I'm rereading How to Write Dazzling Dialogue: The Fastest Way to Improve Any Manuscript by James Scott Bell.

The book is good. One of the things I find funny is it says to avoid exposition. The examples and comparisons are great. However, there's exposition to explain the scenes in the examples.

I can understand the need to provide it as story dialogue has context. The claim is good dialogue shows emotion and doesn't require exposition. I was wondering, “why not just present the dialogue? Let people infer emotion and context.” After more thinking, I realized the same dialogue could occur in multiple scenarios.

For a made up example:

Jimmy, a con man, is trying to convince his target Tony there's nothing wrong with the sauna. Tony also happens to be a mob boss.

“It's just not working between us Jimmy.”
“What do you mean?”
“There's no steam between us.”
“I can fix it, please give me a chance.”
“You've got five minutes.”

which could also be:

Jimmy, seeing his wife leaving for the last time, is trying to persuade her to stay.

“It's just not working between us Jimmy.”
“What do you mean?”
“There's no steam between us.”
“I can fix it, please give me a chance.”
“You've got five minutes.”

It's the same dialogue, but the exposition changes how you'd read it. One's life threatening, with the other heartbreaking.

The books pretty good so far. It highlights the difference between painting a picture with words vs letting your words paint a picture.

I'll admit, I've fallen behind on NaNoWriMo prep this year. I'm currently reading Save the Cat! Writes a Novel to prep and have some path of where I want to go.

In previous years I've always gotten stuck around ~10,000 words. Most of the time I have some sort of premise, but the plot is too linear without much character development. Finding time to write 50,000 words while also doing a day job full time is also pretty tough.

This year, I'm hoping some form of accountability will help me get close to the 50,000 work goal. That's why I'm documenting my progress on Write.as. I'm also thinking I can cheat and include the journal as part of the 50,000 words 😜

This is also an attempt to eat my own dogfood. I've been working on a Markdown Editor called ThiefMD. I really want to explore more creative outlets. Open Source Software is one of those ways I've been poking around, but that tickles one side of my brain.

ThiefMD aims to be like a smash up of Ulysses and iA Writer. ThiefMD manages large amounts of text and allows for exporting. It can export ePUBs, DocX, and now, Blogs!

The more I work on it, the more excuses I have for not writing my novel. Blogging isn't necessary to get a novel done, so this is just more feature creep. At the same time, I have fewer excuses about why I can't write my novel.

My current idea I'm throwing around is some sort of Utopia where it's really a dystopia. This would be a re-do of last year's NaNo with more planning and development beforehand. I was shocked to see Love Alarm on Netflix because the story I was working on had a similar premise. So I guess that means I already have a made for TV-series idea...?

Anyways, this is mostly just an intro post, and to validate ThiefMD is working with Write.as. I look forward to sharing more with you soon!