Guest Post by Jack Smith

Dialogue
Tags

What about “he said”/”she said”—do you
need them?  Or perhaps the character’s
name instead of the pronoun?  How much of
either is needed?  How much is too
much?  Like everything else in creative
writing, no rules here.  Only what
works.  And you can think of this matter
in at least two ways: clarity and style—or both.

Take a look at this passage from Raymond
Carver’s “What’s in Alaska?”  Do we need
the dialogue tags?

“I don’t know.  Something Mary said,” Helen said.

“What did I say?” Mary
said.

“I can’t remember,”
Helen said.

“We have to go,” Jack
said.

“So long,” Carl
said.  “Take it easy.”

We could probably use some help here,
clarity-wise, since we’ve got four characters speaking, but notice too that
Carver creates an interesting cadence by the repetition of “said.”  Really! 
Nice, isn’t it?  What if he went
by some silly hard-and-fast rule about cutting down your use of “said.”  We would miss the lyrical quality of his
prose. Wouldn’t we?

Is clarity a matter in this passage from
Carver’s “The Compartment”?

They love you, I said.

No, they don’t, he
said.

I said, Someday,
they’ll understand things.

Maybe Wes, said.  But it won’t matter then.

You don’t know, I
said.

I know a few things,
Wes said, and he looked at me.

Clarity is much less an issue here.  But again—notice how the repetitive use of
“said” builds an interesting cadence. The texture of the prose draws us in—or
at least it draws me in. 

Notice now this passage from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.  No dialogue tags:

“He must drink a lot
of wine.”

“Or wear purple
undershirts.”

“Let’s ask him.”

“No.  He’s too tired.”

There’s plenty of this bare-bones
dialogue in this novel.  And by now, this
stripped-down dialogue is pretty familiar to many readers—readers, for
instance, of Cormac McCarthy.  It creates
an impact.  We hear conversation spoken,
and that’s it—like an audio tape.

 But there’s a middle road—a “he said,” a “she
said,” or “Norm said,” or “Mary said,” now and then—and then an action line
that establishes who’s talking.  For
instance, also from The Sun Also Rises:

“Poor old
darling.”  She stroked my head.

You could avoid the tags by action lines
like this.  We know who’s talking.

So what are your options?

1. 
Ramp up the dialogue tags.

2. Eliminate them altogether and go with
the bare-bones back and forth exchange.

3. Insert action lines now and then to
find ways to avoid tags.

But don’t get the idea that it’s best to
go for the Aristotelian Mean and take a middle path.  Think clarity, but also think style.

What sound do you want to create?  What tone? 

Jack Smith

Write and Revise for Publication
, Writer’s Digest, 2013, and Hog to Hog, winner of the George
Garrett Fiction Prize, Texas Review Press, 2008

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

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By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

This post will be short and sweet
because…I’ve gotten a little behind with everything this week.  :) And the odd thing is that this is back to
school week, so you’d think I’d be getting tons
of stuff done.

But no. 
And yesterday, I had to sit down and assess where I was going wrong. Why
was I scrambling to finish up writing-related tasks like promo?  Why was supper a last-minute effort? Why did
I keep forgetting milk at the store? 
What on earth was different?

Well, what was different was that the
kids were back in school.  But it’s not
quite the same as last year.

Last year…all the years, actually…I’ve
driven my son’s carpool to school and back. 
I sat in the carpool line and typed half of my word goal each day in
that line.  And now—my son is driving
himself to school. 

I’m still driving my daughter’s carpool,
but not every afternoon.  That school
lets out later than my son’s school, too. 

So my schedule changed and that
messed me up.

Another place where I went wrong—in the
afternoons, I felt so lost by not heading off to the high school to sit in the
carpool line that each day this week I asked myself, “What should I be doing
right now?”

And the answer each time was: “I have no
idea.  Maybe I should check my email.”

Wrong! 
Checking email is never the right
answer to that question.  :)  Email is a tremendous time-suck for me.

What I did instead yesterday was to make
a list of what I needed to do.  I’d made
a list in the morning, but I’d checked those things off.  What I need now, apparently, is a separate
afternoon list.  So I wrote it up.  The most pressing things were to proofread a
teaser chapter that I was on deadline for, find and schedule links for Twitter,
and then pull that laundry out of the dryer before the stuff started wrinkling
(there’s not a lot of ironing going on in my house).  Checking email was not on this list.

So, for me anyway, even small
fluctuations in a schedule have an impact. If I lose productivity, then I need
to figure out where I’m going wrong. 

And lists…one list may not be enough to
carry me through a whole day.  Because
when I finish the stuff on my morning list—heck, I might just pull up my emails
and lose an hour or more.

Do you ever have to reassess when to fit
your writing in?  And do you rely on
lists as much as I do?

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

The business side of writing is my least
favorite part.  I struggle to keep
up.  And there’s sort of a residual guilt
that I’m not doing all I can do to keep my accounts organized.  But I’m trying.

