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Callie Press - The Queen of Smutpunk

In A Flash

Emperor Mensch-Xi looked at his son, the comely Crown Prince Con’er, with loathing.

“You are too weak to rule a state,” Mensch-Xi barked. “And you are certainly too weak to rule our great state of Sya Ang Land of the Many and Obedient People Like Schools of Fish Thronging!”

Since Crown Prince Con’er’s return from his first campaign on the Yellow Danube river, he had been saturated in opium and poisoned lotus, living in one drug den after another. The Emperor was disgusted by his son’s reaction to his first battle wound in spite of his otherwise exemplary performance at war.

“I shall therefore make an Imperial decree upon this subject, you nancy!” Mensch-Xi said. “If one wound has made you this desperate for oblivion, you will be tormented and punished until you have the tolerance for pain of a real man! And then some! Guards, take him to the Imperial Torture Dungeons!”

None of their many cruelties and sadisms, their injuries and poisons, their machines and beatings, could make him so much as cry out. His tolerance for pain was off the Celestial freaking charts.

Mensch-Xi visited the Imperial Torture Dungeons after some months and, after witnessing it for himself, was truly confused.

“Crown Prince Con’er,” the Emperor said, “You have quickly learned how to stand amazing amounts of pain. You are no damn little sissy. I was mistaken.” He bowed.

“No, Father,” Crown Prince Con’er replied, still bound to a rack, bloodied and abused. “Regarding my weakness, you were correct. Your error lies elsewhere, though you are blameless.”

“Please Instruct me, Crown Prince,” the Emperor said as he motioned for his son to be loosed from bondage.

Con, the man, stared directly into the Emperor’s eyes, his undulled memories causing more anguish than seeping wounds and ugly bruises ever could. He covered his right hand with his left and bowed as well as his body would allow, then raised his right arm in a weak but reverent sieg heil before allowing both arms to fall to his sides.

After a moment, he spoke.

“Your highness understands weakness, but you do not understand pain.”

(Oops! Close, but wrong universe for this story. Sorry about that. The point stands.)

~~~

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Callie Press - The Queen of Smutpunk

Research Results

Presented without comment (or SEO because you know where to find me). Just FYI. You know how things go. If this isn’t for you then don’t friggin worry about it, hey? Right?

Moctezuma Johnson and other smutpunk: sativa, ecstasy, lsd, ayahuasca, spiced rum

Callie Press: You tell me, I recommend sativa, dmt, lsd, peyote, or opiates (small doses, and no fentanyl you morons)

H.P. Lovecraft: see Callie Press, or stay sober

Tool: dmt, ketamine, sativa, or opiates (be careful you dummies…kids these days, I tell ya)

Black Sabbath: opiates, edibles (indica)

AC/DC: draft (draught?) beer, homegrown

Judas Priest, Iron Maiden: good beer, mixed drinks, sativa, acid, or cocaine

Modern mainstream country: opioids and fentanyl and straight whiskey, feel free to mix and go overboard until you are broken of this music choice in one way or the other*

Old outlaw country: excessive amounts of PBR or one of the beers that sound like a bodily function onomatopoeia, maybe some ditch weed, filterless cigarettes

Any of the awesome music with George Clinton or Bootsy Collins: the three C’s—kush, cognac, and cocaine

Prince: wine and coco puffs out of a mountain dew bong

Zep: anything, although the Houses of the Holy album calls for something heady like sour diesel, acid, or ketamine

*(but don’t really)

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Callie Press - The Queen of Smutpunk

Smutpunk can be confusing to read. Well, just mine, but still.

How To Read My Shit

I understand that many people don’t know how to read my work. That’s my fault, but I’m not sorry about it. I DO want to fix it, though.

This post pertains to the first uber-narrative, the Butterface Cycle.

As to which you read, it all depends on your mood. Enlightened readers are happy readers, so I am here to remedy things! As I see it, I have three basic categories in my smutpunk. (Four counting non-fiction, but that’s not smutpunk, even though the way I write it, it is.)

