We all talk. Some of us too much, but good writers understand cadence and pacing in dialogue and you can tell because the conversation is smooth and familiar. I’ve judged a number of contests over the years, and below you’ll find a couple of my pet peeves. One pet peeve I have is the idiom, pet peeve, so let’s move on.

“Jack, I think we need to take over this train! The engineer’s dead! If you don’t, we’ll crash into the some stalled train in front of us, or maybe the end of the line where there’s a lot of concrete and maybe a big steel thingy that will crush this tin can!”

“What makes you think I can stop this train, Ethyl?”

“I don’t know, Jack, but you’re a man and all men think they can fly airplanes, so why not a train!!!???”

“Of course I can, but Ethyl, why don’t you do it?” Jack asked without shouting like his partner.

Ethyl exclaimed. “Oh, Jack! My role is to stand aside while you fight the Bad Guys and look frightened! Maybe I can cover my mouth with one hand, too, while you decide between blue and red wires.”

“Good lord! Pay attention, Ethyl. Wires are only an issue when a bomb is about to go off,” he hissed.

“This train is a rolling bomb!”she shouted, fearfully, “but I’m beginning to think you’re a dud. Pretty soon people are going to think we hijacked this train –––.”

“Hi yourself, Ethyl, but this isn’t the time for pleasantries. As we race down this track they’ll soon call some alphabet group to stop us.”

“I’m confused, Jack.

“So am I, Ethyl, but at least we know who’s talking!”

I distilled this from an entry and changed enough of the story for you to get the idea. Writers should imitate the way people speak in real life.

For one thing, we don’t use a person’s name in every sentence when we’re talking. I think the original author watches too many movies or sitcoms, where scriptwriters repeat names to excess in order for the audience to keep up. It doesn’t work in print.

At the same time, , we don’t need tags and attributions like “hissed” in this sentence, because are no sibilants, and for crying out loud, avoid exclamation marks! And if you do use one, there’s no reason to explain that he or she exclaimed or shouted!!!

“One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.” Either Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald said that, and there’s some question about which one, but it’s a true statement.

That’s something I’ve seen when I judged humor writing in newspapers many years ago. The exclamation point comes up way too often in the punch line, or as emphasis at the end of a story. One example is so bad it makes my teeth ache, but it was the last line in what I figured was supposed to be a joke…I think.

“And I looked up that day as the storm approached and saw a squirrel laying flat and holding onto the tree limb. I kept going, but gave him a word of advice. ‘Hold on tight, Mr. Bushytail, it’s a good thing you’re in a pecan tree, because this is gonna be nuts!’”

Maybe he read too much Swiss Family Robinson (1812) when he was younger! It looks like he caught some of Johann Wyss’ bad habits! This except from Wyss is a good bad example of what to avoid.

The setup. A ship sinks, the family survives and winds up on a beach to salvage what they could.

“Well done, Franz!” I cried; “these fishhooks, which you, the youngest, have found, may contribute more than anything else in the ship to save our lives by procuring food for us.”

“All these things are excellent indeed,” said I; “but my friend Jack here has presented me with a couple of huge, hungry, useless dogs who will eat more than any of us.”

“Oh, papa! They will be of use! Why, they will help us to hunt when we get on shore!” (No tag here for some reason.)

“No doubt they will, if ever we do get on shore, Jack; but I must say I don’t know how it is to be done.”

“Oh, look here, father!” cried Jack, drawing a little spyglass joyfully out of his pocket.

All right. I know this was written two hundred years ago, and the issues I’ve highlighted are more for tongue-in-cheek fun than anything else, but I’ve seen examples that are just as bad in contest entries, and the sad part is they’ve been published.

You can dissect and rewrite the scene above in a million different ways, but avoiding all those literary death traps of attributions, the overuse of the exclamation point, and for the love of god…semicolons, is step one.

So let’s review.

Don’t overuse names in dialogue.

Write dialogue as real people would speak.

No exclamation points!

Fewer tags (and I know this steps on toes). Instead, give your character something to do.

Cut as many adverbs as possible.

Learn to drive trains and diffuse bombs, just in case.

When you’re developing a character, how much thought do you put into their status? If you’re like me, probably not a lot of concentrated effort. I have a good handle on their personality, looks, motives, dreams, fears, desires, insecurities, strengths, quirks, and smarts or stupids, but I don’t flesh out their status—at least not consciously. I tend to let that evolve or stand on its own.

I follow Sahil Bloom, a thought leader and motivator, who has significantly grown his audience in the past year. Sahil hosts a site called The Curiosity Chronicle and has a twice-weekly newsletter with some great content. On Tuesday, his subject was How to Play the Right Status Games citing the difference between “bought status” and “earned status”.

