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If you’re a writer, you’ve undoubtedly heard that editors and agents like to see a lot of white space in manuscripts—translated as go heavy on the dialogue. That’s because readers love dialogue, which ultimately creates a faster paced novel. I’m not referring to the how’s-the-weather variety of conversations but rather pithy, witty repartee.
My bio page at the 2009 GH multi-author blog http://RubySlipperedSisterhood.com lists my Ruby Sister nickname as Ruby Queen of Snark. Granted, I may not be the actual QUEEN of sarcasm, (I think that official title was claimed by someone known as Venomous Kate, the author of an abandoned blog, queenofsnark.com), however, I rank at least as high as a princess or duchess in the art of snark. My mouth has gotten me—and my characters—in serious trouble on more than just a few occasions. Therefore, it’s no big surprise that I’m also a devotee of novels and movies with snappy comebacks. One of my favorite old TV shows is The Golden Girls. I love Dorothy’s (Bea Arthur’s) snide answers to Rose’s (Betty White’s) dumber-than-dirt questions.
Since I’m inevitably drawn to books and movies rife with clever quips, there’s little wonder I have trouble keeping irreverent wisecracks out of my serious family dramas. I suspect that’s part of the reason I’m a two-time winner of the Golden Heart award and still unpublished. In 2003—the first time my work was a finalist in a contest—I received the following comment from one of my judges: “What a terrific voice! Great dialogue—I SEE these people sparring—like Spencer Tracy & Hepburn.” Hepburn in this plot plays a heroine who discovers she has a half-sister with leukemia-not exactly a funny situation.
In my experience, a few great lines of dialogue can be the difference between a good movie or book and an exceptional one. And even if profound or snappy remarks don’t make the film great, they at least make it memorable. For example, who could ever forget the lines “You had me at hello” and “Show me the money!” from Jerry MaGuire.
Some quotes from movies have become so renowned you can immediately identify the film from them. And a few have been quoted so often they’ve become clichés. To illustrate, let’s play a little game. I’ll list lines from ten different movies, and you guess their titles. (But don’t post the answers and ruin the fun for everyone else. I’ll list the ten titles later this evening.) Since I’m a romance junkie, most of them are—duhhh—from romances, but a few aren’t. On some of them, I’ve include two or three lines from the movie because I loved them all so much I couldn’t choose.
1. “Stores are never nice to people. They’re nice to credit cards.”
2. “Oh, yeah, you blend.”
“This is a tough decision. Get my a** kicked or collect $200. Hmm . . . I think I’ll collect $200.
“Now, I ask you. Would you give a f#*% what kind of pants the SOB who shot you was wearing?”
3. “You can’t handle the truth!”
4. “Now I can see I bring out the worst in you. Just let me stop you from saying something you’ll torture yourself about for years to come.”
“I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be you so badly.”
5. “You make me want to be a better man.”
6. “Your boss is the Chief Executive of fantasy land.”
“Let’s take him out back and beat the s**t out of him.”
“Just stay away from DuPont Circle. I hear it’s murder this time of day.”
7. “Ditto.”
8. “Uhh—that you’re the only living heart donor.”
“We were up to our elbows in your underwear drawer. It was like touching the Shroud of Turin!”
9. “You’re crème brûlée. You can never be Jell-O.”
10. “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
How did you do? If you recognized seven out of the ten, I’ve made my point. Relevant, entertaining dialogue is one of the most important elements of a good book, and crafting it can be one of the most difficult skills to master. Naturally, being cursed with the smart aleck gene, my preference leans toward witty retorts. It’s why Susan Elizabeth Phillips is one of my favorite authors. Nonetheless, dialogue doesn’t have to be funny to make an impact. Examples 3,4,5,7, & 10 from above are great examples of how dramatic, romantic, or profound statements can stick in our minds.
Witty repartee doesn’t just happen. It takes revising and polishing to perfect the thrust and parry of the ping-pong dialogue that makes our characters’ conversations larger than life. Readers love and admire that the hero and heroine always know the perfect thing to say at any given moment. (Unless, of course, the heroine happens to be Kathleen Kelly in You’ve Got Mail.) 
Have you ever noticed the movies you watch over and over and the books you enjoy rereading are usually ones with great dialogue? Now it’s your turn to share those titles. What are some of your favorite lines in them? What kind of dialogue do you prefer—dramatic, witty, poignant, etc? Which authors can you rely on to deliver entertaining or compelling dialogue?
2009 has not been the best of years for me so far (but hey, there’s almost a third of it left, so I’m hoping it will improve). What’s helped to keep me sane are some of the things I treasure most: books.
And not just any books. I found myself turning not to my many stacks and shelves of unread novels, but instead certain well-loved and much-used paperbacks with cracked spines and the browning pages. The ones I KNEW would deliver what I needed: comfort reads.
As a writer, I suppose I should be encouraging you to explore new written adventures and support the many wonderful authors with books recently in print. Well, I do encourage that. It’s good for writers and good for the economy. Buy! Buy!
