trust not the eye; make of your meat an imaging device

Recently, I was talking with a mentee about what makes good dialogue and wanted to compile some more thoughts here. The most common goal I hear from writers is how to make their dialogue realistic or natural. But good dialogue isn’t always realistic or natural dialogue. These two terms get conflated a lot which can be misleading. If you listen to people in conversation, they often speak in cliches, overuse idioms, repeat themselves and skirt a lot of context that exists between the speakers (depending on how deep their relationship is). This can make for very bland reading, though, sometimes that blandness can be intentional and making that choice is what matters.

I find when I come across mealy dialogue, it’s because of an over-dependence on realism or naturalism. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with striving for realism but it’s not always acknowledged that grasping for the “real”–whatever that is–from a singular author will still give evidence of biases, limited experience and particular cultural contexts in a distilled form. Your real is only your real, not everyone else’s even if others recognize aspects as familiar. Some writers try to graft realism into their work, which often means relying on stereotypes and cliches in order to widen the scope of their story and therefore make it feel more global, heterogenous, but that often comes off as fake and shallow. So why strive for this false state of consensus reality when what’s made in the tunnel of your own mind is much more interesting?

Continue reading “What Makes Good Dialogue?”

So far, in the last two months, I’ve read over 200 short story submissions ranging between 1000-6000 words which means I’ve been inundated with the same question: what makes a good story? Answering this question involves another set of subquestions and the difficult challenge of identifying 1) what are the interesting and engaging aspects of a story, 2) what is working against the story and, 3) what can we change to improve the story.

Good storytelling and good art is something I’ve been thinking about a lot but especially in the last two years. In 2020, Leslie Hung and I ran a season-long comics mentorship with three mentees who were preparing proposals for graphic novels in a variety of genres. We provided developmental support and critique during biweekly meetings for several months. I also attended CRIT, a high impact writing workshop which required written critique of our cohorts’ stories which was both extremely challenging and rewarding. This year, I was a part of the Ancestral Futures Mentorship program and got to mentor an extremely talented Gothic speculative fiction writer. Most recently, I Kickstarted a BIPOC illustrated short fiction anthology which I’m co-editing with Cassie Hart.

In these roles, I’ve had to find a clear, constructive vocabulary to be able to communicate the answers to those questions and have constructed a sort of three-prong diagnostic tool to help with that. The three aspects of story (which can range from flash to short stories to novels) that I think about most often are style, movement, and insight. These three aspects are dials you can throttle back or crank up, not values per se. This could be a post-procedural tool for a story you feel is complete and needs refinement or a calibrator you can turn to during the writing stage.

Continue reading “What Makes A Good Story?”