Dialogue Dragon

Everyday, we all do one thing that many writers find difficult to translate into written word: talk. Dialogue can make or break a drama, submerge or expel a reader from your fantastical realm. It’s a handy tool to have in your tool belt, and the better the quality of your tools, the better quality of work you can do.

Getting my characters to talk to one another was always hard when I first started writing. Everything I wrote was stiff and sounded so formal. It all changed when one of my elementary teachers noticed I liked writing stories. She started giving me photocopies from a young author help book. It had advice in it about anything and everything to do with writing short stories. It had a very small chapter on dialogue. One of the tips it had has stayed with me until now: speak the lines out loud as you write. This makes them more realistic, and sound coherent. If you, or someone you know, wouldn’t say it that way, your character wouldn’t say it that way (unless your character was super dry and/or brainy, like Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory”).

You can adjust the tone of your dialogue much easier by saying yourself what you want your character to say as opposed to imagining how they would say it. Writing from experience is usually much simpler to do than creating a whole new scenario that you know nothing about. It’s like we’re always told: “Write what you know”. And you have to know your character if you want to write dialogue that sounds like them.

It’s true that I’m the type of writer that has to submerge myself in the world I’m writing about or the person I’m talking as in order to write a story that is believable. This method doesn’t work for all people, so here are some tips that can help:

1. Make a character sketch. This is basically a brief description of the person you’re writing as with some background info, personality traits, fears, dreams, basically anything that’s special about them.
2. Force some of your friends to have a fake conversation as though they are your characters. Not only will this help you with your dialogue, it can also be pretty funny.
3. Watch some movies and focus on how they talk. It doesn’t really matter what they’re talking about, but how they say it. What kind of language are they using? Is their tone light, serious, sarcastic, bored, annoyed? How do you notice it? All these little details that are found in movies can be used in your stories. You aren’t stealing them. It’s inspiration.
4. Spy on total strangers in public places. Listen in on their conversations and try to figure out their emotional state just by their word choice. Different words have different connotations, even if they’re synonymous.

Dialogue doesn’t have to instill fear in the hearts of every burgeoning author. Face the dragon head on and find out it was only a kitten with cardboard triangles on it’s back. Happy writing!

-Seivan Engelhardt

Adventures in Self Loathing

  There is no better writer than the self loathing writer: this is a paradoxical thought from the mind of yours truly, a writer whose loathing of ones self is embedded in her very soul. Maybe the term "self loathing" is a tad harsh for someone who is enamoured with the act of writing creatively, but I believe it gets the point across, that the best literature often emerges from intense scrutiny of ones own work.

  For a very long time I found myself trapped in a cycle of inspiration, ecstatic writing, neutral writing and then finally loathing ever letter I had written and hiding my work in places no one would ever dare to look. I am that writer who tears their work to shreds, double and even triple bags it before throwing it into the trash, and yes, even burning it, I kid you not. Until the dawn of writing on Microsoft Word I never kept my writing and I regret it, if only for the fact that I would have gotten some terrible laughs out of rereading it. Once I acquired my first laptop and learned all the tools of the trade I decided not to turn my writing into something at risk of starting forest fire in my backyard and instead hiding it in files within files within files on my computer. After this moment I realized there was more to my self destructive cycle, and that every piece of writing I had ever created had a chance at rebirth.

  The fact that I could keep my work without the fear of anyone ever finding it allowed me to return to it after months and even years of despising it. I discovered that given time, much of my writing seemed to improve, so to speak, even through I had done no editing to it at all. This is not to say that every piece I have ever written is salvageable; I have spent many an hour writing stories of up to 70,000 words and then suddenly experiencing some form of divine intervention screaming to me from the heavens, "Dear Lord if you write another word of this abomination the universe just might cease to exist itself!" But all of this being said, failure is a necessary part of writing, for it allows the writer to find themselves and what works for them, not to mention that it is absolutely hilarious to look back on.

