Thoughts on Writing Good Fiction; Talking heads, Breadcrumbs and Red Herrings
One of the most difficult parts of writing fiction is dialogue between characters. Two aspects of dialogue that are often ignored by writers are the setting in which the conversation takes place and what the characters are doing while they are talking.
The setting and what is going on around them is often as important as what the characters are saying. A conversation between two people in a park on a warm sunny day is a chat. A conversation between the same two characters standing in a muddy field in the middle of the night when it’s pour down rain has a different feel to it. Even reading this, with no dialogue should create a mental image and feel that cannot be ignored.
A conversation without action or a description of how each participant is responding tends to be as exciting as watching a pair of BBC news readers, just two talking heads engaged in an info dump. “A” says something that makes “B” frown. “B” becomes enraged, jumps to his feet and tosses the chair he’d been sitting on across the room. “A” draws back, shocked by “B’s” reaction. It sounds bloody simple, but to get it right, it isn’t.
I love dropping breadcrumbs along the way when I write, little hints that foreshadow things to come or allows the reader to enjoy an “Ah huh!” moment when something that was mentioned before, perhaps many chapters back that seemed trivial at the time, comes into play. In “No Greater Love,” Pauline’s brother is mention five times; in the Prologue, as someone who went into the service, as an RAF pilot and then, at the end as the pilot of Yellow Two. Each breadcrumb along this trail either served to remind the read Pauline had a brother or added to the reader’s knowledge about that brother and what he was doing. Thus, when he shows up at the end, it wasn’t a total bolt out of the blue. But it’s kind of neat, for me as well as the clever guy or girl who manages to do so, when they are able to follow the trail of breadcrumbs that others have missed.
The final element is the red herring, a literary device used to mislead the reader. The mentioning of codes and cipher machines, even the inclusion of Machold’s use of the word enigma to describe Kassel in Chapter 14 was an intentional effort on my part to lead readers into thinking Pauline would somehow steal code books or possibly an encryption machine, named the Enigma by the Allies working at Bletchley Park. That is a red herring, often used in the writing of mysteries to draw the reader’s attention away from the real culprit. One only has to include a butler in the mix of a murder mystery to have a red herring.
In conclusion, I urge writers to try to extend their skills with each story they write in an effort to better entertain. Be creative with your creative writing.
Nancy Cole