Static Edition of Elements of Arousal

Dialogue is not realistic.

Real people stammer, pause, interrupt and are interrupted for no good reason, repeat themselves, digress pointlessly, use wrong words, and misunderstand each other. In fiction characters have speech problems only occasionally. Aside from the character who does stammer, characters stammer for a reason: they are nervous or rattled. Real people stammer, perhaps for reasons of the unfathomable psychological kind, but apparently at random. A complaint of writers first attempting dialogue is: "My characters do not sound natural."

Of course they do not. They should not.

Dialogue requires the illusion of naturalness. In this the reader is the writer's ally. The reader is not an ignoramus; he knows he is reading a story or a novel. He wants the author to spare him the tedium of transcription. Naturally in a modern work of fiction characters do not speak in Shakespearean iambs; neither is every character consciously witty or unconsciously silly as in the plays of Wilde or Sheridan. Characters express themselves well within the confines of their intellects, backgrounds, and situations. The author does not report everything they say.

Characters preparing for a dinner party ask each other where their cuff links are in order to establish that they are going to a dinner party. The entirety of such real discussions is not reported unless the nature of the characters' domestic relationship is the point.

A conversational game played by men in boxcars is that of trying to discover whether in their travels they have known the same person. This game consumes many hours which is, no doubt, why it is played. As a bit of business in a piece of fiction, the game goes:

Which stands for several hours of dull talk. If the story turns on their both knowing a person, they must discover it very quickly, or a passage indicating the passing of time may intervene. The whole conversation may be represented within a couple of pages although a transcript of a similar real conversation might easily fill a book.

Readers of mysteries have a right to expect a number of irrelevancies. The housekeeper is interviewed. She volunteers her opinion of the moral character of the deceased. She tells whom she suspects. She accounts for her actions and observations proximate to the crime. In the end it turns out this interview was a school of red herring.

Elsewhere in fiction, the reader wants to know why he is being told all of this. If the reader cannot place the relevancy of the material, he needs at least a guide to its significance. Dialogue should reveal character or advance plot, preferably both at once. Readers know that. Faced with dialogue that does neither, they become frustrated.

Transcribed speech is full of irrelevancies, and what is pertinent is seldom properly underscored. When real characters meet, by chance or design, with good intentions or ill, lengthy inquiries about friends and kin are commonplace. So are meteorological speculations and many similar types of discussions. Where such ploys must be represented in fiction, they are suggested. So are the ahs, hems, and haws, wells, and you-knows of common speech. Fictional characters do have speech mannerisms. But as in dialect, less is more. A character may have a tendency to begin his speeches with "Hey" or "Well, pardner, ah'll tell ya," but most of the character's speeches do not begin that way. Even a character who stutters, stutters less in dialogue than in real life. Giving characters speech mannerisms will not bring them to life unless they are also given speeches in character.

Do not avoid the "Bill said" and the "Jack said" (or try to vary it by inversion: "said Ty"). Attribution is a convention that is almost invisible to the reader, as by convention the black-clad stage hands of Noh dramas are invisible to the audience. However monotonous the saids seem to the writer, they should not be varied with "Jack remarked," or "Bill stated" or "Larry declared" for the sake of variation alone. If Jack remarks, his words must amount to a remark, which differs from a statement or a declaration. An inquiry and a question are not quite the same thing; do not ask an inquiry or inquire a question. In other words, "said" and "asked" are virtually invisible as they are, do not use the less-transparent terms without good reason.

When characters are well defined and the situation understood, lengthy passages of dialogue can go unattributed (no "Jack said"). But do not set out to see how much unattributed dialogue you can stack up. The reader will become confused if one character is given a speech longer than a paragraph when the only indication that the speaker did not change is the absence of a closing quotation mark. If the roles in a dialogue are interchanged, so that the badger becomes the badgee, for example; if the transaction is complex, involving more than two speakers or one speaker who is given two speeches in succession; if the characters are not developed sufficiently that the reader knows Mark said it because it was what Mark would say; wherever the reader might go wrong, attribute the speeches.

Rounded characters sometimes say things they are not expected to say; when they do, attribute their speeches. In a lengthy passage of dialogue you can sometimes throw the reader a line by letting a character address a speech: "God, Mike, what do you expect from me?" Now we know that the speaker is not Mike, but that Mike will reply. The number of times that two people in a conversation will address each other by name, however, is limited.

Adding an adverb to the "said" is not advisable. First it calls attention to the "said," making it visible. Second, there is a danger of committing a Tom Swifty.

Tom Swift was the protagonist of a series of adventure books for young readers. Characters in the series often "said haughtily" or "remarked off-handedly." This gave rise to a kind of alleged joke called a Tom Swifty, to wit:

Notice that although the speeches are contrived, the adverbs really are ones found with dialogue in second-rate fiction.

Third, the adverb on the "said" may encourage (or reveal) lazy writing. Do not write "Gordon said seductively," but make Gordon's speech seductive. If it is not evident that Phil's remark was sarcastic, it is too late to tell us by the time the place for the adverb comes along. A speech is not made exciting by telling us it was made excitedly (nor by appending exclamation points helter-skelter).

A good way of telling who gave the speech, advancing the plot, and giving the reader an idea of the manner in which the speech was delivered is to place the speech in a paragraph with a bit of action by the speaker.

The sentence or two of action has the advantage of allowing a speaker to make two speeches in succession without danger of confusing the reader.

Do not make characters do something merely to tell who gave the speech. Reveal a character's mannerisms or mood, or advance the plot. Flower arranging, picture straightening, and toying with small object should be reserved for a character who has such mannerisms.

Action in a paragraph with a speech must be action by the speaker. The speaker must be the subject of any other sentence. Not:

Eventually the reader may realize that the "he" of the second sentence is not the person who spoke the words of the first sentence. But the writer should not present the reader with little puzzles like this one. The writer knows what he means and he should tell the reader clearly.