  Loving what you write is far from a requirement when writing creatively, loving to write, however, is. From personal experience I can tell you that loathing your own writing can lead to lovely outcomes. You may, for example, become so enraged with your story that you decide to make your characters drink some tantalizing red Kool-Aid in an outburst of mass suicide. You may decide to introduce your lovely heroine to a charming Mr. Ted Bundy, in a tragic mixture of fiction and non-fiction. You may allow your character to trip and hit their eye on a door knob. Be abusive with them. Your story doesn't need to make sense. If you're angry take it out on your writing because God knows we would all love to do it in real life but this is your only outlet so you might as well utilize it, am I right?  Sometimes anger can lead to the most creative of ideas, and sometimes being absolutely ridiculous can allow you to become more light hearted about your own work.

  Leaving your writing to its own devices for a while is another ideal way to renew your creative spirit and lessen your murderous rage. Sometimes I will return to a piece a few months after completely abandoning it and I will think to myself, "This is much better than I originally thought! I'm a God damn genius!" and from then on out I will be more than happy to continue my story. It seems that the best way for one to love ones own writing is in fact by loathing it. That feeling of wanting to decapitate yourself with your own laptop or smash your own skull in with a typewriter, if you're the old fashioned type, is a sign that you're doing something right. You're discovering your own writing style, you're discovering what works for yourself through trial, error, and intense self loathing. But really, is there any better way to do so?

  The moral of my harrowing tales is that there is nothing wrong with a little rage, depression and self loathing when it comes to writing. It's all a part of the writing process and it allows for one to improve upon their own writing and devote themselves to it. Whether it's anger or enthusiasm, feeling passionate about your own work is a wonderful thing. Your feelings will guide you to becoming a better writer, and knowing how to become your own critic is the most useful skill to have.

- Jamie Wilkinson

Be a Sadist

            Do you ever find yourself really dissatisfied after watching a movie, feeling like you just wasted 2 hours of your life? I recently felt that after watching a movie. It was a low-budget, independent film with a cast of 4 people and one set location. Throughout the entire 2 hours, not a single bad thing happened to the characters. I felt like they just frolicked through a field of daisies throughout the whole thing, that’s why it was so boring.

What happens quite often to me is that I’ll be writing what seems to me a perfectly fine story, where my characters are adequately developed and my plot seems to be moving forward, and then I’ll reach a stand still. So I wonder, what next? What’ll happen to my precious characters? Something interesting I’ve learned recently is that that next event that pushes your characters forward should be something bad.

Kurt Vonnegut once said “Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” I happen to agree with him. Readers want to fall in love with your characters, whether they are realistic or fictional, positive or cynical, good or bad, readers WANT to be attached to your characters, that’s what they’re most often hoping for when they pick up your piece to read. And as a writer, you’ll grow very attached to your characters as well. They’re your babies, you’ve helped them grow and develop. Naturally, you’d hate to see them suffer. Well, too bad.

I’ve come to believe that one of the best things you can do for your characters is put them in awful situations. Its when they’re in these situations that you, as a writer, will discover what they will do and how they will react. Even if it’s not what you want for them, or even if you know it won’t move your story forward, try it out. Let your mind go there, string together a couple sentences letting your characters get his by a bus or shot in the foot and see what happens. You may discover a deep boldness within the soul of one of them, or discover an unforgivable cowardice. Ultimately, you will show the reader what your characters are made of, be it good or bad.  

When thinking up ideas for a story, or when you’re drawing out a timeline of your piece, try making it a time line of bad events. Whether that bad event is a cancer diagnosis or eating expired bread, put them in there. Push your characters to their limits, see how much they can take. And if these situations don’t make the final cut, so be it. At the very least, this has led you to discover even more about your characters, and hopefully you can share those traits with your readers, enabling them to feel more strongly for your precious children.

- Sienna Zampino

Writing Fingerprints

By: Harry Gittens, Lauren Hannough-Bergmans, Nelanthi Hewa

Hey everyone. I try to write. I really do. I sit down at my laptop and try to pour words on to the screen and add on to them to make sentences. Sometimes I dance my fingers around the keyboard [(whose layout I’m so familiar with) you know like when you use the same one every single day and get vexed by all others when you try to use them] in cartoonish and exaggerated ways trying to convince myself I know what I’m saying. Sometimes it helps and I feel accomplished, it doesn’t always though. When it doesn’t work and I really have no fuckin’ clue about what I’m to say I generally follow this procedure.