That being said, when I needed a guaranteed pleasure, I knew exactly what would do it. I wanted happy. I wanted short chapters so I could read in spurts between handling the pressing things on my to-do list. I wanted a long book so I could lose myself in another world.
And although I write otherworld fantasy romance and love the genre, that’s not what I sought. Here it is:
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot. This is the first of four wonderful, fat, heartwarming books about a country veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales of England. His memorable cast of characters includes eccentric friends, down-to-earth farmers, and the woman who becomes the love of his life — not to mention the fantastic pages populated by horses, cows, kittens, dogs, and newborn lambs. If you love animals, you MUST get this book.
As you can see from the photo, my copy has been read many a time over the years since I first came across it in junior high school. In fact I’d gladly buy a new, electronic version for my Kindle, if only one were available. (Ahem, publishers!)
I’m now rereading the fourth book in the series, a copy just as tattered as the first three. Reaching the fourth book makes me a little sad because I know the joyful experience must soon end. Fortunately, the author wrote a handful of other books and I have them ready on my shelf.
Herriot was a fantastic writer, lyrical and joyous, and with wonderful comedic timing. I’ve found myself realizing that his style — what writers call “voice” — had a significant influence on mine, though I can’t claim to be nearly as good as he was.
Yes, “was” — he passed away some years ago. I was in Nairobi, Kenya doing graduate research at a museum and received a letter from my grandmother with his obituary tucked inside. (Aren’t grandmothers so good at remembering little things like the books you love?) At the time, my life was very different than Herriot’s, but I mourned his death and mourned that he would write no more books.
But he left a legacy, one I cherish. His words give me solace and inspire me to write. I can only hope that someday, my stories will touch someone else the way his touched me.
Which books are YOUR comfort reads and your inspiration?
This week, I had the opportunity to read a “throw-back” novel, “Kiss An Angel” by Susan Elizabeth Phillips (which I adored, frankly). Written in the mid-90s , it made me think of the romances I’d read and loved even earlier, as a teenager, when I’d first gotten into romance. I cut my teeth on Barbara Cartlands, historical romances set in the glittering world of the rich and titled, predominantly in England but with a few sheikhs thrown in for good measure. (I mean, come on. You gotta have a sheikh in there). I then moved on to Jude Devereaux and finally made my way to contemporaries and paranormals.
But looking back into my very first romances, I thought of the heroes of those books who entranced me so: Tall, dark and almost brutally good looking, physically imposing whether they were heavily muscled or lean and strong, wickedly intelligent, elegant or a “man’s man” depending on what was needed at the moment (a gala or a fistfight)-and, of course, titled or worthy of a title. Ah, the passions of my youth.
And then I thought about the hero in “Angel”: tall, dark, brutally good looking…hmm… lean and elegant, physically imposing (circus rider and whip wielder, hello!)…intelligent (professor)… and, um, yes, titled: the long lost heir to the Russian throne. But that was a book written more than a decade ago, surely just a nostalgia point for me, right?
So I turned to my favorite heroes today, since I’m now an enlightened forty-year-old, former exec and current freelance business owner, a strong, single, self-sufficient female. And those heroes would be…ah… tall, dark, brutally good looking men whose strength often tends to muscled-but-lean, whose bodies are elegant, minds are sharp, and um… if they’re not titled, they’re worthy of a title. Probably the only thing that’s even remotely different is that they’re occasionally vampires these days, or possess paranormal powers of other sorts – the incarnation of the Tarot Magician.
Which made me realize that my taste in heroes hasn’t changed all that much… in the past thirty years!
Now my preferred heroines on the other hand… well, they’ve gotten older (heh). More complicated. With a few key exceptions for YA heroines with “old souls” or young twenty-something heroines who’ve been around the block so many times they’ve grooved the concrete, I tend to like a more mature heroine. But my hero? As long as he’s lived longer than twenty five years on this Earth (or, okay, any dimension), age is irrelevant to me. Basically, it’s the hero of my youth all over again – which is sort of intriguing, since my life is a whole lot different than it was when I was thirteen years old.
How about you? Have your tastes in heroes, heroines, or romance in general changed since you first started reading it to now? What’s new and different in your fictional preferences, and what remains a tried-and-true component of your ideal romance? I’m fascinated by heroes in general, so I welcome your thoughts!
 I’m a child of summer. As a Floridian with my birthday on the summer solstice, how could any season but summer be my favorite? Long days spent riding bikes, long evenings doing cartwheels in the front yard, long Sunday afternoons spent at the beach or skiing on the lake, are the things made my summers perfect. Oh, and how could I forget waiting out the raucous thunderstorms with a good book? In fact, some of those summer reads were so great, so consuming, that I’d forgo the bike rides to stay inside reading after the rain stopped and sun came back out.
Those books of summer cooled me down, took me to other places and introduced me to new friends. I remember how Joan Aiken had me shivering along with the characters in “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase” even though the temperature outside my house was boiling the thermometer at about ninety-eight degrees.
