The Robot, courtesy of Vernon

vs. 

Padraic.

Poetry has long been thought to be a strictly human domain, but the existence of AppliedPoetics.Org suggests otherwise. Created by George Mason University MFA student Doug Luman, AppliedPoetics.Org generates found poetry from a number of different algorithms. To use, simply input a text of any kind, pick an algorithm, and run. The simplest algorithms remove certain letters, while the most complicated are inscrutable to me.

Of course, this isn’t the same as letting a robot write poetry, but it’s the closest we can get with current technology. AppliedPoetics.Org requires a human to be on hand to operate it and revise the algorithm’s output. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but challenge Floodmark’s own Padraic Price to a game of “Can you write poetry better than a robot?”

The rules were simple. Padraic and AppliedPoetics.Org would both produce found poems using the same source text. I would pilot the algorithms and revise the output, and we would either watch man triumph over machine, or else witness the birth of a new robot literati. 

First, Padraic’s poem: 

“The transformation”

by Padraic Price

The quenching is necessary to suppress the normal.

reactions are often more complex.

lead baths. 

Uneven heating.

Overheating.

followed by a gradual drop 

due to breakdown of coherence.

due to an increased tendency to retain.

soaking time should be avoided.

Water is liable to cause distortion.

There is a serious danger of cracks at the roots of the teeth.

steel is exceedingly brittle.

steel becomes softer.

while the maximum effect is obtained.

This is known as toughening

Pretty good right? Just the sort of thing a puny human would write. Now witness the poetry of your new robot overlords.

“Hardening”

by Vernon Meidlinger-Chin using AppliedPoetics.Org

Quench crack if the alloy diffusion is so slow 

the corners and thick section at such a low temperature are forms. 

In chromium, for an example, pale straw corresponds to 300˚C, 

instead of 230˚C (Table 1).

Table 1).  Table 1). Table 1). Table 1). Table 1). 

Table 1. 2. 3. merge into ferrite masses and cementite, and to cause a particle. 

Where hardening. When cutting

Temperature and cementite masses and thick sections 

should be quenching is necessary, 

therefore depressed. 

Ok so at this point I should point out that AppliedPoetics.Org did not generate the poem as written. I input the text and ran the travesty algorithm with a 480 characters output and a granularity of 7, and the machine provided me with a single block that I then edited. I removed a few characters to bring the total number of characters down to 471, added line breaks, and switched the order of stanza 2 and 3 because I really liked the idea of ending a robot poem with the phrase, “therefore depressed.” Also, the robot really seemed to like “Table 1” and I’m not sure why or if there even was a reason.

Now it’s up to you, reader. Who wrote the poem better: a puny human or the pinnacle of poetry-writing technology? Will robots someday supplant humans both as the dominant species on this planet? And when they most certainly do so, will they use poetry?

 1. http://www.totalmateria.com/articles/Art12.htm

Read more of Vernon's work on Floodmark here.

and

Read more of Padraic's work on Floodmark here.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

This is a line from T.S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land.” It is one of my favorite lines from the poem. It has always reminded me of poetry as a whole. Tiny fragments of words we scratch out on paper in defiance of our own mortality. Hoping our words will outlive us. Hoping strangers will read and understand them long after we are gone. 

As you might (but most likely don’t) know, April is National Poetry Month. In honor of this I wanted to take some time to talk about a few of my favorite poems – my favorite fragments.

This week I have decided to focus on a poem by Robert Frost entitled Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening. 

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

This is a very important poem to me personally because it is the poem that first made me want to be a poet. Frost uses short lines with a regular style and simple rhymes on the ends of lines. Poems like this can often end up sounding sing-song and childish. But the tone and message of this poem are both emotionally complex and beautifully subtle. This makes the poem’s style seem elegant and sophisticated rather than simple.