Whining. Whining is great. Whining makes me feel like I actually have problems. And don’t get me wrong, it is a problem when you can’t think of anything to write. When I need to write something: a song, a poem, or something like an essay, I sit staring at my computer and flip back and forth from the blank word document (of course with my name and other required info in the top left corner, there to make me feel like I have done something, dealt with the required formatting and such) and webpages. After procrastinating a bit I spew a terrible and poorly constructed sentence onto the virtual paper. I realize can’t do this on my own so I harass those who are closest to me. I whine to anyone who fits into this category of people for about an hour while procrastinating by surfing the web.

That is what I am doing right now actually. Not the whining but procrastinating. This is my second night writing this and I don’t know from where my thought train left off yesterday.

Admitting that got me back on track.

Usually after whining for a while, the “closest to me” individual that I decided to talk to about this assures me that I can indeed do this because I am decent enough at writing. I’ll take the encouragement while giving many thanks and sit on that for a while. I usually wait a while and then spit out a random sentence in my head that is intriguing and has potential to build on. I then work on that. Yes I do.

That initial sentence is what is able to get me started on my project. I like to make them short and gradually build up size from there, adding more and more elements.

For me, writing has never been difficult. I am a follower of Hemingway’s “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed,” school of thought. By choosing to write, most of the difficulty has already been taken care of. Despite this, I acknowledge that it is not always easy to discover that magical thought that allows you to produce something that you itch to show everyone you know, in the “Look at me mommy” fashion. However, this does not mean that there is no formula to writing- quite the opposite in fact, as nine times out of ten I find myself following a few steps to get the creative ball rolling. I’ll try my best to curtail the unnecessarily preachy how-to book approach to this by referring merely to my own work as opposed to the typical you may follow this when attempting to write, format. Without fail my first step is to create a playlist. This is no random combination of songs, no shuffle permitted here. The songs must be worthy of either the idea I have chosen to discuss, or the character I am trying to create. There is a time and a place for both The Smiths and Beirut, but they need to be carefully separated based on the intended point of the piece. At this point it is not essential to have a fully formed idea; the music is the vein of inspiration, waiting to be tapped. I am continually influenced by what I listen to, adopting a softer tone with classical music or an abrasive one with hip hop. A couple sentences will come to mind; words jump out and demand to be thrown into context. Once an idea has been happened upon, it is a matter of continuing along the same lines and committing to the topic. After the music has been chosen, it’s time to get comfortable, to find a place equipped with food and plushy furniture to maximize working potential without causing distraction by interrupting the flow of writing. Writing has always been a way to immortalize a miniscule aspect of myself, to put down any sort of depravity or radical opinion that I could never imagine articulating in regular conversation. There is some sort of sick satisfaction that stems from creating a character that you see parts of yourself in, or in creating one that you want to despise but cannot because they are the symbolic representation of some perverse idea you find yourself drawn to. These final aspects are what make writing simultaneously interesting, attractive and deeply twisted: writers, no matter how humble they appear, are all ego maniacs, shamelessly self-promoting their interest in controversy and addiction to their own opinions.

Writing is like swimming: you can be told how to do it all day long, but in the end you need to jump in and figure it out yourself. And for a while there, you’ll be up to your neck and flailing your arms like a crazy person, but with enough practice you’ll be doing the butterfly stroke like a pro. Or at least not drowning anymore. Hopefully, anyway.

Understanding this concept brings forth one of the greatest challenges I face as a writer: that terrifying beast, originality. Human beings have been living and writing and suffering and thriving for a hell of a long time now, so how can we possibly make anything new out of our existence? How can we reconcile our fear and disdain of the trite and overused with the simple fact that our very lives are cliché? None of our experiences are new ones, none of us have thought anything that someone before us hasn’t also thought, and in the end none of us are special snowflakes. As writers who are expected to make something interesting, thought provoking, and above all, unique from our human experiences, what can we do?

