Credits

• Cameras, video editing and audio mixing – Chris Collins
• Audio recording and editing – Julie Cunningham
• Music – Theanon Wonder

A few people have said my dialogue reads like a comic, which is cool. Comic dialogue has to be lean and efficient to fit in the speech bubbles, and I try to emulate that sparsity.

The way I found an ear for dialogue, and used it to create my own style, was to listen to people talking and break down what they say into two containers: what they want to say, and what they think they should say. Next, I threw away everything in the second container.

Sound Smarter By Talking Less!

Have you listened closely when a witness to an event is interviewed on TV?

• “I was leaving the pub when I heard a scream and the car crashed into the actual wall”. The actual wall? As opposed to what? A virtual wall?
• “Personally, I think it was the wrong thing to do.” Is it possible to have an impersonal thought?
• “The man himself dived in to save the kid.” Good job he didn’t dive in as someone else.

I know these are picky things, but they illustrate my point. All language is peppered with useless, often nonesensical, words (really, kind of, you know) that people use because they think that’s how people talk. It’s a belief that the more you say, the more what you say matters. I think there’s a better way: by all means talk a lot, but say a lot too.

You can see the same thing in book dialogue. A lot of writers need the security blanket of an opening “well” or “so” before they let someone speak. It’s the written equivalent of “um”. It’s almost become an accepted standard – that that’s how people talk in books. Fair enough, but it’s not how my characters talk. My characters convey the information they need to with as many words as they need and no more. The content can be trivial, or apocalyptic; high art or low art. Regardless, it’s delivered in the same economical way. It’s one way in which I created the tone of the book – people talking about epic events in minimalist, almost dismissive dialogue. Yes, it’s stylised, but it has style.

This economy of words is the key to keeping dialogue flowing. By parsing ideas down to their core concept, you can create dialogue that is portable, and once it’s portable, you can mix it up to find beats that bring your characters’ words to life.

An Example

“Freddy stared at her for a second, frustrated. He kept his voice calm. ‘That was a question,’ he said. ‘I now have no more idea of what is going on, and you’ve annoyed me’ – her eyes narrowed, so he eased off – ‘a bit.’”

I love that construction – the strong parenthetic break hiding the end of the sentence, turning it into a punchline. I try to use that technique sparingly as any stylistic tool can become tiresome if overplayed. Identifying tags and actions can be mixed into dialogue to pace the rhythm to perfection, but the spoken content has to be lean and portable. Long, multi-clause sentences just don’t arrange well.

How Much is Too Much?

I’m not sure what percentage of Make a Move is dialogue, but I know it’s a lot – more than the third of the wordcount recommended by some how-to-write books (I learned that rule quickly, and broke it twice as fast). I’ve experimented with a variety of writing styles in working towards something I’m happy with, and dialogue-heavy prose just works for me. I’ve written extended sections of action-description, really digging into the details of a situation, but I don’t find them fun to write, so I’d be a hypocrite if I expected them to be fun to read.

But it’s not just a question of taste – that kind of writing just isn’t giving me what I want, which is something that dialogue can: relationships. All of the stories have been told, and creating an intriguing character is almost impossible, but human relationships can still provide a compelling experience within an unoriginal narrative. How do the characters feel about what is happening to them? Without lines of tired exposition, the only way to find out is when they share their thoughts with each other, and allow us to listen in. Those interactions are the life of the story, the way-in for readers, and suppressing the vitality of those relationships with tired, bloated dialogue will rot a story from the inside out.

Ironically, I’ve said enough.

Once I had my three leads, and knew how they related to each other, Make a Move was born.

Freddy Mossman

“Not one part of me caring about you right now.”

I honestly can’t remember where the idea for Freddy’s character came from. I know where Jay came from – he was the foil for the potential mundanity that sat around Freddy’s Parisian exile, but Freddy’s origin is a mystery to me. Obviously, his background dictates his type to a large extent – MI6 recruit men and women with no distinguishing features that can be used to identify them, and his subsequent training provided his physique and demeanour. I knew I needed to break that type to an extent though, as this isn’t a military book, and I needed to inject more humanity into him. Once I had the idea for how to do that (big plot reveal from Episode Six – I’ll say no more) Freddy was… ready. Thing is, I didn’t want to detail him too much, as the more readers learn about a character (specifically, the more they learn that differs from their personality), the harder it is for them to project themselves into the story. He’s a cypher for the reader’s reaction to the situations the story presents, and I want people 100% along for the ride. I’m not a big fan of first-person perspectives right now, so Freddy, even as the star, had to take a back seat and let the reader use him as a gateway into the story. There’s a reason he’s just a silhouette on the book cover…

Jay McFarlane

“Take your mind off things with some random acts of social disorder.”