Category 1: More Smut than Punk

These are just short little dirty bits. They’re entwined with the Callieverse, but they exist mostly for the reader’s convenience in jilling/wanking off. If you’re reading me for the sex, these are the ones to read first. They are in the Callieverse, but not essential to the Butterface cycle.

Dominating Donna (novella; dubcon, group sex, power play, watersports, dwarves, all kinds of stuff; also available in 3 snippets)
Trailer Trash Tales (short, series; exhibitionism, cheating, etc; only one so far, Sunbathing in the Trailer Park, but there will be more soon)
Nectar (short; cuckolding, interracial)
Gauntlet (short; spanking, fmmmmmm…etc)
The Chamber-Pot Prince (short; magic sex, humorous weird fairy tale)
Confessions of Yvette (various shorts)

Category 2: Equally Smut and Punk

These are stories integral to the big Callieverse picture, and you can always expect hot, explicit sex in them. Tonguing Tromp is bonus material not essential to the Butterface Cycle, as it was just written on a lark. The others, however, are absolutely essential to the current uber-narrative, particularly Hot Wife Lyssa’s Confessions.

The last installment of the Hot Wife Lyssa series will end the current Callieverse uber-narrative (the Butterface Cycle), and simultaneously begin the next uber-narrative, which will be the Intraworld series of books (which will probably be complete novels).

Tonguing Tromp (short; satire)
Erotic Pulp (Series; short story collections; homages and interpretations of various pulp and comic book styles) All of the Erotic Pulp volumes have sexy bits, funny bits, and weird bits, all informed by the genres that mush together into Smutpunk. Some stories are self-contained and some continue from issue to issue in the finest comic book anthology tradition—except I write it all, so it’s not an anthology, it’s a collection. They are all involved in the Callieverse, even if they don’t seem to be at first. There are three at the time of this writing, with at least one more in the Butterface Cycle (Season One of Erotic Pulp ends with issue #4; all cliffhangers will be completed).
Hot Wife Lyssa’s Confessions (Series, and will be collected as I release them; cuckolding, cheating, strangeness and magic) This series is the lynchpin to Butterface cycle, though it may not seem like it until it’s all complete. Trust me. I’m told it’s good stuff and my most ’emotional’ work so far. The first four titles are collected in the Hot Wife Lyssa Bundle #1 . All the individual titles of the Hot Wife Lyssa series start with “Me,” except the final installment (probably around #10 or #11, next year; I will update this post as they are released, when I remember to get around to it). They are:


Me and Mr. Fixit
Me and Dan
Me at the Airport
Me and the House Guest
Me Under Glass
Me in Recovery
Me Becoming More
Me and the Hole (coming soon)

Category 3: The Callieverse

These are required to make sense of the overarching storyline through all my Smutpunk, and may not have as much sex—or at least not as much explicit gratuitious jill/wank sex—as the entries in the other two categories. (Some do!) These all touch on the Lovecraft/ Cthulhu mythos, or Yog-Sothothery, or whatever you want to call it, to a greater or lesser extent. These are either more traditional or more experimental fiction, depending on the title.

Butterface (novella, erotic horror) If you want to dive in to the Callieverse, this is the best place to start. It’s probably the most accessible, most traditional story in the cycle, and it serves as the initiation of the uber-narrative. It’s been compared to Stephen King, which is quite flattering. Vital to the Callieverse.
Queen Kegel and the Arena Planet (novella, Smutpunk) You describe this one, I can’t. It’s been compared to Naked Lunch, which is also quite flattering. It’s smutpunk, and it’s very important to the Callieverse if you want the whole picture. Read in conjunction with Erotic Pulp for maximum revelation.
Son of Butterface (novella, existential horror/fake true crime) Coming soon. Vital to the Callieverse.
Queen Kegel and the Dead Galaxy (novella, Smutpunk) Coming Soon. Previous working title: Queen Kegel and the Rapture. This one is…different.
Janie (novella or novel, historical romance/western/smutpunk) Coming next year around Halloween. This is the conclusion to the Butterface trilogy, and will tie everything in the Cycle together, albeit significantly out of chronological order. But it’s fun to wonder and do puzzles, isn’t it?

 

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Callie Press - The Queen of Smutpunk

Netflix’s live action Death Note

This is my review of Netflix’s live action Death Note movie.