When a scene involves three or more speakers attribute every speech explicitly or implicitly. Even in drama, where the identities of the speakers are obvious, having more than three or four speaking parts on stage at one time is unwise. Especially in print, mob scenes must be avoided (of course thousands of nonspeaking extras may be present). The root of "dialogue" does not mean two; "monologue" was coined in error. But the writer does well to think of dialogue as essentially a two-character transaction. Scenes of three or four are for the minor housekeeping tasks such as making necessary introductions. Conduct business by two's.

The best dialogue is dialogue that is the action of the story right now. Dialogue which recounts past events, explains the present, or goes on to long about hopes for the future is weak. Especially to be avoided are Socratic exchanges in which one speaker is a foil so that the other may express himself. Doing is better is than telling. Good dialogue is what the characters are doing, that is speaking. It is not the characters telling. Some of the things characters can do by speaking are seduce each other, hatch a plot, argue, reconcile, and lie. Otherwise, show us the action rather than let the characters stand to one side and describe the action to each other.

Dramatists have technical limitations. They cannot, for example, detonate an atomic bomb on stage. They have to have a character stand at a window and say: "Oh look at the mushroom cloud on the horizon." In print, on the other hand, the writer can and should take us to heart of the nuclear inferno.

"Dialect" here means writing that is supposed to represent a particular dialect of English which differs from the dialect that is regarded as standard. The standard, of course, varies from country to county, but the more important thing is that the standard is itself a dialect. Standard English (for whatever country) is an unusual dialect because it is a dialect that is native very few speakers, if any.

Dialect in the hands of a master can enhance a work of fiction. When not handled properly, dialect can utterly ruin a story. The writer must have a sure grasp of dialect or he must leave it alone.

Leaving dialect alone is a good alternative. A long-standing convention in plays, movies, and fiction allows characters' speeches to be translated to English. We know it is unlikely that native Martians on Mars speak English to each other. But in a science fiction novel, the author kindly translates without calling attention to the fact (although if Englishmen and Martians understand each other on first meeting, we are owed an explanation). In a movie, the U-boat captain talks to his mate in English, perhaps with a German accent to remind us that he is supposed to be speaking German. The writer is entitled to rely on this convention, if he wishes. Dialects are complete languages. If he or she exercises the option of rendering a dialect in standard English, the writer must be sure of writing the standard English (of whatever country).

Readers and critics will always spot dialect gone wrong. They will seldom be bothered if dialect is not attempted.

For writers who believe they have the ear to handle dialect and think dialect would add something to their work, a few suggestions may be made:

First a writer ought to examine his or her motives for wanting to use dialect. Linguists tell us that the speech of rural Southern whites is objectively indistinguishable from the speech of rural Southern blacks. Yet Faulkner's blacks speak in dialect while his whites speak nearly standard American English with few apostrophes, a slightly nonstandard syntax, and a very few unusual spellings. The comparison of black speech and white speech, as Faulkner records it, reveals Faulkner's attitudes, but not the way whites and blacks in the rural South really speak.

New Yorkers do not believe they speak with an accent. Since many editors, publishers, and readers are New Yorkers, the attempt to portray a New York accent is pointless. When New Yorkers see "bird" in print, they think "boid." If you write "boid," they will not know what to make of it. In America dialect is reserved for blacks, Southerners, ethnics right off the boat, and other people deemed inferior by New Yorkers. For similar reasons, if you write about people on Fire Island you are an author, but if you write about people in Houston you are a regional author.

Many of white writers believe that they can render black speech simply by using the wrong form of the verb "to be." But dialects are complete languages, not simply standard English with random mistakes. The English verb "to be" lacks certain distinctions found in the corresponding verb of many African languages. Africans compelled to speak English may have adapted various forms of the crude English verb in order to express the refinements of African language. Or perhaps they did not. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) shares many features with other English dialects of non-African origin and especially with the dialects of the Irish and Scotch Irish Americans who were slave owners and dealers.

"You (be) beautiful" and "You is beautiful" are both well-formed sentences in some African-American dialects, but they do not mean the same thing. If you do not know the distinctions, you had better not attempt these dialects.

The dialect spoken by many African Americans is known as BEV (Black English Vernacular), AAVE (African American Vernacular), or ebonics. It should not be confused with jive, which is a street patois, or slang. Like other dialects, AAVE is not slang, but has its slang. Many academic studies and descriptions of AAVE exist. While I am not sure anyone can learn to write AAVE from these documents, it is worth consulting a few of them to understand how so many writers, from good intentions or ill, have gone so wrong in portraying African American language.[^]

Gay people, of course, have their own dialect although few of us learned it as children. Not much is written in gay dialect, probably because we are still sensitive to the stereotypes (just as early black writers often adopted an elevated style of standard English). We know what it is when straight writers make gay characters say "Oh mary" as an introduction to every speech.

While most of us have said "mary" at one time or another and some of us say "mary" quite frequently, one seldom refers to one's trick as she. Bruce Rodgers reports the following malformation in a neophyte's mouth: "Some day she'll come along---the man I love." We know who is she and who is he and whom we call mary and whom we do not. The straight writer thinks we just mix up our pronouns indiscriminately and that is how he composes our dialogue. We ought to bear this in mind before we attempt to write a dialect that is not our own.

In sum, the first suggestion is: reconsider attempting dialect. Beyond this, a little can be said.

One approach to dialect is phonetic spelling:

This system might work if English were spelled phonetically and the reader were used to translating letters directly into sounds. Since that is not the case, the switch from reading English to reading phonetics demands much, usually too much, from the reader. A few phonetic spellings are common enough to be easily understood:

Naturally, when satire is intended, the more extreme the spelling, the better:

But making fun of the way people talk is not very nice and in the long run not very funny.

As with much else in fiction, suggestion may be helpful. Suggestion is more effective in creating dialect than a detailed phonetic rendering could be. Effective ways of suggesting dialect are in careful use of variations in word choice, syntax, and idiom.