The status subject hit home to me about a recent decision. It was time to buy a replacement vehicle for our old Suzuki hatchback. I hinted to my wife, Rita, that we should splurge and finance a new Range Rover. That didn’t go over well.

“That is nothing but a status symbol. It’s like those leased Beamer SUVs Karens drive,” Rita said. “They’re for people who want to be seen. What? Do you want to start hanging around Starbucks, too?”

Rita made a point. We cash-purchased a low mileage, Kia four-door sedan and grabbed a McDonalds coffee for the ride home.

I flashed back to that Rover moment when I read Sahil’s column and felt it was worth a share on the Kill Zone. So, I sent him an email to which he quickly responded. With full attribution to Sahil Bloom and his kind republishing permission, here’s the piece.

Thanks to Sahil Bloom at The Curiosity Chronicle whose new book The Five Types of Wealth is about to be released.

Kill Zoners — How much attention do you pay to developing your characters’ status?

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Blue-footed booby

I had another post I was working on, but life got in the way. So I thought I’d rerun a column on discoverability. It seems apt in this age of AI. Has anything changed? Where we go:

Discoverability is becoming as rare as the blue-footed booby.

According to Bowker, the outfit that registers ISBN numbers, over a million self-published books were issued ISBNs last year.

That’s a one with six zeros after it.

And understand, this does not include traditionally-published books, nor all the ebook-only titles without ISBNs.

Which means there’s a whole lotta books out there, and more added every year. (Most of which are bad. See Sturgeon’s Law.)

Industry observer Mike Shatzkin added this:

I had reason to learn recently that Ingram has 16 million individual titles loaded in their Lightning Source database ready to be delivered as a bound book to you within 24 hours, if not sooner. So every book coming into the world today is competing against 16 million other books that you might buy.

That number — the number of individual book titles available to any consumer, bookstore, or library — has exploded in my working lifetime. As recently as 25 years ago, the potential titles available — in print and on a warehouse shelf ready to be ordered, or even to be backordered until a next printing — was numbered in the hundreds of thousands. So it has grown by 20 or 30 or 40 times. That’s between 2000 percent and 4000 percent in the last quarter century.

Of discoverability, agent Rachelle Gardner recently observed:

How can any single book stand out in that large of a field? It’s very difficult. The problem is known as discoverability and it means the odds are stacked against us when we want to bring readers’ attention to our books.

This is why the publisher needs your help—it’s important to find your audience, that specific group of people who will like your book. They need you engaging with your audience, connecting with them, doing your part to make them aware of you.

Even with all this work, it’s still hard to make your book discoverable. It’s not anyone’s fault. Publishers are not conspiring to make life difficult for you. They’re not being unreasonable by requiring authors to participate in marketing. It’s simply the situation we find ourselves in—there are too many books, so we all have to work so much harder to each one stand out to its unique audience.

One line that jumped out at me is: the publisher needs your help. It used to be the other way around. A writer needed a traditional publisher to get into bookstores. If there were some marketing dollars in the budget, the publisher might arrange to have the book placed on the New Release table at the front of the store.

But now, with bookstore space shrinking, and marketing push going almost exclusively to the A list, authors writing inside the walls of the Forbidden City are expected to do audience building themselves (which has some authors wondering why the publishing houses still take the same royalty split as when they did all the heavy lifting. But I digress).

So how do you build an audience these days? The old-fashioned way. You earn it. (Hat tip to John Houseman).

Book after book. And more than one or two titles. You don’t hit a stride until you have several books out there to go with a steady pace of future production.

Another agent, Steve Laube, also reflected on the Bowker publishing numbers, and offered this advice:

1. Write the very best book you can.
2. Build an audience who will support your work (i.e. platform).
3. Decide whether to self-publish (but only do it the right way) or go the traditional route (get an agent).
4. Figure out how to launch a book.

The fundamentals don’t change, do they? That’s why they’re called fundamentals. I’d modify the list a bit this way:

1. Write the very best books (plural) you can, at least one per year.
2. Keep learning and growing in the craft.
3. Decide what kind of writer you want to be. If self-publishing is on your mind, consider:
   1. Can you be sufficiently productive?
   2. Do you have the discipline to learn basic business practices?
   3. Are you willing to invest between $500 and $2,000 for cover design, editing, and proofreading for each book?

4. If traditional publishing is your goal, ask:
   1. Am I patient enough to wait up to 18 months for my book to come out?
   2. Will my agent fight for more author-friendly non-compete and reversion-of-rights clauses?
   3. Am I ready with a plan should my publisher drop me?

