One thing I've been noticing in my writing is I have a tendency to write a lot of internal dialog in my 3rd person POVs.  Another thing I've noticed, I tend to cut most of it out during my revisions.  So I thought I'd talk about internal dialog in general, why I put it in and why I take it out.


There are a number of different ways to write internal dialog. I mostly use italics to represent internal dialog and then eschew using italics for anything else in that piece, if I can.  For example:


"Hey Donna, how's it going?" 
Please say fine and keep walking.
"Oh, Jill, just terrible. It's Mike again, I think he's cheating on me."
Damn it.

That's rough but you see what I mean.  I think I put in a lot of internal dialog intending to show my character's thoughts, as a way of getting inside their head.  That's fine for first drafts and second drafts but as I polish a story, I'm mostly cutting the internal dialog out. You don't always need it. I think a better way to show a character's true feelings is through their actions.  Let me try an example again:


"Hey Donna, how's it going?" Jill said.  She kept her feet moving, stared straight ahead and froze a very non-committal smile on her face.
"Oh Jill, just terrible. It's Mike again, I think he's cheating on me."
Donna's smile mostly hid her wince.


Again, rough, but that's a different way of showing internal emotion.  Now I actually would want to go back and add back in one piece of the internal dialog I cut.  The 'damn it'. 


Internal dialog works best when it is in contrast to what is being said. That sets up a nice, ironic tone that works well, I think. You shouldn't have your internal dialog just echo what the character's spoken dialog just said.  


Use internal dialog to show inner conflict that the main character must keep hidden.  Use it to expand on what the character just said.  Use it to contrast what is being spoken and what is being unspoken.


Now I may change my mind about internal dialog, some stories it may work better in than others and I may go back and re-read some of my favorite authors and find that they're using just fine.  But for now, I'm going to say you should only use it a last resort.  


Try avoid multi-paragraph soliloquies.  See if you can show the same emotion in action.  But if you can't avoid it, feel free to use it.  It's just another tool in the toolbox.

Sorry if this sounds obvious to some of you or if I come off sounding stupid. Sigmund Freud couldn't figure this one out.  I doubt I'll do any better but there was a panel at PAX that tried to tackle this question.  There wasn't a uniformity of answers since the women on the panel were, well, all individuals who have different likes and dislikes.  Weird, huh?   


BUT!  There were a couple of things that everyone was in agreement with and I thought I'd toss them out. These were in the context of video games but I think they're going to apply to writing as well.  At least I'm going to try to.


If there was one thing all the women on the panel agreed with was they wanted female characters they could relate to and male characters they could lust after. Part of this goes back to my post on creating sympathetic characters but let me dig in a little deeper.  If your main character is a woman, she probably shouldn't be a stripper or a prostitute or (in their words) a guy with a pair of tits slapped on.  They should be someone you'd like to be friends with. Witty, smart, a little self-doubting/insecure, but cool and confident.  She should be competent at her chosen profession.  She shouldn't be helpless or simply be the object of someone's quest.  She can be captured but she needs to be trying to get her own ass out of trouble, even if she fails.  She needs to be appropriate. Again, they want to see women in action/combat roles but they want to see explorations of what that means from a woman's POV, not as a male character with a woman's form superimposed. 


Relationships are a big part of what seemed to be important.  She needs to have friends of her own.  She should have love interests and care about what happens to them.  If someone's house gets blows up, they wanted to know if the people inside were all right, not if they'd lost all their stuff.  (apparently a Fable 3 plot-fail)  Relationships and the emotions that come from them were powerful motivations and hooks.  Your female main characters should care about the people in their life and how they're doing, what they're doing.**


Several of them brought up Ripley from Aliens and how motherhood as a theme  and a motivation to why Ripley needed to kick ass and get away really spoke to them...even to the women without kids.  As they said, every woman has the potential to be a mother.