The poem’s actual content is an extended metaphor about suicide. The speaker is feeling tempted to take his own life, not out of despair or self-hatred but out of apathy. He sees death as an inviting rest after a tiring life. But he ultimately decides to continue living out of a sense of obligation. He has “promises to keep.” We aren’t told what these promises are or who he has made them to, but they are the force that drives him to continue on his journey. 

Veiling his true topic behind a metaphor and leaving some elements of ambiguity makes the poem more universal. Not everyone is genuinely suicidal but most people can relate to feeling exhausted by their lives and responsibilities. Most everyone can relate to wishing they could just be done with it all, just stop and rest. Many people can also relate to feeling obligated to carry on. 

The final stanza is the most interesting and most important of the entire poem. As readers we immediately sense something is different about this stanza. The first three stanzas follow the rhyme scheme AABA BBCB CCDC. But then the pattern is broken by the forth stanza which is simply DDDD. Obviously the pattern had to change since there is no fifth stanza for the third line of the fourth stanza to echo into. But this is a very intentional move. Each stanza leads into the next and makes the reader feel pulled from stanza to stanza. The broken pattern alerts the reader that the poem has ended. It also creates a sense of finality. The issue the speaker is debating is no longer in question at the end of the poem. He has made up his mind. We automatically sense this without even consciously knowing it. 

 The entire fourth stanza is brilliantly written but the ending couplet, the repeated last line, is the true masterstroke of this poem. “And miles to go before I sleep.” We can almost hear the speaker repeating this sentence under his breath like a mantra. We hear his struggle and his weariness as he breathes out those lines. These lines are heavy as the speaker reflects on how much further he has to go. They are a complaint, but a quiet and resigned one. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening. Check in again next week to read about more “fragments,” more fun, and more fantastic poetry! 

Read more of Padraic's work on Floodmark.

 

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

This is a line from T.S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land.” It is one of my favorite lines from the poem. It has always reminded me of poetry as a whole. Tiny fragments of words we scratch out on paper in defiance of our own mortality. Hoping our words will outlive us. Hoping strangers will read and understand them long after we are gone. 

As you might (but most likely don’t) know, April is National Poetry Month. In honor of this I wanted to take some time to talk about a few of my favorite poems – my favorite fragments. 

This week I have decided to focus on a poem by Max Ehrmann entitled “Desiderata” sometimes also referred to as “The Desiderata of Happiness.” 

(source)

Though some publications break the poem into lines of free verse, The Desiderata was originally an unformatted prose poem. Here it is in the original style: 

“ Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.

And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”

This poem may not be for everyone. It has an unusual style to be sure and prose poems are often disliked in general. Personally, I love this poem for its calm certainty and its uplifting message. It is optimistic and joyful without being idealistic or naive.  Oddly enough, although the poem is a series of imperative statements, it doesn’t feel didactic or preachy. It is far too quiet and peaceful to be taken that way. It is an offering of wisdom not a command. I also love how wonderfully accessible the poem is. Obviously that is to be expect since it is a prose poem. In fact, that is why it is so important that “The Desiderata” is a prose poem; it is an offering of advice for anyone and everyone. Simple instructions on how to live a better and happier life. It shouldn’t be cryptic or esoteric. The language itself is not overly poetic either. There are beautiful lines and phrases but they never become fanciful or musical. Lines like “Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.” are beautiful for their simplicity and their wisdom. This quiet and direct tone is what makes “The Desiderata” seem so profound, powerful, and true. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed "The Desiderata"; it’s one of my favorites. Check in again next week to read about more “fragments,” more fun, and more fantastic poetry!

Read more of Padraic's work on Floodmark.