The reader knows very well which statement was made in the garment district, which in the Baton Rogue honky-tonk, and which in the Senate committee room. Yet every word in every statement is spelled in the standard way. We can make the good old boy utter the last statement: "Far as I can tell, things are working out just like I reckoned they would."

Word choice should be considered even by writers who otherwise are resolved to leave dialect alone. When your character goes out at noon, does he go to the grocery store or the deli? Does he wait in line or on line? Does he buy a soda or a pop? Does the clerk bag it or sack it? Does the character drink it with a poor boy, a hoagie, a submarine, or a hero? At noon is it his dinner or his lunch? When he returns to work at the candy store does he sell mostly bonbons or mostly cigarettes, gum, and newspapers? When he gets home does he collapse on the sofa, the couch, the divan, or the davenport? Is his lover preparing supper or dinner? Will the wine come from the cellar or the basement? When he helps to clean up after the meal will he use a dish rag or a dish cloth?

If you do not know why these questions are posed, write about people like those who are very close to your home.

Syntax is the "I should have such problems." Every word is an English word properly spelled and the words are all so basic to the language that they would belong to virtually any dialect based on English. Its is the order in which the words are put together that makes them distinctive.

"Good old boy" is idiom. These are English words. The syntax is a plain as that of "big green truck." But it is a fixed expression meaning "local gentleman." "One of a group cronies" is not a native connotation of the expression.

For the sake of clarity in illustrating the use of word choice, syntax, and idiom, I have chosen examples that are crude and stereotypical. Unfortunately, such uses are too easy to bandy about when they do not represent actual observations of the ways people speak.

A Midwesterner thinks she knows what a "good old boy" is because she knows the stereotypical Southerner of motion pictures, television, and bad novels. When she reads "good old boy" in a story supposedly set in the South, her impression of verisimilitude is enhanced because what she reads reinforces her stereotype of the Southerner. We all like to have our opinions confirmed. When the Midwesterner writes her Southern novel, she is likely to throw in "good old boy" at every opportunity, convinced she is adding realism to her novel. Since there is some truth to stereotypes, she will do well for a while. But sooner or later she will use "good old boy" inappropriately. Those who know Southerners by stereotype will be none the wiser. Southerners and others who know how Southerners really speak will object.

The wisest course, if you elect to use dialect at all, is to stick with dialects you know thoroughly. When you do this you can move past stereotypes and record authentic usages. When you employ a dialect you are less familiar with, do not look for places to show off your ignorance. Confine yourself to a few characteristic uses of which you are certain and let suggestion do the rest. Dialect is an example of a situation in which, very clearly, less is more.

"Point of view" means who is telling the story. The parts of the story that are not dialogue, are narration, and the issue of point of view is: who is the narrator? who is writing the narration?

If the narrator is telling a story about himself or herself, he or she will use the pronoun "I." If the story is about "I," it is a first-person story. If you have ever been told stories about the cute things you did as a child, then you have heard a second-person story. Most of the story is about "you" did this and "you" did that. Second-person stories are not very common, for good reasons, but they are a theoretical possibility. Most gossip falls in the category of third-person stories: they are about "he" and "she" and "they." There are a number of variations of these points of view.

In some types of fiction, point of view is vitally important. In mysteries, some of the characters know things that the reader must not know. In suspense, the reader must know things---for example, that there is a murderous psychopath right outside the french doors---that most of the characters do not know.

Erotic stories are most often told in the first person. Fortunately the first person is easiest for beginners. It is how we tell our experiences to our friends. It is how most of us would record the events of the day in our diaries. When a story is told in the first person, the story has a natural order: the first thing that happened to I, what I did about it, the next thing that happened to I, what I thought about that, and so forth.

Do not cheat with the first person. You only cheat yourself of the natural advantages of that viewpoint.

The "he told me later" and the "what I didn't know" are cheating. Told in the right order, first-person stories naturally incorporate elements of suspense. I does not know what will happen next. The author, however, knows and sets things up properly:

That mysterious encounter makes I even more depressed. How ironic, "Congratulations!" when I seems to have lost his chance for true happiness or least for a hot date. Eventually we do find out that the worthless roommate was claiming that he and I were lovers. Kevin believed him and that is why Kevin is so cold. It also explains Rodger's peculiar behavior on the subway platform. The business of I's discovering "what I didn't know then" is an essential part of the development of a first person story.

An advantage to the first-person story is that I may lie or may report some things inaccurately; I may be what is sometimes called an "unreliable narrator." Even if I tries to be honest, everyone's perceptions are distorted to some degree by differences in personality, situation, experience, and so forth. Although some readers will believe everything I tells them and will never see any inconsistencies in I's story, other readers will be able to compare I's self-image of being a master seducer with I's fumbling delivery of stale, lame pickup lines. If I is in love, her interpretation of her beloved's actions maybe somewhat at odds with what the reader sees from I's reports of the beloved's behavior.

For such rounding, sometimes stories will mean different things to different readers. A writer once composed a first person story in which the I referred to Thom as being straight. Throughout the story Thom jacked off with I, it was revealed that Thom knew something about being fucked by I, Thom and I lived together and evidently had for a number of years, as I had an affair with a younger man Thom became more moody and cranky, over breakfast Thom took I to task because he had heard I say he loved the younger man. When the story ended, the younger man took off and Thom and I were shown in bed together for the first time. Some readers thought I had succeeded in seducing the heterosexual Thom. Others saw that Thom and I had been lovers all along and I referred to Thom as straight only as a concession to Thom's ego which would never let him come out of the closet. Readers of both kinds professed to like the story, perhaps because each reader could find in the story what he was best prepared to find.

In mysteries I must not know everything or else I has nothing to discover, but most readers think it is unfair for I to lie about pertinent aspects of the crime or for I to turn out to be the culprit.

