A to Z Challenge: D is for Despair

Welcome to the 2013 A to Z Challenge!

This year, I’m focusing on two themes:  Emotions and grammar,

depending on which letter we’re on each day.

I’ll be sharing mostly what I’ve learned about writing emotion into a novel, but I’ll also be throwing in a few key grammar lessons, pet peeves I’ve picked up while working as an editor.

Today’s an emotion day!

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D is for despair:  the loss of hope; hopelessness; to lose, give up, or be without hope

There is probably no worse feeling than despair.  It comes in all shapes and sizes and is relative to our life experience.  I’ve certainly experienced it, but I’m sure it was nowhere near as bad as what some people live through.  Regardless, it affected me just as adversely as it would anyone else in any situation.  When hope is lost, no matter the reason, nothing else matters.

When writing about despair, which I did extensively in my novel, The Mistaken, it’s best to tackle it gradually, building it up over time, day after day, like weight being added to the character’s shoulders until he eventually breaks under the pressure.  That’s part of what makes despair so debilitating.  Everyday, you wake up realizing nothing has changed, or it’s only gotten worse, and that’s one more brick you have to carry.

You have to be concrete when writing about despair, no clichés or heavy-handed melodrama.  I found comparison works well.  Have the character reflect back on a time when life was good, when he had expectations, then show how it’s changed, what he’s lost, and how nothing will ever be the same.  Below are two short passages from my novel:

At first, it gave me some relief to savor the vision of retribution. Yet, I always woke up the next day with the realization that Erin Anderson was still alive and well, walking the earth, enjoying her life, enjoying her family, while my wife was not, while my child lay eternally buried in Jillian’s cold womb six feet beneath the heavy earth, a tiny speck of immeasurable possibility heartlessly quashed into nothingness...

... Alone now, I sat back in my chair with a full bottle of tequila and drank. With my mobile phone in hand, I played Jill’s last voicemail message on an endless loop, over and over, until I could recite it perfectly, word for word in pitch and tone...

There are many physical characteristics to show despair—rocking back and forth, hugging the body, scrubbing hands down the face, the list is endless—but one of the best ways is to have the character act out in ways he never would have otherwise, pushing him over the line. Desperation often drives people to do things they later deeply regret.

A to Z Challenge: D is for Dialogue

Welcome to Day 4 of the A to Z Challenge

Many bloggers have chosen a theme for the A to Z.  My pledge since becoming a blogger is to post about writing, so for this event, I will being posting about what I've learned about writing a novel.

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D is for Dialogue:  the conversation between characters in a novel, drama, etc.; a literary work in the form of a conversation.  (Dictionary.com)

All readers love dialogue on the page.  It’s easy to read, and means the action will be quick.  And let’s face it, long blocks of exposition can be annoying and make us weary.  While we sometimes tend to scan densely worded paragraphs, we snap to attention for dialogue.  It generally means we’re living in the moment, and the characters might be divulging important secrets.  Dialogue is a compression of the action and should somehow be connected to one of the character’s objective, what he wants at that exact moment in time, and it must always move the story forward.

Dialogue should be easy to follow, but this doesn’t mean you need a ‘he said’ tag at the end of every line.  In fact, you should use as few as possible, only enough to keep the reader on track.  Incidental action is a good way to help the reader keep track without using tags, and it helps to infuse movement and emotion into the dialogue without using adjectives and adverbs.  But you also don’t want to bog the conversation down.

Most importantly, dialogue needs to have immediacy and tension on a gut emotional level.  It’s not that the information being relayed is all that important really, but that there is doubt about it, as well as the character delivering it.  It should be a tug-of-war, but we don’t necessarily want to know whether their argument will be settled, but rather whether the characters will make peace.  So find their emotional friction and exploit it, even if it it’s only a friendly disagreement.

Personally, I love dialogue that feels and sounds real.  (Yes, I use a lot of contractions!)  I always speak my lines of dialogue out loud so I can hear exactly what it sounds like, and therefore what it feels like to be with those characters.

So how do you deal with dialogue and

what do you want it to do for your story?