Hi everyone, Pod here. Guess what, that right – it’s that time again. National Poetry Month is finally here! I know you’ve all been waiting eagerly, dressing up like Bobby Frost and leaving whiskey and cookies out for Ernest Hemmingway. Or, more likely, you’ve never heard of National Poetry Month before in your life. That’s fine. No one has. Basically it’s that time, April, when the rest of the world goes about its business completely normally while poets get really excited about poetry… which they always are anyway. So basically it’s just like any other month. Only with nicer weather. If you are one of the lucky few who care about poetry though, it’s a nice time to care a little more, share a little more, write a little more, etc. I wanted to do something special for poetry month this year so I thought it would be nice to have an exquisite corpse open to the public posted on Floodmark. If you don’t know what an exquisite corpse is, it’s a sort of blindly written group poem. It works like this: 

1. Someone writes a line of poetry.
2. They then pass that line to another person.
3. That second person writes a second line of poetry in response to the first line.
4. Ok, here’s the tricky part. The second person then passes only the second line to a third person.
5. The third person then writes a third line of poetry responding to the second line (the key here is that the third person cannot see the first line. The can only see the line the second person wrote).
6. This continues. The third person passes to a forth who can see the third line but not the first or second.

Is that clear as mud? Good. It’s simpler than it sounds. The basic idea is that you can always only see one line of poetry at a time. The line directly before the one you are writing. The process can include as many people as you like. The more people, the better. The result of this process is called an exquisite corpse poem. They are usually very strange, often funny, and more often than you think, make a strange sort of sense. 

This month we are going to be having a Floodmark exquisite corpse. It will be open to submissions from anyone and anyone can submit as many times as they like. We will update it twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. If you want to participate simply read the currently posted line of poetry and write a single line of your own to follow it. Submit your line by emailing it to floodmark.editorial@gmail.com. We will then replace the currently posted line of poetry with your line so that others can respond to it. Your submissions will be kept anonymous and at the end of the month we will post the completed poem with every submitted line. 

So have fun, be brave, and please submit. It’s a lot of fun!

FIRST LINE: 

Remember man, how he used to walk on two legs and gawk at the sky?

Attempting to write a screenplay is a new and confusing endeavor for many writers. If you are starting your first screenplay there are a lot of places you can go wrong. This article is a guide to the fundamentals of screenplay writing. It covers appropriate styles and formats. If you are already familiar with the basics of screenplay writing, this article will not likely offer any new information. For more advanced screenwriting information see my article Screenwriting: A Not-So-Basic How-To (coming soon). 

The first thing to know when writing a screenplay is that the formatting rules of screenwriting are strict and unflinching. Attempting to make your screenplay look unique or stand out will only make it look unprofessional. I am not personally a fan of structure and rules, especially in writing. But when it comes to screenwriting you must follow the rules if you wish to be successful. 

The first of these rules has to do with formatting. Screenplays are almost always written in 12-pont Courier font. Unfortunately, if your screenplay is not written in this font it will likely end up in the trash bin of whoever you send it to without ever being read. That is simply the way the film industry works. Don’t follow the rules and you won’t be taken seriously. The page should be laid out according to this table:

This table is based on information from storysense.com which is a good place to look if you have any more questions after finishing this article.

Any screenplay* should begin with a title page laid out like this:

The title and author should be on line 25 and centered horizontally. There should also be four blank lines between the title and the “written by” line. There should also be a single blank line between the “written by” line and the actual name of the screenwriter. It is also a good idea to include your contact information on the title page. If you decide to do this it should be done in the bottom left corner of the page. The last line of the contact information should be one inch from the bottom of the page. Contact information should include a full mailing address followed by a phone number and/or email in this format:

Include page number four lines down from the top of each page, aligned with the right margin. Only use the number. Do not preface it by the word “page” or “pg.” Place a period after the page number. The page count should not include the title or “fly” page. The count should begin with the first page of the actual script. However, standard formatting dictates that the first page not have a page number actually on it. The second page should be the first with a page number on it beginning with “2.” 

There should be two spaces following any punctuation. Lines should be single spaced (unless writing television scripts). Page breaks must occur only after a sentence. Never page break mid-sentence. This applies to dialogue as well as description. 