That’s a question I think we’re all still trying to answer. But different authors have tried different approaches. Books like Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses are immensely interesting to me because they embrace the mundane. They don’t take us to Middle Earth, space, or the future, and nothing terribly thrilling or exciting happens. Characters don’t go through dramatic shifts, don’t really have the kind of intense, climactic epiphanies people talk about when you’re told “how to write”, and that’s exactly what makes them so ground-breaking and worth reading. They prove to us that regular life, with all of its regular little problems, is still interesting and worth talking about. And I think that’s important because it reminds us that we are worth talking about. It reminds us that even though the great majority of us haven’t gone through great upheavals or experienced anything that will get us on Oprah, we still have something to say and something to share. These books capture regular life, with its general absence of climactic moments, its worries about parties or money or death, and they still manage to make them interesting. Both novels use words in interesting ways and craft sentences that are as intricate as they are misleadingly simple. These books are great because they redefine good writing and are proof that writing is, at the end of the day, about the words on the page and the way writers can reinvent language itself.

Although everyone has a vastly different approach to writing and reading, one universal truth is that literature is a uniting art. It has been proven that words can transcend language and time and that, as the Latins said, ars longa, vita brevis. 

Écrire à la première personne du singulier

By: Shany Pageau

Parler à la première personne du singulier lors d’une rédaction, c’est plus facile, car les émotions décrites sont ressenties plus aisément  par le public, mais également par l’écrivain lui-même.

Tout d’abord, c’est plus aisé pour le public de se laisser emporter par l’écrit qu’il lit quand ce dernier est rédigé au « je ». Il va se sentir comme s’il était le personnage principal du roman et, dans plusieurs cas d’histoires écrites au « je », également le narrateur. Ceci dit, le lecteur va avoir l’impression qu’il exécute les actions que le personnage principal effectue dans le roman qu’il lit. Ainsi, il va avoir la capacité de se faire des scénarios ou même de s’imaginer un film en entier tiré du passage qu’il survole. Ce qui, selon moi, est génial! Certains lecteurs sont également capable de se créer un monde tiré du roman dont ils en font la lecture quand il est rédigé à la troisième personne, mais, de mon point de vue, l’effet n’est pas du tout similaire. Ce n’est pas comparable étant donné que lorsqu’une histoire est écrite au « il » ou « elle », le public se retrouve à être dans la position que personnellement j’appelle « Dieu » : il voit l’histoire d’au-dessus. Pour clarifier, quand un livre est écrit à la troisième personne du singulier, le public sait tout du roman quand, à l’opposé, le personnage principal ignore pratiquement tout. Ce qui signifie que les émotions entre le lecteur et le personnage sont plus éloignées les unes aux autres. Si, toutefois, elles sont similaires, elles ne seront pas aussi puissantes que si le roman était rédigé au « je ».

Par après, c’est plus facile de ressentir les émotions que le plus important personnage vit quand l’écrivain a écrit son roman à la première personne du singulier. Le public va être triste en même temps que le protagoniste étant donné qu’il avoir su en même temps que lui que son chat est décédé par cause qu’il s’est fait rouler sur le corps par un véhicule. De plus, le lecteur va aussi être capable de vivre l’anxiété que le personnage vit durant sa quête pour la raison que, en fait, c’est lui qui résout la quête. Dans le cas présent, si un roman est rédigé au « il » ou au « elle », le public va être parfois poussé à dire au personnage où aller ou, dans le cas contraire, ne pas aller. À l’opposé du « je », qui, le lecteur ne peut reculer devant rien, car il ne voit pas le récit d’au-dessus et ignore, en quelque sorte, les possibilités qui pourraient se présenter à lui.

Puis, c’est plus aisée pour l’écrivain lui-même de rédiger son roman au « je » étant donné que c’est plus libérateur pour ce dernier. Rédiger ce qu’il ressent à la première personne est plus simple pour l’individu qui écrit vu qu’il n’a pas besoin de changer ses émotions, ses actions et même ses pensées en « il pense » ou « elle pense ». Aussi, c’est plus facile de rédiger un passage en écrivant au « je » parce l’impression de se confier est présente lors de l’écrit : les émotions font surface plus rapidement et plus naturellement.                 

The One that Fits

By: Andrea Ouellette

When it comes to writing, whether that be writing songs, poems, novels, or short stories, it can often be difficult to write something original. After all, everything has been done before. Thirty seven times. And that’s just since the turn of the century. 

