Give Me a Beat: Rhythm in Dialog

Just like rhythm in the narrative can hook or bore your reader, the flow of your dialog can also cause a reader to stay or skim. Too many tags can sound choppy, too few can get confusing. How you say it plays a big role in how much your readers want to hear, so look at how your dialog -- and what comes after it -- hits your reader's ears.

Getting the Best Response From Your Characters

Originally posted during the Blue Fire blog tour on Vonna Carter.com

 photo by andrewrennie

A very common structure in writing scenes is the action-reaction-emotional response element. The character does something (or something is done to them), they react to it, and they feel something about that reaction.

Bob threw the ball. Jane missed the ball. Jane cried.

Simplistic, but it has all the right pieces. What makes this stimulus/response structure work so well is that this is how we process information, so it gives us a perfect format to double check ourselves in our stories and avoid common pitfalls like telling instead of showing. Let’s look at type of sentence probably every writer has written at some point:

Leslie jumped as a girl screamed.

Seems fine, right? But look closer.

A Weekend Getaway and World Building

Was a bust week for me, and I have another guest spot up over at My Word Playground, offering tips on how to take over the world -- through world building, of course. If you're designing a fantasy world or just looking to flesh out the small town or big city in your head, pop on over.

Too Fast, Too Furious, and Way Too Much

Originally posted during the Blue Fire blog tour at First Novels Club

I have no shortage of novel ideas. New ones come at me all the time and I’m always starting new files to hold notes and plots and whatnot. Naturally, whenever I get a new idea and I get excited and want to dive headfirst into that idea.

This didn’t change when I sold my first book, The Shifter. In fact, it made it worse. Because now I had an agent, and an editor, and I had to get as many of those books written to capitalize on this fabulous luck before they found out I was a zero-talent hack. (sound familiar to anyone? Yeah, we all have the same fears)

Running on Autopilot: Working With Unconscious Goals

Goals are what drives a character (and a plot), but it's a bit more challenging when the character isn't aware of what they really want. With no concrete need, there's nothing external for them to focus on and a story can easily stall. So how do you keep the plot moving forward? By looking at what lies beneath.

Clues for the Clueless
Try approaching unconscious goals from a different angle, since it's impossible for a character to act on something they don't realize they want. The goal itself becomes more of a motivator, nudging the character toward choices that will satisfy that need, even when they aren't fully aware of it. They'll act in ways that could fill that unconscious desire, but the end goal isn't to get that desire.

If your characters have unconscious goals, think about...

On the Road Today With First Lines

I'm guest blogging over at Routines for Writers today talking about first lines and why I wrote mine the way I did. So if you're interested in what makes a great first line and what to think about to make your first lines sing, pop on over and take a peek.

I haven't forgotten abut Find Your Plot Fridays, and that'll be up later this morning. 

Feel the Rhythm of the Words

I had a few questions about rhythm from yesterday's post, so that seemed like a good post to do today.

Rhythm in writing is very important to me, both as a writer and a reader. The better the rhythm, the more drawn into the story I am. The choppier it is, the more apt I am to skim. Choppy writing is often list-like, with flat description, more what than who or why. There's no sense of storytelling, just explanation.

Dozens came down the hall in long lines. The zombies in front groaned the loudest. The ones in back shuffled without a sound. The few that broke out of line moaned a little. The moans made Bob want to scream. 

Pretty meh, isn't it?

Let's Talk About Adjectives

Got a great question last week...

I do wonder about adjectives. I generally try to avoid more than one per paragraph or thought, but is it okay to use more or should I work on cutting them out completely? 

Decisions, Decisions: Character Choices That Matter

Making a decision is one of the most important things your characters will ever do. Readers turn the page to see what happens next, and decisions are all about the "next." But there's a catch.

They have to care about the outcome of that choice.

Should I have the eggs or the cereal? is a choice, but no one is going to stay up late to see how that turns out. Because the other half of choosing is the fear that you're making the wrong choice.

Now, here's where it gets tricky.

That fear is the reader's fear, not so much the character's. Sure, the character will have their own concerns, but what makes that choice matter is how the reader feels about it. If they care about the outcome of that choice, that choice has stakes for them as well as the character. If they don't care, no matter how important that choice is to the character, it won't have any stakes. This is why those exciting action situations where the protag's life is in danger often fall flat. You know the protag isn't going to die. They might be scared out of their wits, but you know they'll be fine. Nothing they do then matters because there's no consequence to those actions.

Friday's post sparked a question about stakes. I said a man choosing between two great women wasn't real stakes. The reader asked if the man cared about those women, and one of them would get hurt, and he might wonder if he made the right choice, wasn't that something at stake? Did both choices have to have to be bad?

This is a question worth delving into more, especially since romance plots of this type are critical to so many stories of all genres.

If that choice is a core conflict choice, then it should have major consequences to it. If the entire book is about that choice, there has to be high stakes. If the choice isn't that important to the overall story, then no, the stakes don't have to be that high and the outcome can have lesser consequences. (But honestly, if the outcome doesn't matter, why have it in there in the first place?)

It's not that both choices have to be bad. Both choices should have a consequence that matters on a larger scale. If the choice between those two women (or two anything of this type of choice) has no consequence aside from hurting someone's feelings, the stakes aren't high enough to carry a whole story. Because that isn't a choice readers are likely going to care about without something else going on in the story to carry the book.

One of the big romance choices right now is The Hunger Games Katniss vs Peeta or Gale. Readers were rabid to know who she was going to pick. By all accounts, this is exactly the "bad example" situation I said not to do, right? Two great guys, one girl having to choose.

But step back.

If the book had started with Katniss in a love triangle with those two boys, would you even care? I doubt it, because there are no stakes in choosing one or the other. It's the conflicts her relationships with those boys created that made you care about her choice. It's not just hurting Peeta's feelings, it's hurting those feelings after manipulating him and faking a romance to stay alive. How he reacts to that choice has the potential to affect a much larger problem in the book. Every choice Katniss made had ramifications. The book was more than just "which boy does she choose?"

On its own, a choice between two good things with no consequences for making that choice is probably not going to hold your reader's interest. As a subplot, or in conjunction with an internal conflict, it can be an effective choice and provide higher stakes. But only if it has the potential to cause trouble for your protag. And this is the key.

If hurting one of those women was all the consequence the protag had to worry about, so what? Harsh as that sounds, after some grieving she'll go on with her life and find a much better guy than this jerk (grin) As for the man, nothing bad is going to happen to him for breaking her heart. It's not going to hurt him in the long run, even if he does feel bad about it for a while.

If, however, the woman was so upset she killed herself, that's a pretty serious consequence to his actions that he'll have to carry around the rest of this life. If she decided to make his life miserable in revenge, that would cause him trouble. If the woman he dumped was his new boss's sister, he might be in a world of hurt at that new job. It doesn't even have to be that overt. It can have more subtle ramifications for the protag. It can cause emotional troubles, it can make him so guilt-ridden it keeps him up nights and causes a ripple effect.


Consequences create high stakes. Whatever the choice, it should have the power to adversely affect your protag in some way, even if that problem is down the road some. That consequence might not even happen, but the potential for it should be there.


From a purely plotting standpoint, choices that don't cause trouble are wasted opportunities. The whole point of a book is to show someone overcoming adversity to win. If there's nothing to overcome, there's no point in the winning. Just look how many fans leave a sporting event before the end when it's clear what the outcome is going to be. There's nothing left to lose, so seeing the win doesn't matter.