It is important to know that the essential prose style of screenplays differ greatly from fiction prose. There are a few dos and don’ts you should know before beginning your screenplay. First and foremost is that a great deal goes unsaid in a screenplay. Much has to left to the director and the actors to create. This can be difficult for fiction writers who are used to having full creative control over their writing. Scene Headings describing setting should be clinical and simple.  Don’t go into detail about the room a person is in. Only include the essential details. What is the setting? A doctor’s office? An abandoned mine? Someone’s apartment? A good rule to stick to is that no setting description should be longer than five words. There are obviously exceptions but in general this is a good way to gage if your scene heading is too long. Following an introduction such as “FADE IN” the setting should also always be the first thing described. Even if a scene begins with a close up, it is important to let the director and cast know exactly where they are. Remember that as a screenwriter you are no longer writing for a reader. Your writing is not a finished product and will never be seen as-is by the intended audience. Even after you have finished all your edits and rewrites, your screenplay will still be under construction. It’s OK to let the parts show a bit. In general, a setting description should look something like this: 

Notice that the first line is a transition. “FADE IN” describes fading into the scene from a black screen. I will talk more about transitions and shot descriptions in a moment. For now, look at the nest line. This is the first setting and there should be a single blank line between it and the “FADE IN” line. “INT.” stands for interior, letting you know that the scene takes place inside (as opposed to EXT. for exterior). Never spell out “interior” or “exterior” completely. Always use the standard short hand. If a scene moves from an interior to an exterior setting (or vice versa) the correct formatting is as follows: “INT/EXT.” or “EXT/INT.” 

Look at the setting itself. Notice how simple the scene setting is. “LAUNDROMAT - NIGHT” is all the information that is given. In some cases it may be necessary to include a time in the setting such as “LAUNDROMAT (1973) – NIGHT” The rest is up to the director. More details can be included if necessary as the scene unfolds. 

When writing dialogue, place the character cues 4.2 inches from the left margin and the actual dialogue 2.9 inches from the left. Keep character cues short and simple. Prominent characters generally go by their first name. If you need to break a page in the middle of dialogue do so in-between sentences and include the word “(MORE)” on its own line in all caps and parenthesis.  Avoid using symbols or numerals in dialogue. Spell numbers out. Never use italics or all caps in dialogue. Underscore for emphasis. If two characters are speaking simultaneously use multiple columns. In this case it is acceptable to vary the margins on speech columns. 

When moving between scenes there are a few common types of transition you can use. Most of them are superfluous. Transitions such as “SMASH CUT” and “QUICK CUT” are unnecessary. For the most part, you should stick to using “FADE IN,” “FADE OUT,” “DISSOLVE TO,” and “CUT TO.” You should only use the “FADE IN” transition once, at the very beginning of the script. Likewise, “FADE OUT” should only be used at the very end of the script. The rest of the time use “FADE TO” to describe a FADE OUT and a FADE IN back to back. The finally FADE OUT should be left aligned rather than right aligned. It should be followed by the line: “THE END” in all caps, underscored, and centered on its own line.

Descriptions such as “PAN TO,” “DOLLY IN,” or “CRANE UP” should be used as little as possible. Only include shot descriptions which are absolutely necessary to the story. The more shot descriptions you use, the more you usurp the job of the director. This is generally seen as inappropriate in screenwriting. 

When describing action use simple, clear language. Avoid the sort of wordy and descriptive language you may be used to as a fiction writer. Generally, a scene should look something like this:

In terms of length, most modern scripts are 100-120 pages. Generally, each page is representative of about one minute in actual runtime. Do not print the script double-sided. 

Screenwriting is far more complicated than most other forms of writing. Though the prose itself is, in a way, simpler., it can take a while to get the hang of the many formatting rules. There is a seemingly endless list of these rules and the ones I have described here are only the most fundamental. For more advanced information on screenwriting see Screenwriting: A Not-So-Basic How-To (coming soon), which covers more complicated topics including Slug Lines, Parenthetical Direction, Flashbacks, Montage/ Series of Shots, and more detailed information about scene headings. 

For now, good luck and good writing. Be brave, be sincere, and have fun!