In the first person the standard of diction is accuracy of the voice. If the voice is authentic and consistent the writer need appeal to no other authority to justify I's usage. The criticaster barks up the wrong tree if he criticizes I for saying "infer" instead of "imply," provided that I is a person who would not know the difference. An extreme dialect should be avoided for I because it is bound to wear on the reader who must listen to I far more than to any other character. In particular, it is not necessary and possibly not desirable for I to use the contractions he or she might use in conversation. The reader's eye will make the normal contractions and will make them properly so that the reader will never have to wonder whether "he's" means "he is" or "he has," or whether "she'd" stands for "she would," "she should," "she had," "she could," or whatever.

The reader is supposed to feel a natural human sympathy for the first-person character which is difficult to create in some other points of view. Strong opinions and a healthy self-regard are endearing qualities in a first-person character when the same qualities might seem objectionable in a character described from the third person. First-person characters can express ideas of his or her own that would seem to belong to the author if expressed in the third person.

The first person has some traps.

Even if I is supposed to be enormously endowed or very attractive, I will always seem vain if he describes himself as such. A few I's are vain, but many who are very attractive are also very modest. Getting I to describe himself at all is difficult: please! no more lengthy self-assessments in front of a mirror. Let others react to I in a way that shows I to be attractive. Let others remark on I's most striking feature. I may or may not dismiss these remarks modestly. I can refer other's proportions to his own, and so we may learn of I indirectly.

A beginner's problem is that of confusing I with the author. Many first-person stories are autobiographical, perhaps with the author rebuilt and the outcome altered. Many are the author's fantasies for himself. (Some, of course, are fiction.) Yet characters whose experiences differ drastically from the author's is a different character from the author. The experiences will shape the character into someone who is different from the author, and some experiences will not occur to a character unless he is different from the author. The author should be prepared to let the character go his own way.

An author who is consciously being autobiographical may know who he is and may assume the reader does too. It is no sin for the author of a work of fiction to present an image that is not his own. The danger is that the author may present no image at all. When the author appears in a story as himself, he may forget or be unable to provided the characterization a first-person narrator requires.

In the early days of television situation comedies, movie stars often appeared as themselves. The roles were deliberately bland and inoffensive. Nonetheless, one star would appear to be a heck of a good sport, as intended, but another would seem flat and boring. The boring ones appeared as themselves. The ones who succeeded played themselves. The author may appear as himself or he may characterize himself.

Characterization, like stage makeup, requires an emphasis beyond the natural. The character must be clear to those in the balcony seats. The author must not merely show up and be himself, he must also do the things that show us who he is. He must, in other words, portray himself using the same techniques he would use to portray a first person character who was not suppose to be himself. A few people make their livelihoods from marketing their personalities or personalities they have created to market. Their books are merely one of the ways the personality product is packaged. Authors of fiction need not go so far.

When the character is not supposed to be I, it may be helpful to play the character, at least mentally. Experience in dramatic improvisation may be helpful. Dramatic improvisation is very much what writing in character is, except that when you write you always have the chance of going back to correct anything you get wrong.

Sometimes the narrator is another person who tells you his story. Naturally he speaks in the first person. You transcribe what he says. I hear many of my narrators, and indeed almost all of them who are not supposed to be me. Some writers are able to interview their characters.

The ear to hear characters is a gift that some writers never receive. Those who do not hear their characters can create their characters technically. Decide where the character is from, how old she is, what sort of person she is. Then list words and expressions that show the facts of the character's background and personality. Characters in fiction are composed of characteristics, or in other words all the reader knows is what the character does and what the character says, from which is induced what a character is likely to say and do. If you have enough examples of what a character says and does, you have for all practical purposes created a character, although once you have created a character it may be obvious that some actions and sayings do not belong to the character.

In practice, work on a character often goes both ways. From a notion of what the character is like at his unobservable core, you suppose some actions for him. From some of his actions, you alter your view of what the character is at his core.

However you create the narrator, you should eventually employ a style sheet of characteristic expressions and word usages, especially for a longer work. Be sure your character uses words and expressions consistently except where you mean for him to say something unusual.

The first-person narrator is not always the leading character. Detective stories are often told by the detective's associate. The detective then may have a good idea of the solution quite early in the story while the reader is fairly kept in the dark because the story is told by a dim-witted Watson. In erotica the problem is that an off-center narrator, willingly or not, becomes a voyeur.

A story need not be the worse for that, indeed the spying narrator is in a better position to describe the scene than either of the principals. However, unless the narrator has something to do with the story, unless his voices is a large part of the charm of the story, or unless voyeurism is rather the point, the writer should consider eliminating the narrator. Occasionally, especially in a history like Wilder's Our Town, the narrator appears only in the introduction and in the conclusion. In prose this provides an excuse for the third-person material, which forms the body of the story, to have a voice -- by which I mean, to use characteristic expression, to have opinions that color the descriptions of the characters and events in the story, or in other words, for the narrator to have a personality.

However handled, the off-center narrator requires a mastery of both the first person and the third person. The main chance for a beginner is in the ordinary first person with a voice similar to the writer's.

True second person is rare:

That is the second person. Most authorities say that the first time you does something the reader never would do, the reader will necessarily lose the essential "suspension of disbelief." The second person, at any rate, is so rare that readers are not accustomed to conventions that are necessary to that viewpoint.

The second person does occur from time to time in gay erotica. The theory of writers who use the second person is that readers will become involved in the story and experience it as if it were their own. Nonetheless, the second person must be regarded as experimental: to be left alone by a writer who needs a sale.

The second-person pronoun does occur in stories that are not truly in the second person. Sometimes there are asides to the reader. Such asides call attention to the writing as writing. In modern works, whether addressed to you or to the gentle reader, asides are out of place. Especially to be avoided is the mannerism of short circuiting description with "you know" or the equivalent:

If the reader is sure to know what a preppie bar on a Saturday night is like, then write: Every night at Sue's is like a Saturday night at a preppie bar. If the reader does not know, then there is no reason to bring a preppie bar into it; simply describe Sue's as it is. Your narrator may have speech mannerisms, but avoid those as annoying as the gratuitous "you know."