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Callie Press - The Queen of Smutpunk

It Ain’t Easy Being An Outer Goddess

Really. It’s not.

So there I am, in my magnificent Outer Goddess palace, relaxing for the briefest moment on my exquisite daybed throne, and being administered to by my masseuses, when out of nowhere, unexpectedly and completely improperly, there’s a shitlicking mommiefornicating earthquake.

Not just a little errant chaosbug, like most of them are, those planetary zits that cry out for scratching now and then, no. This was the works, the whole nine yards, the entire grandiose spectacle in vibrant Technicolor with a cast of thousands. Pillars start falling and crushing my gladiators to death. The ballroom floor had been retracted to reveal the pool, so naturally, the pool gets destroyed from the big chunks of pillar raining down onto and into it, along with my favorite god damn mermaid and a few of the barely-legal (as in, barely-past-tadpole ) deep ones.

I was not happy about that, because my little pocket-realm, this place where I keep my palace, isn’t subject to earthquakes of any kind. And replacing things is as much a hassle for gods and goddesses is as it is for anyone else. Well, no it’s not. Not at all, actually. It’s not like it costs me anything to replace it or remake it. But it means I have to do something. And I hate doing things that I shouldn’t have to do. Sometimes I love doing things. I’m always doing things in ways you can’t even dream of, but only the things I want. And sometimes I want to just do no things.

Opting for doing no things is a lot like doing nothing. Not exactly, but close. Most of what you do as a creature possessing mass is out of your control anyhow, so you can’t do no things. You can’t truly be still, for example, because you’re stuck on a rock.

But I can.

And if I have a thing to do, then it’s hard for me to do nothing. I can do nothing while I do things, of course, but that’s beside the point. I resent that I can have things I need to do when I would prefer to do no things, and I resent anything that caused it.

Except for when I don’t, but that isn’t now.

When the whole god damn ceiling came down on me,  I went to daddy Nyarly. The one I found first was some kind of giant centipede-looking thing, only all the legs were man-legs. The bottom two were very long and held his slinky body upright with an invertebrate shimmy and an incessant wriggling of the (not all that much) smaller legs.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I said. “You just spoiled half a dozen nothings I wanted.”

Then some stuff happened that I can’t explain, and some stuff happened that I can sort of explain. Chaos stuff. You have no idea how many close calls your stupid little planet has, much less all the rest of them I bother to watch over. The amount of effort it takes to hold order together drives the chaos that perpetually undoes it.

That’s why we play these games at all. Why not? We’ve stopped before, and we’ll stop again. And we’ll start another round of games. Don’t worry about it.

So there I am, relaxing for the briefest moment on my exquisite daybed throne, and being administered to by my masseuses, watching my mermaid getting chased and mounted by the barely-legal deep ones in the pool.

He sure is having a lot of those glitches lately. I wonder, is this game coming to a close?

Wouldn’t that be exciting, even if just for a moment?

If you liked this, Click Here for Queen Kegel and the Arena Planet!

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Callie Press - The Queen of Smutpunk

Have you found yourself asking yourself, Self, Why that Celebrity Apprentice Host Looks So Familiar? Well let me tell you why!

Why that Celebrity Apprentice Host Looks So Familiar

So in all those times you thought Why that Celebrity Apprentice Host Looks So Familiar? I wonder if you ever watch other channels? Because that handsome devil in this picture below (not THAT one!) is the original Celebrity Apprentice Host…

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…and he is also BILLIONAIRE PLAYBOY REAL ESTATE MOGUL DONALD TRUMP of New York City! You surely remember him as a friend of the Clintons and very in favor of liberal causes! You may also personally remember being evicted by one of his employees or sued by one of his many companies!

Why that Celebrity Apprentice Host Looks So Familiar

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Yes, that silver fox host is the same vigorous man as the younger (and svelter!) real estate mogul I just showed you! It is the selfsame Donald John Trump, son of real estate mogul and notorious racist and alleged wartime profiteer, Frederick Christ Trump Sr.!