As I said before, Jay’s the opposite of Freddy. He also the person we all want to be: free, fearless, creative, vibrant, and living by his own rules. Jay walks a fine line between being an adventurer/agitator and just being an idiot, but I was careful to keep him safely within his moral framework – no matter how loose that might be. One strange occurrence I hadn’t expected when designing my characters is that all the girls love some Jay. I never tried to paint him as handsome, or even cute, but something about his personality struck a chord with my female readers. I should be put out; if anything, I’d say that Freddy is closest to my personality. Jay’s my other side though – the person I want to be, and I occasionally find when I’m at my most confidently creative. It’s no wonder that I found the interplay between Freddy and Jay so easy to write – they’re both major parts of my psyche. And, no, that’s not cheating; “write what you know.”

I’m still surprised no one noticed that my two male leads are named after the two biggest horror icons of the eighties, but it wasn’t planned that way; it really was a coincidence. Once I spotted it, I thought about it, decided it was cool, and ran with it.

Names

Speaking of which, I think I have an original way of coming up with names for characters. Most character names in books are determined by the genre of the fiction, hence the number of action adventures peopled with characters named Jack. Even if you try to steer clear of the obvious types, it’s hard to break a pattern; people just aren’t wired that way, and truly random thinking is almost impossible. I gave up trying to think of names a long time ago, so when I introduce a new character, I step from my desk to my CD collection and leaf through the credits of a random album. You’d be surprised at the variety of interesting names you can find involved in music production. A first name from one album, a surname from another, and you have a new character. Easy.

French names aren’t so easy, though. Aside from the fact that I have only two French-language albums in my collection, I don’t know enough about French naming conventions and etymology to be confident in using one at random. Luckily, there are a number of websites listing French names and detailing their origin, so I can be confident I haven’t used a name that is either archaic or regionally improbable. It’s not as random, but I’m happy with the balance.

Holly Henderson

“I’m not sure what’s worse – that you’d be comfortable asking me to do that, or that you’d think I had the contacts to arrange it.”

I left Holly until last as, out of the three, she’s the one who represents my biggest success as a writer. Freddy and Jay are two sides of my personality, so writing them is easy; I just think, “if I was in a Freddy mood, what would I do?”. Holly’s different though – guys writing about girls is hard. At thirty-five, I’d hope I’ve learned a lot about women, but I know there’s infinitely more to discover, and that gender – both your own programming and that bestowed upon you by society – is at the core of every decision you make. I was worried from the beginning that Holly just wouldn’t be believable for my female readers – something would give it away, not matter how small.

I overcame this hurdle by first accepting that I wasn’t qualified to write a female character. I’m not being proud – that’s just a fact. That done, I fell back on the adage of “fake it ‘til you make it”. I lifted stories and scenarios from the women I know well – my wife, sister and female friends – and riffed on those situations. That was working well until about midway through the book, where Holly is becoming closer with Freddy and Jay and adopting more of their mindset, at which point I did feel confident enough to write her; she was playing by my rules now, and I felt I knew her well enough to make some suggestions. There’s no feeling like having a female reader tell you they identified with Holly, and enjoyed her journey, especially as I purposefully placed obstacles and decisions before her that aren’t the normal fare of mainstream women’s fiction. Holly took a different path, and people were happy to join her for the ride.

The Best of the Rest

The episodic structure of Make a Move gave me the opportunity to introduce and remove characters exactly how and when I wanted, and that freedom gave me room to have fun. Monsieur Vasseur – the aggressively self-aware clichéd French baker. The Beautiful Spy – the adolescents’ wet dream with a bitter streak that makes your eyes water. Inspector Guischard – the Parisian policeman who would rather Freddy and his friends keep their crimes off his radar. Hector, Dunnes and Abbott – the trio of British agents delivering bad attitude, disease and high-velocity rifles to the party.

The accepted wisdom states that you shouldn’t introduce a character to a story unless they’re going to advance the plot in some way. That belief assumes that dialogue, character and tone are irrelevant, and that plot is king.

As I’ll discuss in a post covering dialogue, I honestly believe that to be the best way to write a boring book.