A use of the second person which has met with some success is that in which you is not the reader, but is a visitor the narrator addresses. The pattern for this viewpoint is Browning's My Last Duchess. The visitor is unseen. The visitor's movements and remarks are deduced from the speaker's remarks in much the same way that comedians with telephone routines imply the remarks of the person they are speaking with on the telephone.

The narrator may say: Here, let me fill your glass again. This implies the visitor has finished his or her drink. The narrator says: But of course, it is no imposition at all. This implies the visitor has apologized for the circumstances of his call. In any event, the visitor says and does very little. The narrator's words are not set quotes and the visitor is never materialized.

The third-person viewpoint occurs in several forms. The best known is the third person omniscient, the god's-eye vantage. Most other forms of the third person arise from limiting or partitioning the god's-eye viewpoint.

The third person omniscient should be as voiceless as possible. Diction should be transparent, standard American English. The writing is impersonal and dry. "Omniscient" is something of a misnomer. The writing should not reveal that it knows anything of the future. Events in the story may foreshadow the climax, but there are not asides such as: "He made this statement though he would soon regret it," "He hardly knew how that simple act would come back to him," "The outcome of this touching scene the reader will soon know." The reader may be distracted from some piece of evidence or the reader's range of vision may be limited, but the reader must not be lied to.

Within these limitations making a sympathetic story is difficult. Most writers seek cover in the head of a character. In the third-person single viewpoint the writer gets into the head of only one character. In the sigma viewpoint, the writer is in the head of only one character at time, but the character may be different from scene to scene or chapter to chapter.

Third person in a character's head is similar to the first-person viewpoint in that the reader can perceive only what the character can perceive and, of course, the character can be only in one place at one time. What the character sees in the third-person viewpoint, however, may be described in words the character might not use. The character's thoughts and impressions may be summarized for us or we may be given a verbatim account of some of them.

Some writers set thoughts in italics (underlined in the manuscript). Others attribute thoughts like quotations, but do not use quotation marks. Whatever method is used for thoughts, it should be used consistently.

Thoughts represented directly:

Notice that in Method 2, having attributed the first thought the writer has not attributed the successive thoughts because the thoughts are easy to distinguish from the narration. The indirect method of representing thoughts can be mixed with either of the direct methods, but the direct methods should not be mixed with each other. Given the general distaste for italics and the possibility that italics may be needed for another purpose, a mixture of indirect representations of thoughts and method 2 is probably the best way of handling thoughts:

The sigma viewpoint, because the writer must carefully establish whose head he is in at the moment, is better suited for longer works. For the cafe scene, get into the waitress's head before the principals arrive. Tell us what she thinks of them based on what she can observe. Give us only the dialogue that she can overhear. She does not know the story is about them; they are only a couple of customers to her. Stay in her head until they have paid the check and she considers the amount of the tip they left. For the erotic scene, let the voyeur with his telescope scan several other apartments before he notices that your protagonist's curtains are open. He cannot hear what goes on in your protagonist's apartment. He can only suppose what is said or what noises are made.

Keeping things in order while you pop in and out of several characters' heads in the same scene is very difficult and can only be done from the fully omniscient viewpoint. If this is attempted, the thoughts in a paragraph must be those of the person who does the actions in the paragraph or who gives the speech in the paragraph. Put in the attribution, the "Jim thought" and the "she saw that" for each thought or impression. Avoid having more than two or three characters thinking in a single scene. In other words, handle thoughts very much like speeches.

The sigma viewpoint is an example of a third-person point of view that is limited: none of the characters is omniscient. At a given time we only know as much as is in the head of the current viewpoint character. The story is the sum of what the viewpoint characters knew - sigma comes from a mathematical symbol for "sum."

Another kind of limited third-person is the camera's eye viewpoint. We should all be familar with this viewpoint because it is used in most movies and television shows. In this viewpoint, the camera is not a person. It doesn't have opinions or personality, but it does have a location in a scene -- although that location may change instantly. The camera does not know everything. It isn't god. Indeed, the camera does not know anything. It merely records what it sees (and hears). It should not be recording what people are thinking or feeling, but it shows by people's actions and appearances the evidence of what they are thinking or feeling.

The camera's-eye viewpoint is an excellent exercise in writing according to the maxim "Show us, don't tell us."

In most third-person viewpoints, the narration must be objective. Do not write: Patrick is an asshole. Show us Patrick and let us draw our own conclusions. If the waitress thinks Patrick is an asshole, that may be reported, but since the waitress, like many sigma characters, is on the periphery of the story, her opinion ought to be based on something she overheard or the size of the tip Patrick left or that he sent the steak back.

Third-person writing must be stronger. If we cannot be told that Patrick is an asshole or that a painting is beautiful, the author must be able to describe Patrick's behavior objectively so that we will know he is an asshole and the author must be able to describe a painting so that we will conclude it is beautiful. For this reason, beginners usually find it easier to write in the first person. If Jim is the first-person narrator he can say flatly that Patrick is an asshole. Then from what Jim tells about Patrick's actions we can decide whether Jim is right or is overly-sensitive to things that would not bother most people. Inside Patrick's head we will seldom find the thought "I am an asshole," but interesting results can be achieved by seeing things from the point of view of an asshole or a frank sonofabitch.

Whether the story is told in the third person or by an off-center first-person narrator, pronouns can be a serious hazard. When you write "he," which one of them do you mean? The worst examples occur in the erotic scene where the writer wants, quite correctly, to proceed as directly as possible to his conclusion. But it is exactly in the erotic scene that the reader should not be made to stop to figure out what is going on.

Sometimes the writer can resolve this problem by redrafting the scene so that actions by one of the characters are grouped in a single sentence or paragraph. Whenever a sentence or paragraph begins with "he" the reader has a chance to go wrong. Here, more than anywhere else, the ability to read your own copy to see what it actually says, as opposed to what you know you meant, must be developed.

