Speak, spake, spoke

I love dialogue. Or do you spell it dialog?
With one quote mark or two?

It's how people talk and that's the problem. Writing it whilst in the middle of a scene playing in your head, the words sound fairly normal. We like say like yeah you know like it's what I'm tryin' to tell you.

You hear people talking that way and in the scene, it sounds very real.

Read it back and wonder, 'what the fuck was that about?' Single quotes.

Or in italics.

The italics is a form that naturally didn't exist before the word processor was developed. The italicized word was underlined through a process that involves the wheel, axle grease and a backspace key.

I think stories are driven by dialogue, with a touch of 'he pinned the gardenia to her blouse' while he stared at her chest, proclaiming "My, I love the way you have your hair up."

"Thank you, I think," she implied.

Of course, the actions are considered trite and pointless. The 'she said' is good enough but not very often because the experts tell you it drags down the scene. You just need to plop in a pronoun here and there so you can tell who's being snarky and who's being Costello. 

And Who's On First.

It's cadence and if dialogue doesn't seem natural, just condense it to a paraphrased scene and move on to the moment she exclaims:

"Just because I let you put the flower on my blouse doesn't give you the right to have tricky fingers, buddy-boy!"

"Sorry," he whined.

Dialogue from my prospective Best-Seller "Tooth of Toad."

Hilly and Bonny are at the mysterious shed.

*

We found the same dirt pull-in from before and I could see the shed on the other side of the hedge apples that had looked so forbidding in the dark, even with an experienced witch as my guide. Same rusted fence posts, same little pathway through the cocklebur patch. 

“OK, Hilly, my honey bun, here’s our shed. I brought the journal, so we can do some real work there.”

“Is that the same journal you mentioned earlier? We gonna make the wheel spin?”

“You wanna? It’s broken. Grab that wooden slat over there,” she pointed. “We might need to swat down some spiders.”

“I thought witches were friends to spiders.”

Bonny gazed at me. “Maybe your witches are but they scare the fuck out of me. Be my hero, Hilly, and kill any that you see.”

“Another illusion, shot to hell.”

She stopped short of the shed. “If you hear anything, let me know.”

“Any limitations on what that might be? I mean, there’s a little plane flying this direction. If you listen close, you hear the train horn over by Bradley Lake.”

“Don’t be a butthead, Hilly. It needs to growl first.”

“Spiders don’t typically growl, Bonny. Screw this, let me kick open the shed and murder anything with eight legs or fangs.”

“Fangs would have a bad attitude, Hilly. Spiders are just creepy.”

x

Back-reading

I have a lot of manuscripts in my computer or on a flash drive. All of them were written in a voice or a point of view that said:

These are fun books. Read them and enjoy the stories. The stories aren't important and the characters are not supposed to inspire you to think. Occasionally, the dialogue hints at a form of self-appraisal. If not, oh well. 

I tossed off a version of "The 8th Soul" on a couple of people who instantly told me the story was confusing and that they didn't know what the main character's 'job' was supposed to be.

At that point, I realized the road toward legitimate publication goes through some small towns. 

"The 8th Soul" is a story about a newspaper man named Jim, his girlfriend cop named Mint, some unsolved murders and their quest to find the killer, the motive or the method. None of those are apparent.

What is left is the unknown. Clues come from places right next to that.

I have a lot of work to do on the story, and it's useful to know that spending a few hundred dollars just to make me feel better about a book is sort of -- well, what else do I need to spend my money on this year? 

The back-reading is useful to me, but it doesn't fix anything. 

More useful now are people who claim they have plenty of writing time to also have plenty of reading time. We can't make our work better without help. Establishing our objectives is important.

A blurb:

Sharon Sanders and Mary Baker, cousins.

Not sisters, as we first thought, and residents of Ravenswood Mobile Home Estates, as we first thought.

"Not hookers, not really,” Mint told me over the phone. “They owned the trailer and would meet guys in bars, or wherever, and take them out to Ravenswood to party. We found evidence of marijuana in their blood but nothing else that could have killed them. No wounds, punctures. It’s hard to tell, though, if somebody was just scared to death, literally.”

"That’s consistent with what Todd Murphy found on Coo.”

"Um-hum,” Mint said. “Todd’s a good coroner. He isn’t likely to miss anything unusual.”

"Mint, can somebody really be scared to death? I mean, yeah . . . fright might trigger a heart attack.”

"Todd would notice that.”

"Right, so what we have is . . . what?”

"Honestly, and I say this out of a total lack of expertise, I’d say these women have simply been removed of their life. It was like . . . if you open a can of beer under water and hold it there. All the alcohol will flow out of the can. Then you take the beer out of the water and pour it into a glass. It looks and acts like beer, but there’s no alcohol in it. So when you drink it, it tastes like . . . nothing.”

"The alcohol flows out?”

"It just rises, separates itself from the rest of the ingredients.”

I considered the experiment. “I might try that. So, what you are saying is, the alcohol is effectively the soul of the beer.”

"Nothing quite that philosophical, but what makes the beer a beer is that it has some alcohol in it. Otherwise, it’s just liquefied grain.”

"So the gray people snatched the women’s souls.”

Mint laughed into the phone. “I thought you told me Coo didn’t have one.”

"I just said she was a bitch at times.”