, without the ability to draw analogies, or to tell your readers how this is somewhat like something they already know, you’re writing about a situation they can never grasp. You can be writing about a made-up planet, but if you want them to breathe the hot mist rising from the cracks in its crust, you need to draw parallels to the humidity, and maybe the volcanic lava they know from their own planet.

If you’re in a school setting, whether you’re a teacher or a student, the way to inject greater value into the assignment is not just to identify likenesses and differences, but then to explain why it matters.  Because it always does.  And students need to know that.

Do Judge a Book by its Cover

How many generations have grown up hearing, "Don't judge a book by its cover"?  I'm guessing as many generations as we can trace, all the way back to the first books ever published in China and Rome. And, of course, the advice isn't really about books; it's about not judging people or situations at first glance, but learning more before you make assumptions.
Books, however, do get judged by their covers, millions of times a day.  You do it, I do it; it's inevitable.  That's why so much effort is put into the art department at publishing houses.  There's a science to it, and experts know what kind of cover is going to jump off the shelf and make you want to buy it.
If you're fortunate enough to sell a book to a huge publishing house, you'll have phenomenal artists crafting a great cover for you.  If you sell to a small publisher, the artists might be wildly gifted or terribly amateurish.  Either way, you will likely have zero input in the matter.  Did you see the number I just used?  ZERO.  The art department usually isn't very interested in what a writer thinks would look good.  Pictures, fonts, graphics-- that's their field, and they don't want advice from you, any more than you want advice from them about your writing.
I know, I know-- you've been working on this book for months, maybe years, and you've spent hours and hours imagining just the right cover art.  You can picture the fog-shrouded castle, or the comic-book art of the detective's face, or the bright red high heels of the woman in a raincoat, or the sad little child staring out of the rain-drizzled window-- it's been in your head for a whole lot longer than it's been in the artist's head, who just got handed your manuscript this morning.  But it's a rare publisher that will ask you how you envision the cover.
You're simply going to have to let go.  Be grateful that you're getting published, hand it over to the cover designers, and hope they surprise you with a cover even better than you imagined.
But let's say you self publish an e-book, online.  This is now a book of a different color, and you not only have input, it's 100 per cent up to you.  Your cover could make or break sales, and unless you're as talented at cover art as you are at writing, you're in a predicament.  You can hire an artist (and many writers say it's worth every penny), or you can get your friend or your kid to whip something up for you, or you can use stock footage available for free.  You can opt out of art and just use lettering.  You can design something yourself with software on your computer.  You can take a photo and use that.  But whatever you choose, study the options and advice online, from experts in the field.  Make sure your title can be read when the cover photo is the size of a postage stamp on someone's computer screen. Make sure the font matches the genre of your book.  Lettering conveys tone, just as the art does.  Take time to make sure your cover really captures the essence of your book, and makes someone want to check it out.  Because, believe me, no matter how fabulous your book is, people are definitely going to judge it by its cover.    

Lesser-Known Puncuation Rules

I used Grammarly to grammar check this post because 10 eyes are better than two, and if you don’t believe me, just ask a scorpion (although scorpions are known for other things than having excellent proofreading skills, aren’t they?)  If you’d like to enlist a few extra sets of eyes to check your work before it goes flying out into cyberspace, I recommend grammarly.com.

Meanwhile, let’s brush up on punctuation. I have a pair of earrings made from two old typewriter keys: The semi-colon key and the quotation mark key.  I love them.  I wrote a humorous novel (“Sisters in the Mix”) about a TV cooking show host who’s also a grammar fanatic.  She corrects signs with a Sharpie, something I occasionally admit to doing, myself.  From apostrophes to misspellings, she’s on it.

            So today, I’m going to share a few lesser-known punctuation rules that all professional writers should know, and now you can join the quiet army of sticklers who paint out mistakes and make the world a better place.  I leave the choice to you.

            The first one surprises even some English majors.  When you’re writing a sentence that is fully contained within the parentheses, you keep the period in there, too.  It only goes on the outside when the parenthetical phrase is at the end of an otherwise ordinary sentence.  For example, Jim outran the cops (he was in the Olympics, remember).  (Most Olympians are not crooks, though, and don’t have to do this.)

            Next, when do you use a dash, and when do you use the shorter hyphen?  A hyphen is for compound adjectives before nouns, such as self-deprecating, half-hearted, high-maintenance, low-key, and the like.  It’s also used in numerical cases such as a 10-year-old, or a 10-foot pole.  A dash, which you make by typing two hyphens, is used to get extra attention, as if you’ve grabbed your reader by the sleeve and said, “Hold it—look at this.”  Sometimes it replaces parentheses, when you want a bit more impact.  But don’t overuse it.

            And speaking of parentheses, use them when you want to share an aside, something not essential to the sentence, but nevertheless something you want the reader to know.  For example, “Joni drove her husband’s car (the convertible Aston Martin) to Monterey.”  Okay, fine, we do not have an Aston Martin; I just want to see if my husband is reading this blog post.

            When providing a list of things, do you use a comma after the next-to-last one?  That is called the Oxford comma, and it’s a personal style choice.  But I prefer it for clarity, and this one example illustrates why:  On her vacation she met the Pope, a clown and a bank robber.  Without the Oxford comma, it appears that the Pope is a clown and a bank robber.  If you write, “On her vacation she met the Pope, a clown, and a bank robber,” then it’s clear she met three distinct people.  