New as of 2013 is an accountant.  I tried…I did try…to do my taxes last
February. I’ve done my own taxes for the last ten years.  This time, however, they boggled my mind
about halfway through and I also felt a rising panic that I was doing something
wrong.  I found a CPA right away.

One of the problems is that my
income—never very much, but always nice to have and increasingly relied upon—comes from many
different sources.  I’ve now got income
coming from two traditional publishers, Amazon, Smashwords, Nook, ACX, and
CreateSpace.  My accountant recently
asked me financial planning questions.  I ended up giving
several apologetic shrugs.  I’m sure this
makes her want to drink heavily.

“So you’re getting a check this
fall?  But you don’t know what that check
will be for?”  She smiles patiently at
me.

“No idea. 
It’s for royalties from Penguin.”

“For sales.  But you don’t know your sales.”

“That’s right.  It’s just sort of a surprise.”  I’m blushing now.  It makes it look as if I’m not paying
attention. But these are numbers I’m not privy to—primarily bookstore
numbers. This is, admittedly, one of the things that drives writers a little nuts when it comes to traditional publishing.  I add, “But I also have
self-published books and I’m paid 60 days in arrears for those.  I should be able to give you an idea of the
money coming in 60 days from now for my self-pubbed books, if that helps.” Financial planning, when you’re a writer, means a lot of guesswork and piecing together.

I did get some tips from the CPA that
I’ve been fairly good about following (and then some that are good tips that I
haven’t gotten around to yet).

Open a
business checking account.  If you
can, find a free one—probably with a small bank or a credit union.  Have your publishing income direct deposited
into that account.  Write checks for
publishing-related expenses from that account, too—it just helps to keep
everything straight.

Keep a
small notebook in your car to record gas expenses for writing-related trips.
This is not only for promo…this could be gas spent driving to the post office
to mail off giveaway prizes to readers or gas used driving to the bank to
deposit a random check.

For US writers (since I have no idea how
this applies to international writers)—if you know you’ll likely be paying a
fair amount of taxes to the federal government in April (because this stuff
isn’t taken out of our checks, y’all), we should pay
the government estimated, taxes along the way.  To avoid penalties, for sure, but also to
keep the tax bill from putting us in total shock when we get it in April. 

Contributing
to a 401K (self-employed people can be eligible) or an Individual Retirement Account can help to reduce the
amount of taxes we pay.

Obviously, the necessity of paying taxes
means that we shouldn’t spend all of the money
from the checks that come in. As difficult as this is. :)

If your income is higher during the year
than you’d previously estimated, it might be a good idea to check back in with your accountant and make some
plans. 

Keep
receipts.  Keep your office supply
receipts, your receipts for computer-related purchases, your gas receipts, your
conference receipts.  Remember to keep
receipts of payments for services, too—your agent’s commissions, your cover
designer’s bill, your formatter’s invoice, etc.

And the disclaimer…clearly, I’m not a tax adviser (ha!) If you need tax advice…I do recommend you find a
professional.  It will keep you from
staying up at night worrying about this stuff.

Until you find your professional, here
are some interesting articles on taxes and writing income to get a more
thorough overview.

Taxes 101 for Authors—by Susan
Spann

10
ways to cut costs from your freelance writing business—by Michelle V.
Rafter

Taxes
and Record Keeping for Writers—by Starla Criser

How do you keep track of your writing
income? Got any other tips?  

Image: MorgueFile: ModernCog

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I think when writers ask how many drafts
another writer completes for a finished story, they’re really wondering whether
they’re spending too much time editing or too little time editing.

That’s what happens when you work
alone—you have no basis of comparison.

I got this question emailed to me
recently and I had to really think about it. 
What comprises a draft to me?  In
general, how many times do I go through the manuscript before I send it to my
editor?

I definitely keep going through it if I
keep finding mistakes.  Obviously, if you
think it’s not a clean document, you want to keep working on it.  And I continue reading through the manuscript
if I feel I could have used better diction or if I think of other ways to
improve the story.  But there does get to
be a point where a writer is making changes just for the sake of making
changes.  You can write the life out of
your story and when it’s tough to say if a change makes the story better or
worse…it’s probably time to either put it aside for a while or send it out on
submission.

What comprises a draft?  To me, it’s a new version of the manuscript
with significant changes.  A draft is
something, to me, that would make me want to send an updated copy to my editor or
beta reader (“No, read this one,
actually.  Not the one I sent you.”)

I’d say that I have probably four or five
drafts of a story before I turn it in. 
That’s mainly because I write in layers and the second draft is where I
put in the book’s character and setting description and the third is where I
stick in chapter breaks. Then I have another couple of read-throughs for
errors, pacing, continuity, etc.  

You can also approach it a different
way—a bunch of targeted mini-drafts. 
This could take more read-throughs, but each time you’d be looking for
specific things: weak scenes, conflict/tension, description that pops,
out-of-sequence storyline, grammar, etc.

After I’m done,  I’ll email the story to my editor.  Months later, there will be more
editing.  Then it goes to the
proofreader…and even more editing ensues.

How many drafts do you usually go through
on a manuscript?  How do you know when
it’s ready? 

Image: MorgueFile: jppi