Read more of Padraic's awesome work on Floodmark.

*margins on examples may not conform to specifications exactly. For exact margins refer to the margins table and not examples.

Writing well-established, multidimensional, and interesting characters can be a challenge for some writers. It requires patience, insight, and a very specific type of insanity. Creating a good character requires the same sort of awkward, illogical mental gymnastics that actors use to become another person. As a writer you must place yourself, fully, in the mind of each and every one of your characters. Honing your character creation skills is a life-long process and now is always the best time to start. There are several strategies and habits that can help you do this. They can be helpful for beginners as well as experienced writers. 

Let me start by making one thing clear: well-written characters are the single most important element in fiction. Every story is essentially about characters. No story is about an event or a social/political/environmental/economic situation. All that is setting. Your story isn’t about a war; it’s about soldiers. It’s not about a hospital; it’s about doctors and/or patients. No story is ever about things that happen. Stories are about the people that things happen to. Characters are what your readers will respond and relate too. Don’t tell me that Joe died tragically. Tell me who Joe is. That way, when he dies, I’ll actually give a damn. Who your characters are and what they want will be the main driving forces that propel your story forward. What happens to them along the way is not nearly as important as how they respond to it.

A good place to begin is to create dossiers for each of your main characters. Do this before you even begin writing your story. Start simple. What is your character’s name? How old are they? What is their favorite color? What do they look like? What do they want? Include details that seem unimportant. Don’t worry if you’re not sure about something; your character’s dossier will change as you discover them more. Nothing you write is set in stone. Unless you write it in stone. Which is weird. Don’t do it. Unless that’s your thing. Live your life. 

Include a background story/ bio in each of your character dossiers. What has happened to them so far? How has it shaped them? These dossiers should take time. Don’t write them all in one day. Allow yourself time to mull over your character. How is their past / personality going to shape the story? Every time you add something to one of the character dossiers you should reconsider everything you have already written. Does a specific event change how you see the character? Should their appearance be adjusted? Does it change how they fit into the story? Maybe something you discover about a character will shift their dynamic with another character. One person’s dossier can effect another’s. Once you really know each of your characters, you can drop them into the story setting and know exactly how they will react. The story will almost write itself. Almost. 

The question is how do you discover a character? How do you know what they want? Obviously, a good amount will be uncovered as you tell yourself a background story about them. It is important, however, to cultivate an interest in and understanding of social psychology. By this I don’t mean that you should take classes or read books on psychology. If you want to do so, go right ahead. I’m sure it will help. There is a more direct and rewarding method though. Make yourself a student of human nature. Interact. Introduce yourself to new people. Ask people how they feel and think about things in their life. Be social. Be observant. Take time to objectively observe your own thoughts, actions, and motivations. Actors do this same sort of thing. They spend hours and hours getting into the head of their character. As a writer you have to do this for each of your characters. Reading helps too. Consider the motivations and thought processes of the people you read about. But for understanding human nature, nothing beats authentic human interaction. In your day-to-day interactions, be always aware of and attentive to how people are feeling/thinking. What actions do those thoughts and emotions eventually lead them to? Take an interest. As an added bonus this will make you a better friend and a more social person. You’re welcome. Literary advice and personal improvement. We’re a full service website.

As you build your understanding of human nature, there are a few exercises you can try to expedite your character creation process. Set up generic situations to insert your characters in. Create as many as you like (I usually create at least seven). These situations should be emotionally, mentally, morally, and physically challenging. Think of them as personality obstacle courses. Once you have thought up these situations write a short story about each character going through them. These short stories won’t be part of your final story (unless you decide you really love one of them). It is important that all the main characters are sent through the same situations. As you create these short stories and decide how each character handles them, you will uncover something about who you want that character to be. Since all the characters are presented with identical situations, you will also learn how they compare to each other. What do they have in common? How are they different? This will effect how they interact with one another. 