Characters still have to be called by name often. For that reason short, crisp, distinctive names are desirable. Major characters should not be given names that are easily confused, perhaps not even names that begin with the same letter. Beginners think that repeating names and other nouns is to be avoided. In fact, repetition is not as tiresome to readers as writers think and certainly is better than confusion. What, after, if Lincoln had said: "Of the people, by them, and for them," or "Of the masses, by the electorate, and for the public."

Pronoun problems are another good reason for beginners to write in the first person, with the first person being one of the romantic principles. That eliminates the pronoun problem in the erotic scene, at least in twosomes, for the actors then are I and he (or in lesbian scenes she). Nonetheless, naming him (or her) occasionally is a good idea, and pronouns will still require attention in other parts of the story.

Write in the past tense.

The present tense appeals to new writers in the same way that the second person does. Again, the theory is to involve the reader in the action. The effect of the present tense, however, is often surreal or dreamlike (as, for example, in the lyrics of the Beatles's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"). The surreal effect may sometimes be desired, but it is not what most writers who attempt the present tense hope to achieve.

The past tense is too deeply ingrained as a convention. Readers have more confidence when being told of things that have happened. Do not monkey with the present tense until you are certain of what you doing.

The simple past is more effective, perhaps because it is less wordy than the perfect tenses. The perfect tense can be avoid by shifting into the simple past once the time is established. The time can be established explicitly by mentioning the day or hour, a previous clause can establish the perfect time, or the facts can convey perfect time implicitly by recounting events described in immediately preceding text.

Example:

Perfect tense: Dan had come over for an afternoon quicky.

Substitute simple past with time established explicitly: Last Wednesday, Dan came over for an afternoon quicky.

Perfect time established in a previous clause: Dan had tried to make friends. He came over for an afternoon quicky.

You may transport the reader across great distances by skipping an extra line. Try to do this with more art than "Meanwhile back at the ranch,.... " but better "Meanwhile back at the ranch,.... " than leave the reader wondering where you have taken her.

Do not make a habit of transporting the reader through time. The flashback is a poor device. It is made poorer yet when it is formalized.

Very well, perhaps that is putting it a little too strongly. The flashback is overworked and often poorly executed. Beginners who know of devices such as the flashback are often overly eager to employ them. But the better policy is look for ways to avoid departures from a clear and direct chronological line.

A writer who has properly understood the importance of beginning his story with an important or exciting event may suppose that he should, once things have settled down a bit, flashback in order to explain the events which gave rise to the excitement in the beginning. In fact the flashback is not the only way and not the most desirable way of conveying necessary background information. Necessary bits of information can be fed to the reader as the story progresses. This may add an element of suspense to the story.

If for example we have to know that Jerry was wearing green suspenders at the time of the accident, we probably can find a way of slipping this fact in without flashing back to his dressing room. We may need to establish that hostility exists between Carl and Bob, but often their present behavior will show that and we will not need to recount the scene of their falling out. If we show the scene of their falling out, the reader will not wonder whether it was over money or jealousy or differences in housekeeping standards.

Little, informal flashbacks are sometimes useful. Joseph Hansen, author of the Dave Brandstetter novels, has a technique of jumping into the middle of the action and working backwards. It works for him. The writer sacrifices the suspense of the outcome of a minor matter. He hopes to equalize by arousing curiosity as to how the event came about. Begin by sacrificing something that would be difficult to make suspenseful anyway: sacrifice a point you are bound to lose.

The following occurred far too deep in "Dale and the Glory Hole," a short story that first appeared in Torso, September 1984:

The writer could not find a way to make Dale's getting stuck the subject of suspense. He thought the question of how Dale will get unstuck was enough suspense for this light story. Being stuck in a glory hole, however, is a curious situation, curious enough to support several paragraphs of backtracking. Once the subject of glory holes was established (in about 400 words too many) the writer wrote: "Dale got stuck." Then he did flash back. But he did not flash back to show aspects of Dale's childhood in order to analyze the psychic analogy between the glory hole and Dale's mother and how being stuck relates to Dale's subconscious feelings about his father. The writer flashed back only far enough to show how Dale got stuck.

If there is something essential to the story that can only be got at through a lengthy formal flashback, perhaps the story has not started at the right place. More likely, however, the author is overly attached to some bit of nostalgia which belongs in another story altogether.

A complete discussion of figures of speech and rhetorical devices is beyond the scope of this book. Some of the main ones are introduced here, however, because the writer will employ them, whether she knows what to call them or not. Knowing what to call them may make it easier for her to organize her experiences. My object is not to encourage beginners to work in a device or a metaphor wherever possible, but to encourage an understanding of what such things are when they are encountered.

One of the most powerful devices of writing is parallelism.

Grammatical parallelism is simply the rule that constructions used in similar ways should be similar:

Wrong: We liked hunting fossils and to go horseback riding.

Correct: We liked to hunt fossils and to ride horses.

Or: We liked hunting fossils and riding horses.

As a literary device, parallelism is the principle that similar thoughts should be expressed in similar constructions.

This does not violate grammatical parallelism:

Joe was a top. Rick liked to be on the bottom. Gene was undecided.

But literary parallelism suggests:

Joe was a top. Rick was a bottom. Gene was an undecided.

A comparison of two situations each of which consists of two parts can be given in parallel form:

By day we were rivals; by night we were lovers.

This structure can be diagrammed:

A: by day B: we were rivals

a: by night b: we were lovers.

When the parts A and a are joined by a line and the parts B and b are joined by a line, we see that the lines between the comparable parts are parallel.

In this case, however, another figure may be more effective. When there is a contrast of two situations each of which has two parts chiasmus may be a striking way of presenting the ideas:

We were rivals by day; by night we were lovers.

Diagrammed:

A: we were rivals B: by day

b: by night a: we were lovers

This time when the comparable parts are joined by lines, the lines cross, and this is how chiasmus gets its name.

Many figures of speech are at their heart metaphors. The central idea of metaphor is a departure from the literal meaning of words. The metaphoric expression called a metaphor involves equating a thing with another thing that is dissimilar but which has some common aspect.

