Free This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley Page A

experience.
    So how do we fix this sentence? There are many ways. If the only thing that bothers you is the narrative voice, you might want to change the declarative sentence into a bit of dialogue. Maybe Rena, after seeing Van obliterate that annoying fly with the flat of his hand, tells a friend what she thought Van was feeling. Depending on her character, this sentence might work well. Dialogue can be sloppy, overly elaborate, inarticulate, and many other things that the novel’s narrative voice can never afford to be. If we believe that Rena communicates in this repetitious manner, we will accept the information and move on without question.
    We could get rid of all the adjectives and simply show Van smashing the fly and then looking at the remains of the insect with grim satisfaction.
    We might have Van say something over the top and inappropriate for this seduction scene.
    “I hate that goddamned fly.”
    The easiest thing to do is to get rid of the sentence and go on. Maybe his rage or anger or fury is not all that important to the story.
    Always try to pare down the language of your novel. Is that word necessary? That sentence, that paragraph, that chapter? Most writers tend to overwrite. They either fall in love with their use of language or want to make sure that the reader understands everything.
    But, as we saw above, you can never say everything. There are too many details in reality. Fiction is a collusion between the reader and the novel. If you have brought your characters into the story in such a way that their emotions both color and define their world, you will find that readers will go along with you—creating a much larger world as they do. It won’t be exactly the world you intended them to see, but it will be close enough—sometimes it will be better.
    You must investigate each sentence, asking yourself, “Does it make sense? Does it convey the character properly? Does it generate the right mood? Is it too much? Does it get the narrative voice right?”
    Every sentence.
    Every sentence.
    dialogue
    How your characters express themselves is just as important as what they say.
     
    “Man walk up to me,” Roger said, “an’ say he know my name. . . I told him he better get on outta here.”
     
    We know a great deal about Roger from just this snippet of dialogue. He’s angry and confrontational. He might be afraid of something, and he identifies himself with a street sensibility. He probably isn’t well educated, but he has a subtle appreciation of language. We understand that Roger’s dialogue has the potential to tell us things he doesn’t say.
     
    “What’s wrong?” Benny asked Minna.
    “Nothing.”
    “Come on,” he said, coaxing her by touching the side of her hand with a single finger.
    “Um. . . #8221;
    Here we appreciate an underlying disturbance in Minna. Benny sees it and tells us about it as he questions his friend and reaches out to her. He has seen beneath her subterfuge. It might be that these few words are intended to tell us about the relationship between these two rather than to lead us to some undisclosed personal problem.
    Many new writers use dialogue to communicate information such as “My name is Frank. I come from California.” This is the simplest use of dialogue. It’s okay for a job interview or a chance meeting in a bar, but in the novel, dialogue is meant to be working overtime.
    Every time characters in your novel speak, they should be: (1) telling us something about themselves; (2) conveying information that may well advance the story line and/or plot; (3) adding to the music or the mood of the scene, story, or novel; (4) giving us a scene from a different POV (especially if the character who is speaking is not connected directly to the narrative voice); and/or (5) giving the novel a pedestrian feel.
    Most of these points are self-explanatory. The last two, however, are worth a closer look.
    If your novel is written in the first or third person, you