            Kurt Vonnegut told writers never to use the semi-colon; I love it.  In fact, it’s my favorite punctuation mark and belongs in a sentence where each section could stand alone as a sentence, but is related enough to be joined to the other one.  “Drive slowly; children are present” is a good example of needing a semi-colon.  A comma just doesn’t convey the “because” aspect of that directive, and chopping it into two sentences sounds robotic.  A dash might work, but is a bit panicky-looking.  

            When should you use a colon?  A colon indicates that a list is coming up, and is only used if the previous statement could stand alone as a sentence. The old rule was to put two spaces after a colon, but one space is acceptable these days.  Joni’s blog has three parts: Humor, Writing, and Cooking.

How do you work with characters whose names end with S?  Well, you can avoid those names forever, or simply learn the rules.  The Jones’s cat is like the Joneses; he has a name ending in S—Rufus.  And that is Rufus’s bowl.

Some writers still struggle with punctuating the word, “its.”  This is because we use an apostrophe to show the possessive in people’s names, such as “John’s book.”  But don’t do that with its.  Use it when the word is a contraction for “it is.”  This sentence shows both usages: It’s a miracle its walls are still standing after the hurricane.

            And put the apostrophe after the s when you’re talking about a group, but before the s if you’re speaking of one person. “The teachers’ cars were all vandalized,  and the gym teacher’s son is the chief suspect.”

            There are many more rules than these, but the best way to learn them is to read all you can.  Hey—that’s also the best way to learn how to write.  You’ll simply get a feel for it, and recognize accepted conventions in grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and style. You’ll also notice when they change, which, regrettably, they always do.

Thou Shalt Nots for Writers

          Much of good writing is about breaking rules.  I remember my 4th grade teacher saying we must never begin a sentence with the word, "And."  Oh, please.  I do it all the time.  You probably do it, all God's children do it, and it works fine.  The teacher was just trying to get us to write proper, complete sentences.  Good for him, because it's like learning opera if you want to sing, or ballet if you want to dance:  Learn the classic, the best, the grandest way to do things, and then you can branch off from there and sing country or dance hip-hop.
          Same with writing.  There's another sentence he would have circled in red pencil.  The point is that, once you know what you're doing, you can bend the rules.  I used to tell students, "It's okay to break writing rules, as long as you don't get caught."  This means, as long as the reader doesn't frown and resent the way you did it, thus breaking that magical spell of being lost in your story.  If you break rules for no good reason, and it irritates the reader, you will get "caught," so to speak.  Thus, don't misspell.  Don't use poor grammar.  But if you want your characters to interrupt each other to show how impatient they are, then it works.  Or if your writing is conversational, it's okay to start a sentence with "And."
          AND, despite having said it's okay to break rules, here's where I come to my list of no-no's for writers. The following are cheap devices, wrong turns, and techniques to avoid:
          Dream sequences. Everyone resents being played.  You're watching a TV show and you can't believe the main character is shooting his friend!  Whaaat?!  Suddenly the main character sits straight up in bed, covered with sweat and panting.  Whew-- it was only a dream!  (Years ago these horrid scenes were also accompanied by harp music and wavy filming.)  The viewer, or the reader, has no idea this is all imaginary, and your surprise is not anticipated, thus not appreciated.  It feels like a bad April Fool's joke on the wrong day of the year.
           Last-minute Villains.  Do not write a suspenseful tale with a culprit who shows up in the last quarter of the book.  The murderer, the bad guy, must be woven throughout the story so readers can go back, see clues, and put it all together.  How could they possibly guess it's the policeman himself, if the policeman only shows up at the eleventh hour?  Sloppy and lazy.
           Belated clues.  Like the villain who is hidden until the last minute, clues should not be held in secret from the reader, either.  Let the reader know what the hero knows, or you're not playing fair.

           Oft-repeated phrases or scenes.  You can only have one shark attack, one psycho staring out a window, one person rumored to be a witch, one secret panel in a bookcase, one talking parrot-- you get the idea.  Things that are unusual or highly dramatic cannot keep happening; it stretches credulity too far.  As for phrases, repeating your favorites is annoying.
           The Amazing Save.  A helicopter that comes to the rescue out of nowhere, a magic wand that just happens to roll over to the imprisoned hero, a psychic who warns him to go another way-- any supernatural occurence that benefits the hero is taking the easy way out.  The hero needs to devise his own rescue, not suddenly meet a talking monkey that leads him down a hidden alley.
           The Amazing Defeat. There cannot be a sudden attack by intergalactic aliens, a weapon or a poison that doesn't exist yet, a villain who suddenly gains supernatural powers, an unexplainable injury or illness that ruins everything.  Yes, you want your hero to encounter insurmountable odds, but not cheaply.  You don't want your readers rolling their eyes at the ludicrous twist you just gave them.
           Silliness. Don't surprise readers with an evil twin-- or any twin-- not involved in the story all along.  Don't have ethnic people using phrases or words a racist would assign them.  Don't write about bimbos or thugs as if they're one-dimensional.  Don't have people fall in love and get married within two days' time. Don't tell the moral of the story (it should be obvious, if you have to have one at all).  Don't use bathroom humor.  In short, eliminate immaturity from your writing. 
           Now, go ahead and break the rules.  Just not these rules.