One word I do wish we’d get rid of is platform. For non-fiction a platform is desirable because there’s a built-in audience for a subject. But agents and publishers push this amorphous concept on unpublished fiction authors, which only adds to their stress and detracts from their writing time.

The best time for a fiction writer to build a platform is 2003. That’s when we weren’t so blog saturated that a new author might actually gain a following. That’s when we weren’t tossing away good writing time on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram (and, worse, thinking that the latter venues are good places to sell books!)

As I argued a couple of years ago, we need to get out of “discoverability thinking” and into “trustability thinking.”

You should be thinking that each new offering is an opportunity to prove to readers that you deliver the goods. As you do this, time after time, trust in you grows. Consumers buy more from businesses they trust. Readers are consumers and you are a business.

This applies whether you are traditional or indie, commercial or literary, tall or short.

Or have blue feet.

So … are you about to dive into the cold Atlantic of content, knowing full well how vast and choppy it is out there? Have you taken swimming lessons (studied craft and market)?  

Or are you already swimming?

How’s the water?

By John Gilstrap

The crazy lady held a carving blade from the knife block on the kitchen counter, and she vehemently expressed her desire to hurt me with it. The year was 1990, plus or minus three. We were in her double-wide. The driver of my ambulance was in urgent communication with the EOC–emergency operations center–police were on the way, and the crazy lady (you got the CRAZY part, right?) stood between me and the door. I was armed with a radio and maybe a stethoscope. I suspect that drugs may have been involved because the crazy lady repeatedly sought counsel from someone only she could see. And apparently hear.

This was not my wheelhouse. We volunteers had no training for talking unstable people out of their murder weapons. While she seemed moved by my arguments that I had a young boy at home who needed me, the invisible sonofabitch had a convincing counterargument.

The confrontation ended without nuance. Crazy Lady had left the door open and when a critical mass of cops had arrived–I’ll stipulate that it took less than the seven hours that it felt–they hit her with the subtlety shown to a quarterback who fumbles the snap.

Happy ending. For me. I don’t know how it ended for her. Or her imaginary friend.

I’ve never written of this incident until right now, largely because it exposes me as a moron. Can you articulate the error that nearly got me killed? Read to the end for the reveal.*

Let’s turn this into a writing lesson.

For me, action scenes–fight scenes–are the hardest scenes to write. They’re also the easiest scenes to screw up.

My interaction with Crazy Lady involved countless thoughts, decisions and observations, all of which transpired simultaneously and in the space of a heartbeat.

In fiction, a heartbeat on the page can be a paragraph or a chapter. In Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” that length of time takes up a whole short story.

The secret to fast action is to write slow.

Let’s imagine a scene we all know: The Old West duel in the street. For my example, imagine that we’re past the build-up and the dread–think “High Noon” or “Firecreek”–and dial straight into the ditry deed of draw-and-fire.

The reality of the action will transpire over the course of a few seconds–five, at the most–but a one-sentence gunfight squanders drama and cheats your reader out of and exciting, engaging scene. So, how do we make it engaging?

Choose your POV Characters carefully, remembering that both shooters have something to prove or defend.

Arguably, the easiest POV characters for the scene are the shooters themselves–the guys (it’s always guys, right?) who are presenting their hearts and spines for penetration at 900 feet per second.

Are they concentrating on not being killed, or on killing the other guy? There’s a huge difference. Think about it: The best chance to score a kill shot means squaring your body across the target for a stronger stance that allows for better aim and trigger control. That also means making yourself a bigger target. Alternatively, you could blade your body to the target to make yourself harder to hit, but also creating a less stable shooting platform. What does it say of a character who thinks this way?

Are you presenting both POVs or just one? What are they thinking? What are they looking for?

Now, suppose that (one of) the POV character(s) is the 12-year-old child of one of the shooters. What does that do to your narrative? Okay, and the 12-year-old’s best friend is the child of the other shooter. Are they watching the duel together? What are their older or younger siblings doing?

Every element of story is about character.

If you write thrillers, your job is to make your audience scream for mercy. That means setting up seemingly irreversible collision courses for your characters. If one of my stories presents a comfortable moment for you to go to bed–or go to the bathroom, for that matter–I have failed.

In our street duel example, why didn’t Good Guy Greg just pop Bad Guy Bart in the back of the head and be done with it? Or the other way around? Did they consider it? Are their hands shaking?

In the real world, all of these thoughts and feelings and considerations whirl at the speed of synapse, but as the recorder of fact in the fictional world, it falls upon you to reveal these instinctive reactions in a way that feels fast yet is still discernable.

*Humiliating tactical error: I allowed Crazy Lady to block my access to the exit. If I could have left and gone to safety, the police response (God bless them!) could have been far less kinetic.