At EDF, we get a lot of “Dialogue only” stories. These are stories with zero description, just (at minimum) two characters talking to each other.

I can count on one hand how many of them we’ve ever accepted (and have fingers to spare).

The biggest reason for rejection? Both voices sounded the same. With dialogue only stories, you’re basically saying, as a writer, that you’re so good at writing dialogue that you don’t need all that mundane stuff like description, setting, and plot. You can do it all in the spoken word. Well, if you can’t even make two character sound different from each other, you’re in trouble. As an editor, I should be able to point to a random line of dialogue and say, oh, that’s character A speaking. I can tell because of his/her (way of speaking/accent/personality/etc).

Other good reasons for rejection are:

• You’ve inserted a random line of description at the end. If you have description at all, you need it everywhere. Otherwise it just looks like you tried to write a dialogue only story and failed.
• More than two characters. Two is hard enough. I’ve never seen a successful dialogue only story with three characters. The reader just gets confused.
• Info dumps. Just because it’s in dialogue, doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.
• The story sucks. A “clever” format like dialogue-only can’t save this.

Anyways, dialogue only pieces make for great exercises, but poor stories. Disagree? Prove me wrong. And then submit that proof to EDF’s slush pile.

Tags: EDF, The craft

I see this kind of thing a lot in the slush these days. The author eschews the actual story, and instead paints us an elaborate picture of what happened after the action. Obviously, this is common in flash, because often the inciting incident cannot be written in few enough words to qualify as flash.

We’ve published a few of these kinds of pieces, but often they just don’t work. There’s an insidious little trap that authors seem to fall into with regularity, and it is this: “When writing an aftermath piece, the situation described must be more interesting or powerful than the inciting incident”. Otherwise, the whole time you audience is reading the story they’re thinking, “wow that would have been cool to read about”.

To use a real life example, imagine you arrived at an intersection. Firefighters are hosing away stains on the street and you can just see a tow truck driving away towing something you just can’t make out. You ask a bystander what happened and he goes nuts, “Holy cow, I can’t believe you missed it! There was this wild elephant chasing a peanut truck and it ran into a wig factory and there was hair EVERYWHERE!”

You’d feel a little disappointed that you’d missed the action wouldn’t you? In an aftermath story, you’re going to have to overcome that with your readers.

How do you overcome it? Well, that’s really market dependent. In some markets (usually pulp markets) if your inciting incident was a bullets blazing, fist shaking brawl, you’ll never be able to overcome reader disappointment. They’ll want to read about that fight. However, if you’re targeting a literary market, they’re much more concerned with the emotional impact that that kind of violence would have. Give them a little angst and heartbreak, and they’re much more likely to forgive you for skipping the action.

Once again, it comes down to effective story placement. Know your market, and you just might be one of the ones who can pull off a perfect aftermath story.

Tags: The craft

So this is going to seem self-evident, but if you write a story in first person POV, you are, in theory, telling this story directly to your readers. It should work equally well on paper, or–and this is key–face to face.

So there’s shouldn’t be scene breaks because you don’t stop in the middle of a story you’d tell someone at a party (unless it was to go get a drink).

Equally, you don’t usually have “meta-narrative”. This means you don’t do an info-dump, then describe a scene, and go back to an info-dump. Remember, always picture yourself telling a story to a friend at a party. If they’d have to ask questions to follow your story, you fail.

That will be all for now.

Tags: First Person POV, The craft