Then there’s the repeated word (2 or 3 times in a paragraph)–pick a word, any word. NO word is good when it’s repeated too often (unless you’re going for the appositive effect and personally, I’d rather pick a patter that doesn’t repeat ) Man, I *WISH* I could write patter-song like W.S. Gilbert (of Gilbert & Sullivan) or Danny Elfman.

Other than frowning and scowling, I don’t think I’ve ever fallen prey to any other truly annoying actions.

There’s one that Nora Roberts does that not only drives me insane (in a bad way) trying to envision the character actually managing to do it, but it’s really an unpleasant sight once I manage to picture it. It’s the tongue between the teeth thing she apparently likes to do – I’m POSITIVE it’s her personal habit to do this and it has just come out in her characters. Given she’s the single-most PROLIFIC and in-print author in the Romance market (41% of all fiction in North America and she has 300 million copies of it right now) I’m thinking other people don’t mind her sticking her tongue between her teeth or running her tongue over her teeth or doing anything else with her tongue *smirk* There I go again! *heh*

Great discussionsm, yeah. Thanks for having Robb guest-write for you.

Love the discussions and look forward to Rob’s post tomorrow on description!

Sarah, I too love the action tags. I did find that my heroine had flicked her hair one too many times in an earlier manuscript and that was a very valuable lesson. It’s a balancing act between enough tags to keep the context without being too ‘busy’.

Rob, I like the analogy of Michael Angelo chipping away at a block of marble. Something beautiful emerges from a cloud of chippings and dust And I’ll be sure to use bribery on the next short-legged little mutt I meet…

It depends, of course, on what voice you’re using to tell your story. If you’re in the third person limited, it’s super-easy to get in close, as they say, get inside the character’s head and — using their diction so it is THEM “speaking” to the reader — make them have a conversation, of sorts, with themself. They’re thinking but we all “talk” to ourselves at one time or another.

It’s a trick that can backfire on you, if you make it too obviously a mechanism for inserting “pseudo dialog” forex, but done right, it can work for a long passage of expositive to break it up the way dialog would. AND it tells you something about a person to know what they say to themselves when no one else is listening. Does this person lie even to himself?

In my current WIP I have a character who was kidnapped and is being beaten while unconscious–when he wakes up, he finds he has new injuries. His self-examination and “thoughts” are a sort of self-dialog. His emotions are out there, raw, for the reader to feel, but he’s alone in a room and when someone else finally DOES come in and speak to him, he deliberately and forcibly PREVENTS himself from speaking to them–won’t give the captors the satisfaction, the stubborn little git that he is. That’s a mistake he’ll have to learn the hard way

You can add a lot of tension, humor, pacing/page-turning gripping stuff in those kinds of expositives without having to worry about tagging as much as injecting personality and voice into the character’s “self-dialog.” Try it. The more you write, the better you get at writing.

-sry

@Bren – I’m the opposite. I find it easier to overwrite in first draft and then edit down to what is needed. Like a Michelangelo who started with a giant block of marble and then chipped away everything that didn’t look like David. And ‘barbie dolling it’ is a one of those terms I stole from another writer friend (who may very well have heard it from someone else, I’m not sure).

@Helene – dachshunds are naturally mean unless you share your Tim Tams.