An Absence of Alliterative Appellations: Day 6

The end of an era? (6,263 / 1,000,000)

There I stood, armed only with a broken chair leg and my own wits, facing down a horde of snarling… Psyche! No short story today. We’re back to our regularly scheduled programming, if anything I’ve written so far could be considered regular.

First off, some of you reached out with kind words, and I just wanted to sincerely thank you! I had a lot of fun coming up with stories over the past few days, and I think I learned a few things as well.

I spent the last two days trying to figure out how the hell fictional people talk to each other, and let me tell you… words are hard (see what I did there?). I think what surprised me most was discovering how little dialogue fit naturally into my stories. I found that I had a predisposition towards lengthy descriptions, whether it be of the characters themselves or the environment around them. It was difficult for me to pare down the development, and add in the dialogue. For reference, only 172 of my roughly one thousand words were dialogue yesterday.

In the future, I think being more strategic with my setting and characters would help me better achieve my goals. If I wanted to perform a case study on dialogue, maybe a remote mountainside featuring just two characters was not the best backdrop for the story! Something like a group of people telling spooky stories around a campfire would probably give more opportunities to flesh out dialogue. My problem is that I’m more impulsive than a caffeinated chihuahua, and rarely do I allow myself the luxury of forethought.

Oh! That reminds me, if anyone was curious (spoiler: nobody was curious), I’m going to teach you my favorite word of all time - verisimilitude. Basically, it’s just how believable something is in the context of the story. Let’s say you were marathoning Game of Thrones, and Jon Snow suddenly pulled out a Glock 9 and started capping White Walkers¹. That would probably break your verisimilitude. Obviously, zombie popsicles themselves are not realistic, but verisimilitude does not address realism, simply story consistency. Where was I going with this, again? Diablo 2? No. Diabolical? No. Oh yeah, dialogue! Man, you guys have to be tired of that word by now.

When I write, I tend to break conventions. By that I mean I don’t know the conventions, so I assume I break many of them. But one convention I try not to shatter too thoroughly is verisimilitude. Dialogue can really make or break the believability of a character, I think. A character’s speech should reflect a perspective in the story that is believable for that story. Neither a medieval peasant nor a pirate captain would likely utilize an extensive vocabulary of obscure words. Unless of course that specific character were intentionally unique. Take Captain Barbossa’s “I’m disinclined to acquiesce to your request,” from that one pirate movie. Ah, it’s too bad that movie never had any sequels…

I wonder what I should work on next? It’s in my nature to drop unfinished work and start something else completely fresh. Remember, caffeinated chihuahua. I’ll eventually circle back to work on dialogue again, I’m sure, but in the meantime I think I’ll move on. I’m really interested in worldbuilding at the moment (and, well, always). Worldbuilding has to be one of the most beloved elements of writing amongst fiction authors. I don’t know that for certain, but it’s such a pure form of expressing creativity. I mean, you’re literally just making shit up…

To do it well, however, I know that I’ll need to focus on saying more with less. Sure, detailed descriptions add depth to your world, but you don’t want your readers to drown in a deluge of descriptors. You can only be so detailed before you are characterizing the nature of the atoms that make up the blade of grass in the meadow which is found in a clearing of a forest adjacent the town of Bree. Obviously, it’s not usually that bad - subtlety is not my strong suit, if you haven’t noticed already.

I’ll probably return to short stories to experiment, but I’ll let that be a surprise. Since worldbuilding is inherently a part of every story, I’ll be able to look back at my other few stories to see what I did well and see what areas I can improve upon. I think I may get around to rewriting some of my stories too, so I can see what I would do differently on a 1:1 scale. Part of Jensen’s million word system states that “writing is rewriting”, but also imposes some restrictions on rewriting. The word count of the first draft of something is worth full words, the word count of the second draft is divided by two, the third draft is divided by three, and so on. For the arithmetically inclined among you, the word count of the nth draft is worth: word count * ( 1 / n).

It’s funny, when I write stories I find that I’m halfway done with the tale before realizing I’m at 1200 words already. While when I write whatever this would be considered (a blog post?), I find myself putzing about around eight hundred words, wondering what tantalizing tidbits of text I can add to fill out these last few hundred words. Reading through this post, I could probably milk a few hundred more words out of this if I just broke up my contractions. But I think simply mentioning the fact that I could do that will suffice today. As always, thank you for reading, stay safe, have a great day, and….

Totally Nailed it,
Michael

1. For those of you around my age or younger, a Glock is a gun that goes “pew pew!”, like in Call of Duty. For my older readers, capping is a colloquial term for when one discharges a projectile from a firearm at an entity.