Why that Celebrity Apprentice Host Looks So Familiar
[image error]THE CELEBRITY APPRENTICE — Season: 14 — Pictured: (l-r) Shawn Johnson, Leeza Gibbons, Lorenzo Lamas, Kevin Jonas, Jamie Anderson, Johnny Damon, Vivica A. Fox, Geraldo Rivera, Donald Trump, Kate Gosselin, Ian Ziering, Terrell Owens, Gilbert Gottfried, Sig Hansen, Brandi Glanville, Keisha Knight Pulliam, Kenya Moore — (Photo by: Art Streiber/NBC)

 

This show was a disgrace and an insult to your intelligence! It was an enormous hit and made a great deal of money for one Mr. Donald Trump!

What a winner!

Why that Celebrity Apprentice Host Looks So Familiar

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Even the noble Geraldo can’t save all his face here, though he does manage to avoid beating the shit out of his chosen opponent (unlike the more desperate has-beens and want-to-bes on the show!) So let’s give him points there!

Geraldo, weren’t you friends with Cheech and Chong? What’s wrong with you? Where did your soul go? I guess we’ll never know! Ha-Ha!

Why that Celebrity Apprentice Host Looks So Familiar

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You may also recognize this conveniently available, married bachelor from the FOX News Channel, where he ran for President! And guess what? He WON!

Why that Celebrity Apprentice Host Looks So Familiar
[image error]Sorry, I don’t know what’s going on here. I was never in the Boy Scouts!

He’s made his way to the top! I know just how he feels because I used to get paid good money to write blogs just exactly like this! I hear Google has gotten their act together a little since then, so I suppose I’m hurting myself even worse! Ha-Ha!

Why that Celebrity Apprentice Host Looks So Familiar
[image error]I just found this on the internet! If it’s yours I’ll credit you!

Here is President Mr. Lord Donald Trump sharing a sociopathic laugh with his best friend, O.J. Simpson, the greatest running backup of all time! He sometimes mistakes him for his other former friend, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, or the “Big Man” Clarence Clemons, about whom he always said, “He blows a mean horn for a colored”!

Why that Celebrity Apprentice Host Looks So Familiar

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Being the President of the United States makes you a VICTIM of free speech, so perhaps you know him from some of the brutal jokes made at his luxurious expense!

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Like this one!

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And this one!

So there you have all the reasons Why that Celebrity Apprentice Host Looks So Familiar!

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Callie Press - The Queen of Smutpunk

#WokkawokkaWednesday

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Fuck SEO, google will figure it out eventually and then you will all be here for my brilliance!

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Callie Press - The Queen of Smutpunk

Rumination and Review: The Defenders, Season One

Well it felt like forever for this to arrive after waiting for it since shortly after Daredevil (although in ways I’ve been waiting since the 70s when I were but a wee ginger lass). I devoured it. Here’s what I think.

The Defenders: Ruminations

First, as soon as I was aware of Netflix’s Marvel Universe, I knew any shows would be different than my expectations. That’s fine, too, I suppose. For a while I hoped to—but knew we wouldn’t—get the original lineup.

They teased me.  I held hopes that Doctor Strange would create and lead the group, as he did in canon, but not high hopes. The movies taught me not to hold out hope for too much to make the transition between comics and video in any case.

The original Defenders were Doctor Strange, the Hulk, and Namor, along with Valkyrie (who for some reason never gets mentioned at all as an original) and eventually Silver Surfer and a lot of other shorter- or longer-term members. Luke Cage was one of those who was a Defender for quite some time, and he has always been kick-ass and groovy, so I was happy he’s involved.

The new story is nowhere near as good as, and tragically petty to those of us who knew and loved, the original Defenders storyline(s). It was, and is, some of the best comic storytelling of all time (which is par for the course when Doc Strange is involved). I’m not even going to synopsize it, go subscribe to Marvel Unlimited and read it for yourself! It’s cheap enough, so just do it. It won’t take you a whole month.

