writing skills – Sophisticated Nonsense

This week’s theme was dialogue. I wrote 5,500+ words for my three stories this week and in each I worked on trying to create dramatic and captivating dialogue. I think I had varying degrees of success overall. I would like to have some more feedback for my writing, however, I have no idea how to promote my writing blog. While I have about 20+ followers I don’t know how many actually follow any of my stories. I have gotten many likes this week and that’s certainly encouraging, but it’s hard to translate likes into constructive feedback. If anyone has any advice on how to attract people who might be interested in reading my stories please let me know in a comment. For now I just want to reflect on the three sections of dialogue I wrote this week.

The first of these was The Monk and this contained the worst dialogue of the three in my opinion. Not for the content, indeed I have actually won some praise for the content, and I am pleased with that myself. Rather what I was unhappy about with this dialogue was the simplicity of style, it was just questions and answers. It had the sophistication of a public school homework assignment. There was little passion in the dialogue, although I tried to put a feeling of solemnity in it to try and spice it up emotionally. What I would like to do in future Monk updates is have more arguments, debates, and emotive speeches. I don’t like the low energy nature of these dialogues. Continue reading “Writer’s Diary: Dialogue”

Writing depth into a character is difficult. Creating a character who is flawed, complex, and deep is not an easy task. In my early books (15-20 years ago), all my characters were flawless. They were honest, strong, noble, and if they were villains then they were at least stoic villains. These superficial characters were the creation of a superficial writer. That is, the younger me hadn’t gained enough self-knowledge to be deep enough to create deep characters. Even to this day, I struggle with simple things like lying in fictional characters.

I am naturally an honest person. It was difficult for me to accept that other people lie. My villains used to be honest people, which doesn’t make any sense to me now because an honest villain can’t be evil. They must be dishonest in some way. When I was a young man, though, my world was turned upside down when I discovered something about myself: I actually did lie. I lied to myself by telling myself that my weaknesses weren’t really weaknesses, but unique virtues that only I had. For example: I am not manipulative, I am kind hearted by tricking people into doing what’s best for them, which is actually only what’s best for me. Continue reading “Writer’s Diary: Character Depth”