A metaphor: Joe's feet were blocks of ice.

Of course Joe's feet were no such things. They were flesh and blood like everyone else's feet. The common aspect is what is meant here, namely that Joe's feet and blocks of ice had in common being cold. Unfortunate many metaphors, including this one, have been worked to exhaustion and have become clichés. Metaphors can be worked to death, and once dead metaphors lose their figurative quality:

Joe is a stud.

Once this was a living metaphor in which Joe was compared to a stallion put to stud, the common aspect being that the primary usefulness of both Joe and the stallion was sexual. But most modern readers lack a rural background and the expression is so common that many readers will understand the word "stud" to mean a sexually active man before they know the word has other meanings.

Some trite metaphors can be recast:

Trite: An hour of that night was a drop in the ocean.

Better: An hour of that night was a drop from a leaky faucet.

A simile is merely a metaphor in which the comparison is made explicit:

He opened his mouth like a baby bird waiting to be fed.

The dangers of mixing metaphors are usually taught in grammar school. Do not compare a cock to a glass rod in one breath and to a steel pipe in the next. Mixed metaphors often occur when one of them is dead or moribund:

His pale back was highlighted with a dozen small tattoos.

What went wrong here was that the author forgot that "highlighted" has a literal sense, and what is more, the literal sense is exactly opposite what the author means. Rather than being bright spots on the pale back, the tattoos are dark ones. Probably the author thought of the word "accented" and wisely discarded it as sounding too much like a designer's word. If he can think of nothing better, the word the author wants is "peppered."

Synecdoche is a kind of metaphor in which the whole stands for the part or the part for the whole:

The bare feet slapped the tile as they followed Jim into the locker room.

Of course, it is not merely the feet, but the whole person they are attached to that has followed Jim. In some cases synecdoche can be as dead as any other metaphor:

All hands on deck.

What is wanted is all of the crew on deck, not merely their hands. But this figure is now dead. "Hand" is now synonymous with "crew member."

Metonymy is a figure similar to synecdoche, but in metonymy some other close relationship besides that of whole and part is the basis of the substitution:

Watching him perform the bench press was a hard-on.

Here the effect stands for the cause. What is meant was that the sight was sexually arousing, but the result of sexual arousal is stated instead.

Shakespeare sometimes made Jeff weep.

Shakespeare could have done no such thing, since Shakespeare was dead centuries before Jeff was born. No doubt it was the sonnets of Shakespeare that affected Jeff so.

I wanted to punch out his lights.

This means I wanted to knock him unconscious, which would close his eyes and in effect shut off his sources of light.

Other figures and devices may be found (with these) in the brief glossary of terms.

Some miscellaneous advice.

In parallel structures, repetitive parts of jokes, and lists, three is the magic number. Once is an event. Twice is a coincidence. Three times establishes the pattern. If the writer errs and includes a fourth item, it will be forgotten. Churchill said: "... blood, toil, tears, and sweat." But the world remembers: blood, sweat, and tears.

Bartlett's does not reveal who first described a writing student as approaching a typewriter "determined to commit an act of literature."

Nothing, it seems to me, is wrong with wanting one's work to endure or in trying to write well enough that it might. Thucydides frankly admitted to writing for the ages. Twenty-four centuries later we must admit he may have succeeded. And so I wrote when I wrote my most successful work, for I could not foresee the way it might be published while I lived. Preston has reminded me, as I have reminded others, of Johnson's saying: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Now I think Johnson's statement is wise but overstated.

Writing for money and writing for the ages are not antithetical, but this false dilemma is promulgated by those who have comfortable means and who dare not try their masterpieces upon the market. Some works are now more esteemed than when they were new. Occasionally old works of little merit are reprinted as curiosities. But generally what we now judge to be great literature and keep reprinting enjoyed at least a little success when first published. Dickens was a prodigious success from the moment he tried his hand at fiction and he remained successful throughout his long life. Although those forced to read it in high school may wonder at the fact, people once paid good money for the privilege of reading Silas Marner. Publishers never were, intentionally, pure philanthropists, but most books we think are great literature were first issued by hardhead businessmen with expectations of profit.

What is wrong with attempting an act of literature is the method most students employ, which is to emulate a writer who is great or who is enjoying fashionability: Salinger, Vonnegut, William Burroughs---for some reason young writers once wanted to write as Thomas Wolfe did---the heroes vary from generation to generation, but the tendency of young writers to idolize their heroes and to try to rewrite masterpieces endures.

Do not esteem your betters too much. Respect is one thing; adoration, another. Learn what the masters have to teach you, but then be appropriately impertinent. You cannot be sure your work will come to light. You can only be certain that it will not while you write in another's shadow.

To write fiction about being a writer, one's credentials as a writer ought to be in order.

The subject most often ignored in writing about being writer is writing. Very little has been done about what it is that happens when a person comes to a typewriter with blank paper and experience and produces a story. Most writing about writing is about not writing: it is about not being able to write, not getting published, not making enough money, and not having an easy life. I am not sure we need more fiction in this vein.

"Write what you know!" does not mean to write about writing. At least not until you do know about writing.

M.J. Bevans in a Blueboy editorial that appeared just as I was first thinking of writing fiction, influenced my opinion on this subject: forebear using a pen name for your gay erotica.

We ask general bookstores and newsstands to carry our work. We want our readers to show their faces to the clerks, at least long enough to buy our books and magazines. We trade upon a movement that cried: "Out of the closets and into the streets!" Not only is it politically incorrect for us to hide behind false names, but also it is wrong.

I acknowledge a few good reason for using a pen name. A prolific writer may use different names to distinguish his several series of novels. A person who has some other position in gay publishing or the movement may fairly use another name for his gay fiction. A writer whose name is the same as another well-known writer's or whose name is so unusual that it is borne by only one other person may well alter the styling of his name or use a nickname. Everyone will understand if a writer whose name is Silvester prefers to work as Sly. For a John Smith to publish under his own name is hardly tantamount to coming out of the closet; he may wish to use something more distinctive.