Full disclosure: I never loved any other ‘official’ superhero team as much as the Defenders (except maybe the Justice League, but I was a Marvel fangirl more). I always slanted toward their mystical stuff so aside from Adam Warlock, Doctor Strange was my man, Hulk was the bomb, and Namor was the only male in a speedo I’ve ever lusted after. It was close to my comic book dream team when I started reading them in the late 70s/early 80s. Daredevil and Luke Cage would have made me like them even more, as they were early favorites of mine, and still are. I’ve never read Jessica Jones, even still. I liked Iron Fist and Danny Rand from the Heroes for Hire days, but he always seemed like sort of a fuddy-duddy twat compared to Power Man/Luke. There, my cards are on the table.

The Defenders: Review

Considering The Defenders on Netflix is built from other characters’ shows rather than other characters’ comic books, it wouldn’t make much sense for me to talk about it without mentioning them.

Daredevil is the best of the bunch. It set some high standards in every way. If you haven’t watched both seasons yet, you are missing out. It’s a great show in the abstract sense, and it’s so good it even undoes the abortion of a movie. The Netflix series is the first and only incarnation of Daredevil that has ever been on screen, in the same way that there is only one Highlander movie.

Jessica Jones was very good, and so was Luke Cage. I preferred Luke Cage, but both of them were eminently watchable, well-acted and written, and true enough to the comic characters to work (as I understand Jessica to be in the comics, at least—as I mentioned, I’m not very familiar with her in that context). They were lighter on action than I expected and hoped, but that was purposeful, and it succeeded.

Iron Fist was, well, it was a catastrophe. Bad acting, bad directing, bad action. I thought that most of that, especially the eye-roll-worthy acting, came from the bad directing, but now I’m not so sure. In other words, read the wikipedia origin of Iron Fist if you want and just skip the show. It’s not worth the hours.

I didn’t hate it because I sorta like Iron Fist the character, aside from the whole Rich White Man Is Better At Your Culture Than You Are thing. But I sure could have hated the show if I weren’t so forgiving with the MCU. I’ve waited too long to have my fill of superhero video to be overly critical now.

But seriously, it was distinctly not good.

The Defenders is a blend of all four of those shows, as expected.

You know what happens when you blend things? You get how averages work? Yeah. Like that.

I think it was things that carried over from Iron Fist that damn near ruined it for me. It’s worth watching…but it’s not a grand slam.

Hey! Bullet list. I’ll have this review wrapped up in no time!

The Defenders: Bad Things About Season One

Shitty, blurry, impossible-to-follow-the-first-time action scenes
Simpering, whiny, erratic performance of Finn Jones as Iron Fist
Iron Fist’s random, badly-written, inconsistent motivations and behavior
Iron Fist’s poorly-handled K’un L’un non-storyline dominating the plot
Iron Fist being the ‘center’ or ‘heart’ of the team even though he comes across as a barely useful, weak-willed man-child who is less of a help than a thorn in the team’s side
Iron Fist, repeated for clarity and generalization
The unbelievably shitty filming of the fight scenes, even worse than those in Iron Fist, so bad it deserves multiple entries just like the Iron Fist character (and compared to the fight scenes in Daredevil, this is inexcusable)
The paucity of exciting fight scenes and none of this kind of uplifting, adrenaline-boosting thing, where all four-or-however-many of them are coming right at you to kick your ass and save the day (there are barely any fights with all of them on screen at once in any case, and nothing iconic enough to stand out): [image error]

The Defenders: Good Things About Season One

All the actors and the acting, except Finn Jones/Iron Fist (the stereotypical Police Captain kind of sucked too, but the actor didn’t have much to do with that)
Hooking Cage and Iron Fist up, so they can do Heroes for Hire and leave the Defenders alone, and maybe redeem Iron Fist on video a little bit
Misty Knight losing her arm (we know where this is going, Colleen Wing was right there! Yay!)
Stick and Mrs. Gao

The Defenders, Season Two: Do Better!

Seriously. Please. Get this Iron Fist shit under control and come up with something worthy of the Defenders for season two. I’m begging you. Keep the Hand or don’t. I know you have a budget, but it wouldn’t hurt you to get some bigger, out-of-this-world stories happening. The Defenders was never a ‘street-level’ team, so if you keep it this way, that’s fine…but make it feel important, for fuck’s sake. It just really didn’t.