Another good exercise is to choose a specific trait in each of your characters and then reverse it. If they are brave, make them secretly cowardly. If they are kind make them callus. Turn one of their traits in an unexpected direction. Give them something that clashes a bit with the rest of their personality. This gives characters internal conflict and helps to make them multidimensional. If all your character’s traits are too consistent, they become archetypal, flat, uninteresting, and unconvincing. People are not simple. Give your characters some complexity. Maybe it’s a simple as: the gruff mercenary used to be a kindergarten teacher. Maybe it’s a huge as: the priest no longer believes in god. The bigger the gap between their overall character and their conflicting trait, the more intense their internal conflict will be and the more interesting they will become. Be careful though. It is good to have multidimensional support characters but if their conflict become too important, they will begin to eclipse the protagonist. If, as you develop your support characters, one of them becomes more interesting to you than the protagonist, consider changing the spotlight. I have changed which character is the protagonist many times in my own stories.  Whichever character you find most interesting, your reader will likely find them the most interesting too. 

There is some additional work that needs to be done on the main character. There are many ways people define the lead character or protagonist in a story. Personally, I prefer the theory that whichever character learns/fails to learn a lesson is the main character. Let me explain. In a sense, every story is about a lesson, something the protagonist needs to learn. By the end of the story they will either succeed in learning this lesson and be victorious or fail to learn it. This is the theory that makes the most sense to me. If there is not personal growth at stake, then there is nothing interesting about the protagonist or their journey. As you develop your protagonist, look for gaps or instabilities in their identity. Look for something about them that needs to / is in danger of changing. Something they can learn. Your protagonist should never be the same person at the end of the story as they are at the beginning. This is true for all characters but it is especially true for the protagonist. Or, if they do end up the same as when they started, it should be because they came close to changing and chose not to. They failed to learn the lesson presented them. Even in stories like this, however, there is still some change in the character. They are now cemented in their ways. The piece of them that was unstable or uncertain is now settled. For better or worse. 

Generally, a character’s journey should follow these basic stages: they begin in one place (metaphorically). As events unfold, their identity decides how they respond and how they move forward. Their desires or obligations drive them forward.  Along the way their perceptions and predispositions are challenged. They must decide whether to embrace these changes or to cling to their old ways of thinking. (Note: remember that these are the stages of the protagonist’s mental / emotional journey. They are not the stages of the story as a whole. Though they closely correspond, these two things are not exactly the same.) 

There is of course no one way to craft a story. There are no absolutes and no strict rules about how a person’s journey should unfold. Always challenge accepted strategies and find what works for you. These are only a few suggestions about how to get to know your characters better. Be strange. Be unexpected. Just be sure that you are doing so in order to be true to your story and your characters. Don’t be different just to be different. Be different because you genuinely see an interesting new way to tell stories. A word of caution: human beings have been telling stories since we were squatting around camp fires and hunting with sticks. It is the oldest of all art forms. You are taking part in an art that is fifty thousand years in the making. Over the millennia, we have refined and perfected strategies for telling stories that are interesting, valuable, and emotionally rewarding. The common design of story, shape, and character development is a careful distillation of the creative genius of every storyteller that has ever existed. If you think you have a better way of doing things, go ahead and explore it. That is the only way art evolves. But remember what it is you are challenging. The collective creativity of the entire human race. Past and present. I do not say this to discourage you but to excite you. If you have an original idea, then you have a chance to say something in a new way, to do something that has never been done since the dawn of time. Which is pretty badass. So be brave, be sincere, and have fun! 

Read more great work from Padraic on Floodmark.

A discussion of common pitfalls in writing dialogue and expositional methods.

Talking. It seem like the easiest thing in the world. We do it all the time. Some of us do it way too often. So why should it be so hard to make characters talk? Writing convincing and intelligent dialogue is one of the biggest challenges in fiction. A great deal of the dialogue I have read from my fellow writers (and written myself) feels strained. Not quite believable. It can sometimes be hard to tell why your dialogue isn’t quite working, which can be frustrating, to say the least. This is why I thought it would be a good idea to talk a bit about the problems I most often see in people’s dialogue writing as well as how to avoid them. Dialogue writing is a complicated task and there are many ways a writer can go wrong but there are three main areas where I often see writers struggling. The three cardinal sins of dialogue are what I call: Dumping, Flat, and Open Book dialogue. 

