Fiction Scribe

Hello everyone! Welcome to out weekly Bird by Bird discussion. I hope you’ve been enjoying the book so far. It’s definitely given me a bit of a boost in my writing.

Today we’ll be discussing Dialogue and Set Design.

I love the way Dialogue starts because it gets right to the heart of the matter - dialogue can be a wonderful, wonderful thing, and it can also kill or nearly kill your story. It can be such a pleasure and a really big pain.

Lamott also touches on something I’ve mentioned before in a podcast (but has since blissed off from the 451 main page and disappeared): read your work out loud.

I can see the surprise on my students’ faces, because the dialogue looked Okay on paper, yet now it sounds as if it were poorly translated from their native Hindi. The problem is that the writer simply put it down word by word; read out loud, it has no flow, no sense of the character’s rhythm that in real life would have run through the words. - Dialogue, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott

In my opinion, dialogue should be the frosting on your cake. You’ve spent your time trudging through the fine details to make your world a working, functional world, you’ve set up places for your characters to grow and learn, and you’ve put it all in story form. And now your characters get to talk!

It’s a lovely thing.

Another good rule beyond reading your work out loud is “you should be able to identify each character by what he or she says.” This can be extremely difficult, as it’s easy to have a few strong voices and leave everyone to sound just like you. But just like you like listening to some people more than others, so will your readers like reading different voices in your characters. If every character sounds like you and your readers don’t like the way you talk, well…

Give your characters room to move, breathe, and talk is one of the the bottom lines in this chapter. Lamott does a lovely job of providing metaphors and advice which help to remind you that things take time, and practice is key, which is what I love about this book.

Set Design wasn’t a chapter I was particularly looking forward to, as I’m more of a dialogue woman than a set designer, but this only told me there were plenty of things I could learn about setting.

I got lost in Lamott talking about gardens, and even as I read, I found myself wanting a garden for my character to have peace and calm. In this, Lamott - perhaps unintentionally - presents the beauty of good setting. You get lost in it. You want to stay there. You want a space like it all your own.

For a chapter I wasn’t particularly looking forward to, it’s one of my favorites so far. It not only presents a picture of how Lamott set up one setting, but it also gives you other snippets of advice along the way like research, ask people for help, and visualize.

What did you think of these two chapters? Is there anything I didn’t touch on that you would like to talk about? Did these sections help you?

*Remember to read “False Starts,” “Plot Treatment,” and “How Do You Know When You’re Done” for next week.