And either get a director who can bring out a good performance from Finn Jones, or find someone more Iron-Fisty to play Iron Fist. Or better yet, split this bunch back into street-level teams as they were all meant to be, and bring in the real Defenders.

Hey, check out my friend Son of Cthulhu’s awesome comic blog, too!

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Callie Press - The Queen of Smutpunk

Dialogue, Part One (of God Who The Fuck Knows How Many Because People Rarely Get It)

Okay kids, let’s get real. Dialogue. Why is it so hard for so many people? Everybody talks, right? Everybody hears people talk, right? So why do the words on the page often feel wrong?

I think about this a lot because — not to brag, but dialogue comes naturally for me, and people notice, and mention it. Also, I have had to help a lot of writers fix dialogue issues. That’s because it’s a huge part of fiction, and in modern genre fiction, it can make or break you. Literary snobs have their own take on it, but genre fiction isn’t even “put up or shut up” anymore. It’s “put up or fall off the planet and sell nothing.”

That doesn’t mean I can’t write mediocre dialogue or screw up, because I definitely can, and I certainly give my dialogue as much thought as I do the narrative sections when revising and editing. I just have good instincts for written dialogue, which actually makes it harder to talk about. I didn’t have to learn as much to produce good dialogue as someone without that inborn knack, which — let’s be honest — is rare.

I’m going to take the easy route and talk about what’s wrong with dialogue, because talking about what’s right with dialogue won’t convince you to fix anything. You’ll see yourself in all of it if you’re not careful, and anything that’s done right by one person can be done with very different results by a different person. And since I can’t teach talent or ‘knacks’ or basic inherent competence, I’m going to try and explain where things go wrong, so that you can catch it in your own work.

So let’s think, in big terms, about the problems that come up. There’s nothing formal about these categories. It’s just how I think of them.

Huge categories of bad dialogue

There’s wooden dialogue, where the characters speak in a manner that is necessary. It may be informative or expositional, but wooden dialogue is clearly written when it should feel spoken. Danielle Steel is great at this (although she, and many others, also get deep into the other categories here, as well). If it was a good thing, I would recommend her for study. This kind of dialogue is the most common flaw in modern romances, although every genre can and does suffer from it.

(Don’t study Danielle Steel for craftsmanship. You may break something of your own that you have right.)

Then there’s the stilted dialogue, which is like wooden dialogue kicked up a notch. This is amazingly common and it breaks my heart. When I talk about stilted dialogue, I’m referring to characters who speak woodenly — with or without proper grammar, although again obviously written without the vibes of spoken dialogue — but basically, there’s nothing natural to it. Stilted dialogue almost always requires “backing up” to reread it so the reader can understand what the dialogue is trying to say. This is obviously a huge no-no.

And finally, for me, there is a catchall category that I consider shit dialogue. Again, this is stilted dialogue taken up a notch. Nothing feels or reads right about shit dialogue. Badly done accents, unnatural speaking rhythms, bizarre word choices, incoherent and/or unnecessary conversations—this is shit dialogue.

Waaaaay, way too much of that in our little self-publishing universe, folks.

I adore Lovecraft, but he was semi-professional his whole life for a reason. I’m convinced the reason is that he wrote shit dialogue. His very best efforts are at least stilted and wooden. When you study Lovecraft (and you should), remember that all his dialogue is shit. Study the rest instead. Only.

So how does wooden and stilted dialogue happen?

First, relax. Everything can be improved, so don’t worry.

The most common advice that you’ll find on how to write better dialogue just amounts to eavesdropping. Keeping your ears open, listening analytically, blah blah blah. (This goes hand-in-hand with the other most common, most misunderstood piece of good-bad advice: “show don’t tell” — I’ll get to that someday, and touch on it here no doubt.)

The problem with listening to people speak is that you’re not reading or hearing good dialogue. You’re not learning how to write conversations by listening, not directly. If you do listen analytically, you may or may not have the wherewithal to actually analyze it in a way that can help your writing. If you can, you have realized this key fact:

People don't speak the way character’s dialogue is written… EVER!

That’s right. Even great dialogue — in fact, especially great (and shit) dialogue — is marked by a distinct craftsmanship which separates it from realistic dialogue.