The first of these, Dumping, is the worst and most common of these three. This type of dialogue is when the writer tries to dump too much information into a character’s speech. Trying to force expositional material into conversation is dangerous at best. It’s a sign of impatience on the author’s part, trying to get the reader up to speed as quickly as possible. This style of dialogue almost always leads to overly direct exposition and characters who are not believable. No one, in real-life conversation pauses to not-so-subtly explain the situation. It is very difficult to make this sort of speech sound authentic and true to you character. Background information can be slowly and carefully revealed through subtle hints in dialogue and narration. Think about who your character really is as a fully-formed person. Would they really say what you are writing? Is that like them as a person? 

One of the oldest tricks to dealing with the exposition problem is to create one or more characters (usually the protagonist) who are outsiders, new to the situation. This can be a quick fix for overly expositional dialogue.  It is by far the easiest way to overcome Dumping dialogue. There are however one or two problems with this approach. The first is that this is a rather tired method. It is an old and well-used trick that may be a bit too cliché for you or your readers. The second problem is that it is restricting. Once you decide to make a character an outsider, that will help shape who they are and everything they do. Characters are the center of any story. Their desires and experiences are what propel the story forward. Changing the background or situation of any significant character will necessarily change nearly every aspect of their behavior and by extension, their story. 

The only fool proof way to avoid Dumping dialogue is patience. Approach exposition and characterization in a piece-meal fashion. Take your time. You don’t need to tell the reader everything right away. Letting the backstory come out naturally over time. If some small piece of the story-so-far fits comfortably into a situation, go ahead and include it. But if there is any doubt in your mind as to whether you are being overly direct, then err on the side of caution. Nothing is cluckier sounding or more tedious to read than huge information dumps that dispel all mystery at once. The wondering, the putting it all together is not only part of establishing the situation but an important tool in revealing who your character is. It is also an effective method of creating intrigue in your reader. Curiosity is a powerful motivator and it can keep your readers hooked. 

The second most common cardinal sin of dialogue is Flat Dialogue.  It is born from and perpetuates flat characters. It can be tempting, once you have an interesting idea for a plot to stop and think up realistic and complex characters, but this step cannot be overlooked or rushed. It is the most important part of fiction writing. Fortunately overcoming Flat Dialogue is somewhat easier than overcoming Dumping Dialogue.  It is as simple as intimately knowing who and what your characters are. Before you begin writing anything, sit down and create a dossier for each character. Include everything. Physical appearance, personality quirks, favorite color, detailed backstory, and bio. Keep working until you know your characters at least as well as you know yourself.  

The third and final cardinal sin of dialogue is Open Book Dialogue. This is when your character has a bit of an over-share problem. When they say absolutely everything they are thinking in a certain situation. In real conversation people are often indirect and mysterious. They lie, hide things, or just plain avoid certain things.  This, like Dumping Dialogue, usually comes from impatience. If you do have a character you feel you know and are excited about, you want the reader to know them too. You want to show exactly how they feel and what they think. Be patient. Be subtle. It is far more interesting and convincing to reveal your characters by what they don’t say. 

Notice all of these problems and solutions are closely tied with who your characters are. That is because what we say is closely tied with who we are. Your character cannot have convincing dialogue unless they themselves are convincing and fully-formed. Before you can honestly write for a character you must know who they are. As you read (and a writer should always be reading), pay special attention to who the characters really are. How are they formed? What motivates them? What are the different aspects and dimensions of their identity? Develop your understanding of people, what they do and how they think. A good writer needs to understand human nature. So live, know yourself, know others, be brave, be sincere, and have fun! 

Read Padraic's work on Floodmark here.