July 3, 2017

13 secrets of great dialogue

Most of these are borrowed from Dialogue by Robert McKee (which I highly recommend and which I'm rereading at the moment). And some come from regurgitated stuff in my head—things I'd picked up from various sources over the years. You can argue that there is no such thing as perfect dialogue, but I'd argue back that as much as dialogue can be fluid and nebulous, it must have a form. It can fluctuate within that form, but without form it bogs down the narrative with melodrama (which stems from unclear character motivations) and other dialogue sins (info-dumps, on-the-nose talk, repetitiveness of arguments, inadvertent summaries, random interruptions, unfinished thoughts, etc.).

So. I created a cheat-sheet of sorts for myself which I'll share here with you and will bookmark for myself to return to when I feel like my dialogue sucks and I don't know how to fix it (which is almost every day).

1. ACCELERATE YOUR PACING VIA INDIRECT DIALOGUE

November 16, 2016

What’s it like to live under fascist dictatorship

by Ksenia Anske

I am writing this post at the request of my writing mentor who said "We all want to know!" Irkadura was supposed to be the book that drew from the wealth of information I'm sitting on, having grown up in Soviet Union, lived in GDR in my teenage years, witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and having returned to Moscow where shortly after snipers were shooting people from the roofs, and the country as I knew it ceased to exist. This was the book he asked me to write. It didn't turn out the way he envisioned it, as I was still going through lots of personal pain which spilled itself out in Irkadura. I wasn't ready. Nor am I ready now. TUBE is not what I thought it'd be either. I'm still healing, still trying to find the ground under my feet. Hell, I'm not even supporting myself financially yet, after turning my life upside down and giving everything up to write and finding happiness where I didn't think was any. But I will try. Because these are the times when I must speak, and speak I will.

November 11, 2016

Draft 5 of TUBE is completed

by Ksenia Anske

Let me start by saying this: Make art. Make art. Make art. And in the words of Neil Gaiman, "Make good art." Art saves lives. Art gives us reason to continue breathing. Art heals. Art inspires. Art helps us process anything. Anything. Anything at all. Art gives us a way to pull through the worst. And when the worst is over, art helps us celebrate and enjoy the best. Now as never before art is what will carry us through.

And in the words of Neil Gaiman, "Make good art." Art saves lives. Art gives us reason to continue breathing. Art heals. Art inspires. Art helps us process anything. Anything. Anything at all. Art gives us a way to pull through the worst. And when the worst is over, art helps us celebrate and enjoy the best. Now as never before art is what will carry us through.

Writing TUBE forced me into one of the worst of my fears: facing my father again. I was terrified of doing it. I wrote anything but what I needed to write. I almost quit writing it. I trashed every single one of the previous drafts. This draft—draft number five—is at last what I wanted to say, to myself, to the little girl about five years old who was so terrified, she held me frozen and wouldn't let me go into her memories. I had to coax her. I had to ask her permission. I had to hold her hand. Together we had to find a way to go back into the closed, scary rooms, and come out the other end, complete. Yes, writing TUBE has reunited me with that little girl. I distinctly remember the moment when it happened, and it's described in the book, and it made me weep. It was good weeping. It was healing.

October 21, 2016

The divine force for writers

by Ksenia Anske

There must be some kind of a divine force out there for writers. I have gotten to the point in my draft where the timing was wrong, and I didn’t know how to fix it. The train route my characters take requires an additional 12 hours of travel, and according to my scenes it’s too much, I must end the ride in order to continue the story according to the plot. And what do you know. I go research the route, and turns out I got it wrong! It’s too long. It’s the old route of the Moscow-Simferopol train that went around Ukraine back in the old Soviet times, and that was later replaced by a faster route that cut through Ukraine and took one day less to travel, but then at the end of Perestroika it was returned to the old route again, to avoid Ukraine and go around due to the conflict. TUBE is happening in 1989, and this smack in the time when the last Moscow-Simferopol trains were going through Ukraine (I’m not entirely sure, as the sources don’t say the exact year when the route was changed, but it’s close enough), and so guess what that does? Cuts my route my about a day, so 12 hours gone! Wow! I’ve got shivers here. Really, this is crazy. It’s like this book wants to happen. Like all those drafts I wrote and discarded before were just not the right story, and this is the right one. It’s so right, it’s telling itself. It’s helping me. I’m speechless.