But back to the point: wooden dialogue often comes from a writer who is using dialogue to convey exposition (if it isn’t just beginner craftsmanship needing some more exercise, which is usually the case).

“What’s wrong with that?” you may ask. Writers must convey exposition. Dialogue is automatically “showing and not telling,” right?

No, dearie. Oh my, no. No no no. Follow that trail, my loves, and you’ll soon find yourself damned to the Pit of the Stilted.

Think 1950’s sci-fi dialogue between two scientists who are explaining to each other what they already know, so that you can follow along at home — hideously stilted, often shit, always wooden. And are they really showing you anything, just because it’s in quotation marks?

Doctor Jones held up the prototype Whatchamacallit and adjusted a knob. “As you know, Doctor Brown, the Whatchamacallit is the most powerful MacGuffin of its kind in the Atomic Age.”

Doctor Brown, busy adjusting the Interociter, paused in his labor to join the discussion. “Indeed, Doctor Jones, just as the Whoozis is a bomb of such proportions that the explosions of the last Great War would look like child’s play in comparison!”

A brick-shithouse blonde knocked on, then opened, the door. “Would anyone like some hamburger sandwiches and coffee?”

“Yes please! Thank you, Doctor Gams,” they both said. “And don’t forget, our research paper needs typed by tonight!”

“I’ll have it done! Would you like a drop of Scotch in your coffees, or would you prefer an entire shot?”

That’s just wonky narrative exposition coming out of the mouths of characters. It’s not dialogue. It’s a cowardly author dumping exposition on you and blaming it on their characters. It’s not fair to them, it’s not fair to the author, it’s not fair to the reader, it’s just not fair to anybody. (I made it feel a little more 50’s than I needed to, but come on, I, also, have to enjoy this shit, and I already know how to write good dialogue. Plus I have fun messing with established norms.)

(And did you catch the foul plural-and-subsequently-ambiguous speech tag? You need NEVER use ‘they said’ as a speech tag, but if you do, make sure you only tag the part that could possibly said in unison, because people don’t spontaneously say the same god damn words for ten seconds at a time! Plural speech tags are the worst. They’re always confusing. Don’t do it.)

Wooden dialogue happens because someone has information to convey, and they haven’t developed an ear for it, so they write it the way they were taught to write. It’s a completely understandable development. But if your dialogue only serves one purpose — such as exposition, for example — you’re doing it wrong.

“Why have you not gotten dressed yet, John?” Marcia asked. “We are supposed to leave in less than half an hour. You are not at all ready!”

“I must not have realized the party at their home was this evening,” John said. “I will go get prepared and be right down.”

Typical dialogue in the modern Amazon romance, right there. I would call it wooden with a hint of shit— not quite stilted but if someone called it stilted, I wouldn’t argue with them. It’s comprehensible, the grammar is passable, it’s been fixed for redundancies—but it leaves the reader’s ear hollow. Me? It makes me roll my eyes and wish the author had done better.

Why? Everything they said is something people could have spoken. It’s believable enough to pass muster in the ‘well, people say those words in those combinations’ way. Full grammatical sentences abound. So why does it feel wrong to the reader?

Because it is wrong. We all know it. You know it, even if you wrote it. Just because the Word spellchecker or Grammarly or your uncredentialed editor says it passes muster? That don’t mean shit! People don’t talk that way, so let your instincts interfere if you write crap like that last example.

Surrender the illusion of control and eavesdrop on your characters. Invest time into learning how they speak, what they don’t say, how they communicate nonverbally while they speak. If their words feel differently than what you write for them to say…listen harder and rewrite more.

Verisimilitude Vs. Reality

Let me give you a little tip to keep in mind, all the time, when writing fiction. Best advice evar? I think so:

Fiction is not true.

Listening to people talk does not teach you how to write dialogue, it teaches you how real people speak in real life (if you’re properly analytical, as opposed to improperly analytical — meaning you not only know how to interpret what you’re hearing, but you know how to write what you’re hearing in a realistic way).

Don’t write what they are saying. How fucking boring is that?

Write what you truly hear. With ALL your senses. All your insight. All of the nuance and understanding. Then cut out the rest of the nonsense.