Even in general publishing, some editors will react with suspicion when the name for the byline differs from the one for the check. Except where the reasons are obvious, editors may wonder: If this is his best work, why won't he put his name to it? If it is not his best work, why should I be bothered with it?

Naturally I mean no disrespect toward my elders and betters who began working when conditions were very different. Today writers are not justified in using pen names. Those who adopt cutesy, obvious pen names insult readers.

Gay readers deserve a writer's best work. A pen name suggests that the writer thinks he might do better writing in something besides porn, that he has something better to do than to write for gay readers, that he is reserving his true name for work he considers more serious, and that he has spared some effort or talent in composing the work of gay erotica.

That is an affront gay readers ought not to receive with equanimity. It is an affectation that hardly endears a writer to his colleagues who are writing as well as they can and who are proud of their work.

Favor the use of common speech rather than blunder in the attempt to approve you know better.

This principle is owing to Fowler who demonstrated the nonsense that may result form an overweening fear of splitting an infinitive, ending a sentence with a preposition, mistaking "will" for "shall," or using "who" where "whom" was called for.

In truth, a number of points that purists congratulate themselves for mastering are figments. The distinction of "will" and "shall" was invented by grammarians of the Nineteenth century and has no basis in the history of English speech or writing. Purists cringe when "loan" is used as a verb. Only "lend" is the verb they say. But "loan" as verb, as anyone who consults the OED will discover, has been the Queen's English since at least the Sixteenth century.

The wisest course is to learn the purists' prejudices and to follow them when it makes no different. If you can write "to lend" as well as "to loan," then write to "to lend." The purists will be pleased and no one else will know the difference. But if a character must say to "to loan," then so be it. When the alterative to ending a sentence with a preposition is an ugly, twisted circumlocution, the purists will just have to lump it.

Answering critics is very poor judgment. Criticasters pan books because it is easy to do so. In writing bad notices there are many opportunities to display superficial wit, whereas thought analysis and constructive criticism require knowledge and effort.

Sometimes a bad notice thoroughly misrepresents a work or suggests an author approves of everything her characters do or puts a character's speech in the author's mouth. A critic may depart from the text and may speculate about the author's personality. Speculation about the facts of a work's publication might be justified in the case of an ancient text, but while the author and the editor are still living, the critic could, if would make a couple of telephone calls, provide his readers with facts instead of speculation. In any of these cases the author may be tempted to fire off a letter to the critic's editor. But the author cannot win in such a situation.

Adopt the attitude that there is no such thing as bad publicity. No one has shown that a bad review hurts sales (though a good one helps). The worst thing is to be ignored; that is what most hurts sales. When a book is reviewed, readers will recall the book's existence long after they have forgotten what the reviewer said and many more people will recall the reproduction of the book's cover than will ever bother to discover what the reviewer wrote.

Stick to the main chance, at least at first.

In the front matter of Big Shots and Beast of Burden (both from Badboy Books, 1993) Aaron Travis describes his hyperthermal mode, which is what he calls the form of writing that appears in those books. It is third person, present tense, with uncensored fantasies, descriptions, and language, and sometimes has the dark melodramatic qualities of film noir. Clearly there are ways of writing successfully that are different from and even contrary to the methods I recommend in this book.

Aaron Travis is a very talented writer and editor who has worked in the gay market for many years and who, under another name, has a successful series of novels in the general market. His other works show that he has a complete mastery of more conventional styles. If you were Aaron Travis I would say to you, but of course, strike out on your own, explore the uncharted resources of the language, do things that lesser writers dare not dream of.

But you are not Aaron Travis. If you are reading this book, I suppose it possible that you do not yet command the conventional forms of writing and that you do not have a well-established career in fiction. You are an apprentice. Do not mess with the spells in the master's book lest you invoke forces you cannot control.

You've been warned.

Murder your darlings. Another maxim.^

No one knows, I suppose, why the passages, the figures, and the word plays a writer loves best are the ones that must be cut from a work. Write them out if you must, but delete them before the final draft. In any event, an editor will never want to cut a mundane part, but only a great one.

Sometimes writers only muddle through. Sometimes they are masters of grand designs. Nothing is wrong when a writer knows what he is doing. And nothing is wrong, really, with having a grand design. Except.

Except that a writer's universe may fit together all too neatly. In the period between World War II and the Vietnam war many American writers suddenly discovered Freud and Jung. The psychological novel was upon us. Those fortunate enough to have avoided the onslaught can imagine how gay people fared in these books. Reality fared little better: anything longer than it was wide was a capital S Symbol. Warped too, in their own way, are socialist realist novels, Christian short stories, and fast gaining on us, Politically Correct fiction. Certainly, if he wishes, the author may be a partisan. Fiction without an axe to grind is not worth reading, much less writing. The writer may be a Freudian, a Christian, or a Feminist. But the bourgeois is not the source of all evil, some of us were never particularly impressed with our mothers, Françoise Sagan was not a prophet, and not even the most devout Christian knows the mind of God. At the bottom any good work, as in the real world, are forces the writer does not fully understand, things he cannot describe, and questions he cannot honestly answer.

You may know why Ronnie has a morbid fear of snakes, why Lester turned around at just that moment, and how Spyder got his carbon tattoo. But still there are things you do not know. You do not have to bring your ignorance to the surface and make a display of it. You need only avoid the pretense that you and your philosophy could explain it all.

Unless of course nothing is hidden from you, a condition known as paranoia.

Strunk and White wrote: "Do not explain too much."

My advice is do not explain what you do not know. Do not write tracts.

Stick to novels and short stories. In other words, stick to forms that publishers and readers recognize. Novels are seldom serialized anymore, and outside of gay erotica, there is little demand for story collections.

This is merely a reprise of the maxim "Know your market!" If you do not see much of a form you want to work in on the bookseller's shelves, do not be surprised if you have difficulty selling your work.