Dialogue – Page 3 – Joseph Carrabis, Author Blog

Trigger Warnings – Did you forget to put the gun in Act I?

“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” – Anton Checkov

I keep running into editors and publishers wanting trigger warnings when submitting manuscripts.

The need for trigger warnings confuses me because it raises a question about storycrafting, specifically the aspect of storycrafting known as foreshadowing.

If I, as an author/storyteller/writer, have done my job, the reader won’t need a trigger warning because any story element requiring a warning will be warned of well ahead of its happening by previous events in the story itself. And don’t say “What if in the first scene…” because now you’re talking genre tropes, not storycrafting.

Does some event come out of nowhere without precedent? It doesn’t belong in the story, or the story needs major revision.

Examples Continue reading “Trigger Warnings – Did you forget to put the gun in Act I?”

The Book of The Wounded Healers
(a study in perception)
Chapter 5 – The Russians Have Landed

You can read the backstory on The Book of the Wounded Healers in The Book of The Wounded Healers/(a study in perception)/Frame and Chapter 1 – The First Communication, and it may help understanding the story’s universe a bit.

Read previous chapters:

Let me know what you think.

The Book of The Wounded Healers
(a study in perception)
Chapter 5 – The Russians Have Landed

Fourth grade, now a student in Mrs. Woodbury’s class, and we are talking about a recent Russian cosmonaut landing. One of the kids in class asked why the Russians always landed on land and we always landed in an ocean. I remember Mrs. Woodbury dismissing the question, “We could land on land if we wanted to…” I don’t remember the rest of her answer. What I do remember is knowing, knowing even then, that Mrs. Woodbury was lying, that we couldn’t land on land and that water was safer for us. What I remember most was knowing in that sacred unspeakable way only a child can know, even as Jiminy would know, that Mrs. Woodbury was afraid of the truth, afraid to admit that the Russians could do something we couldn’t.

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Terry “Tales from the Greenhills” Melia and I talk about Writing, Authoring, and Publishing

The amazing and incredible author Terry Melia talked with me this past Saturday. It was a fun chat and we covered lots of ground, hopefully some of it will be useful to others.

Here are two excerpts starting with using your own emotional experiences to add realism write fiction events

and one with some advice to writers.

You find the full video on Terry’s YouTube channel (and we both hope you do and comment).

Attribution via Action

People who’ve worked with me in critique groups or in my trainings know about attribution via action because

I use it often in my own work and
I use it often when editing/critiquing someone’s work as it tightens scenes considerably.

Almost a year ago I wrote

The desire to have characters do something while talking is good, the execution is usually poor, and now we’re dealing with attribution via action which I’ll cover in another post.

in Toing and Froing and now, for various reasons, here’s that post.

Attribution via Action became increasingly important to me when writing my last novel, Tag. I noticed the actions I used for attribution purposes were stale, generic, didn’t apply to what happened in each scene.

I’ll defend myself with “It was a first, rough draft” which is true. I recognized the problem and made notes in the manuscript to fix it during rewrite, which I will because I tend towards anality about such things.

And still, it’s better not to have such issues in any draft, especially first drafts, as the more corrections necessary the more time taken not publishing and promoting the immediate project and all projects together.

So as I often do when I recognize a weakness in my own work, I gave myself exercises to improve my storycrafting and storytelling. In this case, use attribution via action specific to what I want the reader to experience when they read the sentence/paragraph/page/scene.

I’ve also learned from workshops and teaching that the term “attribution” isn’t in vogue any more.

Sigh.

So some definitions/explanations first.

Speech Tags
The reader has to know who’s communicating in a scene. Knowing who’s saying what is often more important that knowing what’s being said. This is done by identifying the speaker with what they’re speaking.

Words like said, talked, shared, spoke, … are now called “speech tags” and use to be called “attributions” but far be it for a writer to use a single, exact word when a weak, two word phrase can almost do the job not as well.

Said, talked, shared, spoke, … are fine words and they are weak because they lack emotional content until we use a adverb modifier such as said angrily, talked quietly, shared emphatically, spoke loudly, …

A thesaurus helps because said angrily becomes hissed, talked quietly becomes whispered, shared emphatically becomes emphasized, spoke loudly becomes shouted, … becomes … and so on.

Linda Seger’s “Making a Good Script Great”

Linda Seger’s Making a Good Script Great is one of two books I recently picked up on scriptwriting/screenwriting because…well, basically because I like to learn, and learn I did. There are more pages dogeared, highlighted, and marked up than there are pages untouched.

Begin with the concept that storytelling is storytelling is storytelling and it doesn’t matter the medium because regardless of medium you want a strong, visceral reaction from your audience/reader.

Now recognize that any medium will touch on all aspects of getting that strong, visceral reaction to some degree; a character is a character is a character, a scene is a scene is a scene, dialogue is dialogue is dialogue.

Go one more to specific mediums emphasize specific aspects more than others due to that medium’s limitations. Literature can handle 1st Person POV handily, script/screenwriting not so much.

Recognize that and the next item is to learn ways to fake 1st Person POV in a medium designed for 3rd Person Limited/Omniscient POV.

And if you stop there and say to yourself, “But I don’t have to do that when I write a book” you’re missing out on an incredible learning opportunity. Sure, you may never have to do that in a book but learning how to do it and – more importantly – how to work with such a constraint gives you the flexibility to use that technique, parts of that techniques, concepts from that technique, modify it, et cetera, to make your own non-script/screenwriting work sing.