 We’re taught not to write in clichés but what is one to do when everything has become a cliché? Writing about love is so overdone. And loss? Well that’s just drab. We have gotten to a point in history where we are so desperate for an original plot line that we are mixing things like pride, prejudice and the undead. Jane Austen would probably shove a tiny tea spoon through her eye if she ever came back as a walker, may God forbid it.  

Perhaps writers are straining a little too much for originality and ignoring the fact that there are simpler ways to make a piece original and authentic. It was only recently that I began to really pay attention to the detail of point of view in my own writing and as I gave it a second look, I realized that point of view can turn a complete failure of a story into something worth the ink from your printer. Don’t get me wrong, Twilight could have been written from a million different points of view (something poor Stephenie Meyer tried) and it still would not have won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It would not even have been long listed, or even considered to be long listed. But you get the point.  

For inspiration on point of view, I didn't have to reach very far on my bookshelf: my favourite novel, The Great Gatsby, is a perfect example of the importance of point of view. Fitzgerald made Nick Carraway his first person narrator, rather than one of the main characters of the plot. If Gatsby had been the narrator, or even Daisy, the novel would perhaps never have been the success that it is today. It would never have been a forced read in high schools and we never would have gotten to witness Leonardo Dicaprio throwing cashmere sweaters about his room, makin' it rain like Fifty Cent. By using a minor character as a first person narrator, Fitzgerald achieved an original telling of a love story that could not have been told, fully, otherwise.  

Another great example of the importance of choosing the right narrator is Emma Donoghue’s Room. The entire novel is told from the point of view of a five year old boy, who is stuck in a room with his mother, who was kidnapped six years before. When I first read this novel for a class, many people complained about the narrator because they thought it was tedious to read his descriptions of things when all he was really talking about was a window. It is exactly that however, that made the novel so powerful; its narration. There are probably hundreds of books about kidnapping in your local Indigo or Chapters, but Donoghue made hers original and authentic by creating a narrator that saw the world in such a naïve and sheltered way that readers experience it in a much more raw fashion.  

In the case of these two novels, the authors’ choices of narration were the difference between being bestsellers and being those books in the five dollar book section (which has treasures of its own, of course). So next time you feel like you have a good story or a good character that you aren’t quite ready to let go of, think of narration. Sometimes you have to try on a few cashmere sweaters before you find the one that’s worth wearing. 

What's Missing?

By: Allison Cohen

            Ever since I was young, I’ve enjoyed writing. It has always been a passion of mine, as I’m sure it will be for years to come. One of the biggest problems that I face while writing, is once I’ve finished working on something, I read it over and I feel as though nothing has really happened. The story has progressed, but there is not real change. The characters have gained nothing, the problem remains relatively unresolved, or some other something that makes my stories feel incomplete to me. After reading it over, I always seem to be asking myself “What’s missing?” or “What really happened?”

 I struggled with this problem for years, and more recently I have found a way to help fix it. As the author, I feel like maybe I’m to close to the story, and that it could be useful for someone else should look over it- someone who can take a step back and be more critical about my work. Sometimes I will have a friend read it over, but they don’t always know exactly what the issue with it is exactly. Other times, I will tell a friend the beginning of one of my stories, but I’ll tell it as if it was really happening to someone else I know. I won’t tell them the whole story, and I’ll ask them to guess what happened. I’ll ask them how they think my “friend” had been affected by a certain event that I had written about but couldn’t quite complete. Hearing what other people thought would happen or could happen gave me clear, realistic idea’s as to how I could alter my story.

Sometimes when you’re writing, you become very attached and maybe a little near-sighted when it comes to your own work. Having others read your work over can always be helpful, as well as reading other author’s work. I also find that sometimes I can gain inspiration from other short stories or novels (And no, not plagiarism- I’m talking about a root to an idea that you expand on yourself). Sometimes, digging deeper into a small comment a minor character in a book made, or a certain gesture or tick can set you off on a writing rampage, and result in a great story.

J.K. Rowling, who is my favorite author, said that “You have to resign yourself to the fact that you waste a lot of trees before you write anything you really like, and that's just the way it is. It's like learning an instrument, you've got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot, ‘cause I wrote an awful lot before I wrote anything I was really happy with. And read a lot. Reading really helps. Read anything you can get your hands on. I always advise children who ask me for tips on being a writer to read as much as they possibly can.