Avoid These Language Traps In Your Fiction & Dialogue
I originally titled this post “language flaws” instead of “language traps,” but when I surveyed the following flaws of language and dialogue, I noticed that they all had something in common.
They seem to appear when a writer is defaulting to some sort of trap of language, a go-to of intellectual laziness, which (and I include myself here) we’re all guilty of when we’re running creatively low.
Note: I think these are, more than anything, guidelines to help the weary writer on his writing travels and are not meant to be hard and fast rules for writing. I believe in descriptive rules rather than prescriptive, and if you break a guideline, you should have a reason why you should break it, but it’s valuable to know it exists.
Cliches
Cliches are those tired phrases, plots, or characters that seem to follow a well-known script, which everyone can mouth along to because they’ve seen or heard it a 1000 times before.
These include phrases like “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” or “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
When a reader comes across them, they recognize them as symbols of famous literary moments, pulled from popular culture, and it takes them out of the story instead of reinforcing their intended affects.
Character-Neutral Language
I intentionally placed character-neutral next to cliches, because there’s some harmony going on between the two flaws.
Character-neutral talk is the kind of language that is so neutral, so “everyman” that any character could say it.
The language is neutral to that character. It has no specificity to that character’s vocabulary. And this is natural to do. If you look around, most people who are talking, when you’re walking around a grocery store or a gym, are talking neutrally.
Their language is full of banal and cliche statements, that has no bearing to their individual character, and we’re prone to fill up our dialogue and fiction with these kinds of statements.
Ostentatious Language
If you’re aiming to avoid character-neutral language, you may move your language barometer too far in the other direction.
These are lines that call out to the reader that a hand is moving them, and a character isn’t speaking them.
It’s the type of line that makes the reader pull the book a few inches away their face and say, “he / she thinks they’re soooooo literary.”
It’s the type of line that is so god-smackingly out to lunch, with every polysyllable philosophic latinate word in the dictionary, that it takes the reader minutes to get through each line, because they’re shuffling through their dictionary every few seconds.
Melodrama
As Robert McKee said in his book Dialogue, “The problem with melodrama, therefore, is not over-expression but under-motivation.”
That is, it is not melodrama that is the inherent problem in writing that is over-dramatic, it is that the cause for the melodrama is underwhelming. A character’s actions, and the plot, must be suited to the causes.
If they are not, and you overshoot, you are being melodramatic. If they are not, and you undershoot, you are being boring.
Try not to be either.
Avoid The Abstract
Robert Olen Butler has an exercise, which he talks about in his book From Where You Dream, where he tells his students to write out a scene, a very simple scene, without a single abstract word or sentence, using only the physical senses to describe the scene. Anytime they veer into the abstract, he puts them back on the path of the concrete.
He calls it “The Anecdote Exercise.”
When someone says their teeth were “large” he wants to know how large, exactly, because ‘large’ is relative and abstract. He wants to know what colour they were, how they smell, and which one was chipped.
He wants you to paint the “cinema of the mind” and the abstract, “large” is not concrete, it is ambiguous and it ruins the cinemascape that you’re building.
Be concrete. Be specific. Use the senses. Paint the picture in your reader’s mind.
Writing On-The-Nose
Now, and this is the trouble with any type of guideline article like this one, you may have swung back in the other direction. You may make character’s too concrete, too on-the-nose.
They might start saying exactly what they mean. You might over-explain things, in too much detail, that do not need to be explained. Some things readers just get, without explanation.
I do not know where the example comes from, but when we say an old man gets into a rusty truck, wearing a frayed ball cap, we can almost all see a very similar type of old man.
That is why going into too much detail may actually ruin that mind-scape for the person, because they’ve already gone into it in their minds, and to over describe may make the movie disappear.
And I want to re-iterate that you’re going to do all these things, and I’m going to do all these things, right after writing this. All writing rules are like this. We all fail, every day, over and over, at trying to correct for them. We also often do them on purpose, because we know what we’re doing. Or we don’t, and we catch them in editing, or our writing is flawed, because we are human.
That’s okay too. And I just wanted to let you know that.