Great dialogue says what the characters mean, and is not dictation of the real-life noises emitting from the real-life face-holes of real-life people — it can be, but it’s almost always bigger than just those vibrations of the vocal cords.

(Cords. NOT ‘chords.’)

Your brain’s heard a million conversations, and filtered them, and you already have all of this information available. You may not have ever realized what you do with it in daily life compared to in your writing, but you can learn. You may need to go out and learn to listen, but you don’t need to learn to hear. (Or vice-versa, whatever. You get the point. So all of you uberpedantic geek-lord semanticists can shut the eff up already.)

Real conversations are tedious, usually annoying to overhear, full of poorly chosen words and deceptive subtext and sarcasm and hemming and hawing and “uh”-ing and “What?”-ing and sighs and sniffles and weird tongue motions and all kinds of noise that you parse, but don’t really listen to.

The problem is, these un-vocalized and sub-vocalized bits inform the context of what you’re hearing to a huge extent.

You don’t want reality in dialogue. Hell, you don’t want much reality in fiction, period. You want verisimilitude.

You want the illusion, the texture, the flavor of reality, not the disappointing reality of reality. You want your lies to feel true. You need believability, not realism. It just has to feel real.

But it HAS to feel real.

Next time you listen to a conversation that captures your interest (by which I usually mean eavesdropping, that is, and if you don’t do it, you’re not much of a writer yet), pay special attention to what is actually entering your mind through your sensory organs. If you can see the speakers and watch them talk, you’ll pick things up you wouldn’t if you were unable to see the speakers — I’d mention some examples, but you should figure this out for yourself. How many of their actual sonic emissions would you record, if you were dictating that conversation as a fictional dialogue?

Probably, either a much smaller fraction than you’d initially guess, or else you’d need far more words than they used to convey the meaning. The point being, reality isn’t enough, but it still informs our ears and creates the baseline of what ‘believable’ means.

Oh, directly related, yet a sidestep from the previous paragraph: how often do people not use contractions? Stop avoiding contractions in dialogue, you amateurs! Don’t let formal writing ruin you. There’s nothing wrong with contractions. Writing formally in dialogue is step one toward stilted dialogue. Formal writing is almost always wooden, by design and definition, because people don’t talk that way. It’s a concession to clarity that fiction doesn’t need in the same way a textbook needs. Even trying to squeeze dialogue it into ‘proper grammar’ takes a toll, and usually it ends up hurting the feel and flow enormously.

But real people also don’t talk like they do in Tarantino movies, or in the Whedon-verse. Or the Callieverse, for that matter, arrogant as it may be for me to even tangentially include myself in such august company. It’s not ‘real’ talk. Very few real-life conversations occur between two minds that are that crack-spot-on-top-of-life (Hitchens and Rushdie aside). There’s a ton of craft behind that. A lot of listening by the author, yes, but far more analyzing and applying insight into what’s really driving the whole damn show. Certainly more than just ‘people talk that way.’ Because, again, they generally don’t.

A lot of what people say — those stalling tactics while they gather their thoughts, the sighs and noises, all that shit — should help you write narration, not dialogue. When you start sifting that out, you learn to see how to select the few important words, from amongst the flood of useless but realistically spoken words, that will elucidate your reader to the character’s state of mind. All those ‘ums’ and ‘uhs’ should almost never get written down, and people often filter them out, but are they telling you someone is nervous? Scared? Bashful? Of course they’re telling you something.

Figure it out and use it.

THAT is how you show, and not tell, the right way. In dialogue, at least.

Well, it’s part of it, anyhow.

The one solid I will do you is to say this: read your dialogue out loud. No, scratch that: act your dialogue out. Rewrite it until you can do so believably. Convince yourself.

Forget the rules when you’re inside quotation marks. That’s fair in dialogue. Narrative has rules, dialogue has different rules. If your characters matter to you and your work, let them have their own voice. Don’t fit their words into some imaginary ‘proper form because grammar’ unless you want your dialogue to make good firewood.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this in another column, so I’ll call this part one. The gods have no idea when I’ll get around to it and neither do I, but if you needed this, there’s actually a lot of homework built into this concept, so get started!

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