Surprisingly, most of the panel didn't have a problem with slutty characters* so long as the woman owned her sexuality.  It was ok for girls to chase boys or dress revealingly (And with style.  Accessories are important, it seems) but it was important that it be her choice.  Its ok for her to 'get naked' but it was not ok if all her clothes were torn of by an explosion/melee attack/wild raccoon.  Sexuality was ok, plot-dictated titillation wasn't, by and large.

Finally, this wasn't from the panel but from what my fellow writers have mentioned, let your female main character drive the action and not just be caught up in it or purely reacting to it.

That was about it, in the hour long panel they mostly talked about when it was alright to be slutty, characters they could identify with, and motherhood as a powerful motivation/theme.  I have feeling this panel could have gone on much longer and it certainly is a topic for more 


*though they didn't like overly-pretty characters.  Apparently clear, smooth skin was a hot button for them.  Who knew?


**This was partly my inference as they didn't come out and say this but they talked at length about their character's relationships with NPCs in their games.  So this was my takeaway and it was a bit of an eye-opener.  Guys don't generally care about what other people are doing, not in the same way. We'll ask 'how's it goin?' and that's good enough for us.

I'll be offline for a few days. I'm going to PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo. It's a huge video game convention here in Seattle.  Last year they had some interesting panels on writing for video games.  Hopefully they'll have something like it this year.

Plus, well, video games!  I'm gonna get my KOTR MMO on.

What I like best about writing is when I'm in 'The Zone' and the words just flow.  But when that flow shuts off or gets blocked up, it can be hard to force yourself to keep going.  I think you do need to.  Usually, when the 'flow' stops, part of your subconscious is fighting against you.  Steven Pressfield calls it 'The Resistance' and I think it's real.   Writers tend towards self-sabotage. 


But I'm not talking about anything that dramatic the biploar mood swings most writers seem to suffer from. I'm just talking about the slowdown in your productivity.  I get this sensation after a couple hours (or three or four on Sundays) where I feel like I'm 'done'.  I'm not. I just think I am.


I've been trying to find ways to sneak around that feeling since literally forcing myself to write is hard.  (I keep doing non-writing things, like video games when I try to force myself)  I've found something that seems to work for me and I want to share it and see if it works for anyone else.


Get up.


That's basically it.  Get up, get out of your chair, go walk around.  Cool down.  I get very hot when I'm in 'The Zone' and end up drenched in sweat for some reason.  A hot laptop doesn't help the ol' Throne of Writing(tm) either.  So get up.  Get out of your writing pod.  Walk around the house, talk to someone, even if its just the cat.  (all writers have cats, right?)


See, a strange thing happens to me when I get up and walk away from my computer.  I start thinking about what I should have written or what should come next.  It's like some strange, F-ed up girlfriend who only wants you around when you're walking away from her.

I have been working on my next novel, The Mageborn Mechanic.  The main character is a pretty hard-edged, cynical 18-year old.  One of the things I'm working on (and will probably keep working on) is making him sympathetic.  The last thing I want is the whole book to come off feeling bitter. This is a thriller but it's also a supernatural thriller so there should be sense of wonder there as well. That got me thinking about what makes a protagonist sympathetic.


First of all, make them relatable.  Their problems need to feel plausible, something the reader can identify with.  Even if you're writing epic fantasy, people aren't different. They can still have problems living up to a parent's expectations or have relationship problems.  If your main character is a supermodel who also sells best-selling mysteries and she's flying off to Hawaii to get over her breakup with her movie-star boyfriend...we aren't going to care about her problems.


Make them suffer unjustly.  If someone starts playing tag with cars in traffic and they get hit, we're not going to feel too bad for them.  Likewise, if someone decides to ignore warning about a haunted house, that cuts down on our sympathy for them once the killer starts warming up. Ideally, your character should suffer and suffer badly but if they aren't to blame, we will side with them as a reader.


Make them care about someone else.  Another way to build sympathy is to have your main character help the helpless or show concern for others.  If your protagonist is a unstoppable killing machine, that can be fun for a while but we won't really care about them any more than we care about losing a 'guy' in a video game.  Have your protagonist care about something other than themselves or their plot goal.


