Month: July 2011

Creating a Diction List

During my great quest to differentiate the dialogue of my characters, I’ve consumed a lot of ice cream. This hasn’t really helped with the dialogue but I thought I’d warn you of the side effects of this task. Anywho, one of the things I’ve done has been to create a diction list for each character. To do this, I asked myself some of these questions:

1) How well-educated are they? For example, I have a well-educated character in my WIP who says occurred (instead of happened), perhaps (maybe) and precisely (exactly). She rarely uses contractions and always speaks in full, unbroken sentences. At the same time, I also have several uneducated characters who use a lot of slurred words. So they say dunno (don’t know), coulda (could have), kinda (kind of), lemme (let me), woulda (would have), gonna (going to), lotta (a lot of) and so on. These characters sometimes conjugate their verbs incorrectly and they use slang such as ain’t (are not/is not) and got (have). In the case of my current WIP (where there is a great deal of profanity), every character uses different words when they swear. So one might say something softer like crap while another might pull out the F-bomb in every sentence.

2) How old are they? When referring to certain things, people of different generations use different terms. For example, I will give you a call implies the use of a phone whereas I’ll text you implies someone (possibly younger) who uses a mobile device. Some people say record or CD while others say track or song. Be mindful of this when your characters speak.

3) Where are they from? For example, I have a character who says y’all instead of you and another who says you guys instead of you. If you have a character from a certain area, do some research on the common terms said there and bring them into your character’s diction. Also, take into consideration the type of habitat they come from. A farmer might compare a screeching noise to a rooster while a city person would be more likely to compare it to a subway.

4) Do they speak slowly or quickly? I have some characters who abbreviate many of their words. For example, of course (‘course), between (‘tween). I also have characters who trail off their sentences a lot as well as characters who speak almost incoherently (going on tangents within tangents).

5) What are their common words? Every person overuses certain words or expressions and these should differ for each character. Some of these include: that, okay, just, like, totally, then.

The great thing about making a diction list for each character is that, if you’ve tagged their dialogue as per my previous post, you can very easily scan each character’s word choice or do a Find & Replace across their entire style.

If you have found any other methods that you use to differentiate your characters’ dialogue, I’d love to see them! If not, I will happily accept photos of ice cream.

Digital Media Strategy for Authors

Here’s the thing: I’ve been running Web sites and digital publications since (*cough*) Clinton was President and because of that, I usually don’t talk about them in my writerly world. But I’ve seen a few posts about author Web sites recently (including this great one from Kathleen Ortiz) and I thought it was time to cross the line. So here it is, Holly’s condensed tips on creating a digital media strategy:

1) Yes, you need a Web site and it needs to link from your domain name – yourname.com. If you can’t get yourname.com, get something really close like yournamebooks.com or yournameauthor.com. Whatever it is, register it and keep it registered. And EVERY SINGLE TIME you send out information about yourself, use it. Post it on your Twitter profile, your Facebook profile, your Goodreads profile, your signature. Heck, put it on a bumper stick and t-shirts if you want. This is THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE of your online brand. Use it. Don’t lose it. And please don’t panic if you don’t know how to do this. There are sites like rebel.com that cost $10/dn/yr and they are very easy to use.

2) You must have one Web site and ONLY one Web site. I know some people might hate me for this one, but I’m sorry, it’s true. Having multiple Web sites under the same brand is probably the number one usability mistake I see. There needs to be one place where people can go to find out everything about you. If they have to go to two Web sites with different looks and navigations, they’ll either a) get confused and annoyed, or b) (and this is more likely) they will pick the one they like the best and ignore the other one. And if they do, they’re missing whatever it is you’re putting on the one they are ignoring.

3) One of the other mistakes I often see is the missing mission statement and by that, I mean the answer to “who the hell are you?” NEVER assume people know who you are. I don’t care if you are J.K. Rowling, your Web site needs to say that you’re an author and it shouldn’t be buried somewhere in a blog post from 2007. 

4) It will significantly improve your brand if you post a professional photo on your Web site, but only if you use the same photo everywhere and NEVER CHANGE IT. When you’re a person, you don’t have a logo like Nike so your face becomes your logo. If your picture keeps changing, people will no longer associate it with your name, which means they might not recognize you when they see your face on your book jacket.

5) There are MANY ways to get a Web site for little to no cost and to be perfectly honest with you, most of them are as good as what you’ll get from a reasonably-priced Web designer or host. I don’t mean to insult Web designers here (I have some very nice ones that work for me!) but unless you are going to spend a bomb to get a design that screams YOU, I don’t see the point, especially when you’re starting out. You can get free or cheap designs for WordPress and Blogger and many look as good as, or even better than, what you might get if you spent 5K on something custom. This is not to say you can’t get something nice from a Web designer. I’m just saying that, maybe, your 5K would be better spent elsewhere.

6) Finally, remember that, like your face, your name is also your brand. If you’re going to get out there in social media world, ALWAYS use the same name you’re using to write under. Use it on Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads and use it every time you comment on someone else’s posts. If you take only one thing away from this post, it should be that the whole point of a digital media strategy is this:

YOUR NAME + YOUR FACE = RECOGNITION

Okay, that’s it. I apologize if this is abrupt (it’s kinda of hard to put 15 years experience into one blog post). I will happily answer any questions in the comments or via email at holly[AT]hollybodger.com.