Make your main character 'cool'.  Have them say all the things you've always wanted to say.  Give them all the good lines. Have them smart off to authority figures. They may not (and probably should not) get away with all the time but have them get in people's faces.  Have them dress well.  Show them in control of circumstances that most people get wrapped up in.


Make them competent.  A main character that can fix a car, parachute out of an airplane, win a fist fight and cook dinner will draw our admiration.  If they fumble with their keys or can't protect themselves or botch giving first aid, we grow frustrated with them. That doesn't mean writing flawless characters. But whatever your character 'does', make sure they can do it well.


Make them have a sense of humor.  Humor, especially in the face of despair, makes us identify with your protagonist. I'm not saying they should be flippant or light-hearted when it's not appropriate but a person who can laugh at themselves draws our admiration.


There's more, I'm sure.  Let me know what you think makes for a likeable character.

The New York Times in its infinite wisdom decided it would tackle the troubling fact that most new readers are girls, not boys.(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/books/review/boys-and-reading-is-there-any-hope.html) This has sparked blog post after blog post and not a little heat.  Most of the anger seemed to come from the assertions made by the article's author that boys, in effect, don't read stories written by women.  And most of the YA novels being published are targeted towards young women.

I've been challenging myself to work on my weak spots and on things I'm afraid of.  Several authors at the PNWA Conference mentioned that what we're most afraid of can be the richest vein to mine for our characters. And what we're weakest at as writers is where we need to focus our attention.


It's easy to coast along on our strengths, good dialog, realistic characters, good action. Yea.  But endings?  Yeah, that's where I'm weakest.  I recently received another rejection letter, for the story (almost) nobody liked.  (Thanks to Eric Guignard for the lightning fast turnaround.) Eric gave me some great feedback for my story, which was much appreciated but one thing stood out that other people in my critique group pointed out.  My endings suck.


My story endings are too abrupt, at least in my short stories.  So I'm going back to Nancy Kress' book, "Beginnings, Middles and Ends" (http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Fiction-Writing-Beginnings-Middles/dp/0898799058) and going through some of my notebooks of writing advice and seeing what I can find.


I know endings need to be satisfying, not always happy but they need to satisfy the reader.  I need to think about this more and figure out what is going to satisfy me and my audience.


See, this is a strange weakness to me and it took this rejection to realize it IS a weakness.  I almost always know my ending before I start writing my stories.  I usually have a pretty clear picture in my head of that last scene or that last moment. Unfortunately, that picture, that moment isn't satisfying my readers. They want more.


So, I don't know (yet) how to solve this problem but I'm going to focus on it.  If you're writing with a critique group, ask them honestly where your weaknesses are. It won't be easy to hear but listen to them and focus you attention on where you're weak.

Successful writing careers don't 'just happen'. That's the message I get from writers I know and writers I admire.  It all starts with a goal.  A clear, one sentence objective.

Let me run through a list and then I'll get specific and personal:



-Define your goal in one sentence

-Goal needs to be a POSITIVE goal. What you want to do, not just avoiding what you don't want.

Sorry for the lack of posting yesterday.  My hosting provider had problems with my admin login.  All better now.


I started serializing a short story on Twitter.  When I'm done, I'll post it here as well. I'm curious how this will work.  It is a real challenge for me to keep my writing to 140 characters, including the #shortstory hashtag.  I don't know if people will be interested or able to follow but if you like, I'm @MarkAndrew88 on Twitter.  (I know, but all the variations on Mark Edwards were taken and my full name was too frelling long for Twitter).


One thing I've noticed, is that I'm choosing my words carefully.  I'm not using words and descriptions like I would in a typical short story. That's interesting. I need to make each 140 character snippet somewhat self-contained. I'll be interested in how it will read once the whole thing is finished and collected on my site here.  Keep in mind that this is an experiement.  Experiments don't always go right