Or how the cool misty mornings of “Beautiful Joe” felt so real to me, that I pretended we had a barn in our suburban backyard instead of a swing set so I could find a poor, mistreated dog to rescue.
Then there was the summer I finally read “Gone With Wind” and felt like I’d been born in the wrong century. Oh, fiddle-dee-dee!
How about you? Did you spend your summer with the required reading list, or maybe with Nancy Drew? How about Donna Parker and Cherry Ames?Or in Sweet Valley? Or with Misty of Chincotogue?
Share some of your favorite summer reads from childhood or later. We can all use some new ideas for what to read pooside, lakeside, beachfront, dockside, or just chilling on the sofa beneath air conditioner.
Like most of you, I spent much of my childhood with my nose in a book. Worried about my lack of exercise, Dear Mom enrolled me in gymnastics lessons. After one class, I sported a goose egg on the back of my head and a new found terror of the high bar. And don’t even get me started on the Evil of all Evils. I lasted four weeks.
Up next? Ballet. I loved everything about it — the music, the swanky leotard, telling stories through dance. Unfortunately, the thought of pirouetting with my bird cage in front of an audience scared the tutu off me. I hung up my slippers after one year.
Lucky for me my mom is not only dear, but very, very wise. She realized early on that not every little girl is meant to be a cheerleader or a ballerina. More than that, she recognized my passion. And she fanned the flames. So instead of dance lessons, she enrolled me in a book club. I vividly remember tearing into that first flat brown box (I know. Not. Normal.) and unearthing Beverly Cleary’s Socks and Sid Fleishman’s McBroom’s Ear.
To this day, the beloved stories from my childhood still flit about my head, books like A Wrinkle in Time (I so identified with oddball Meg!); Are you There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Island of the Blue Dolphins; and The Outsiders. Kids books are powerful. Perhaps it’s because they touch a young, raw, vulnerable place in us. Perhaps it’s because they speak a truth children demand. Whatever the reason, they hold on long after “The End.”
You’ve seen a few of my childhood faves. Now it’s your turn. What books from your childhood refuse to let go?
Recently, I got into a discussion with former Golden Heart Winner and fabulous romantic suspense novelist Cate Noble about what makes for marketable fiction. We started with romance, of course, because that’s how we roll, and posed the question: if there was only ONE quality that you HAD to have for a romance novel to sell, whether your sub-genre was romantic suspense, historical, paranormal, contemporary, etc., what would it be?
Well, based on a completely unscientific review of the top romance novels on the shelves today–regardless of sub-genre–my assessment was: if you had a hero sexy enough to melt your readers into a steaming puddle of goo, a hero compelling enough to make you remember HIM long after you’ve forgotten the plot of the story itself (or any other details of the book, for that matter), you were well on your way to a winner of a book.
Or, okay, at least it’s that way for me.
Think about it-when you consider the most beloved movies and books on your keeper shelves, what pulls you back to them time and time again? As a paranormal fan, I am well versed in the J.R. Ward oeuvre-but it’s Zsadist’s story in “Lover Awakened” that really knocked me out. Why? Because he was a compelling hero. He was tortured, he was passionate, he needed. In the classic battle of Han Solo vs. Luke Skywalker, I was a Han Solo girl all the way, and I so wasn’t buying that he wasn’t head over heels for the Princess (you can’t fool me, Han!). Of all of the many brilliant Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ novels, I love “Breathing Room” the most, because, well, Ren just has a way of jumping on all of my buttons. And Jenny Crusie completely did me in with Phin, in her book “Welcome to Temptation”… truly one for the ages. These are the kind of men who beckon you back between the sheets-er, pages-time and again, just to remember the excitement they offer, and their unparalleled need for their heroines.
But that’s not the only reason why readers fall in love with books, or audiences with films. Sometimes, it’s the heroine who calls us back time and time again to a beloved story. Whether she’s spunky or intrepid, fierce or loving, it’s the heroine who gives the hero meaning and a sense of place in the story–and in our hearts. What would Zsadist be without Bella, for example? What would Jack Colton be without Joan Wilder in Romancing The Stone? Lost, that’s what. Still aimlessly wandering around South America. When I consider my favorite heroines, Sarah Connor from Terminator II comes to mind. Okay, okay, so she’s a little intense: but isn’t it the high stakes that makes her fight so worth watching?
For some fiction lovers, too, it’s the emotions that a story evokes–either through a knockout romance arc or a heartwrenching turn of events or a story of unending love. The chemistry between a hero and heroine can transcend a story and make it truly memorable. A recent case in point would be the just-released movie The Proposal, a harmless bit of summer fun with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. Each of these actors on their own do their jobs admirably, but put them together, and somehow the movie is far better than it has any right to be. Even afterwards, it’s not so much their relationship that makes you smile, but how they look at each other, the zing of possibility that exists when they’re both on screen.
And finally, it’s sometimes the story itself that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Take the Suzanne Brockmann Troubleshooters series as exhibit A. Even if you’re a die-hard Brockmann fan, there are some of those stories you’re going to like more than others, some that you think of whenever you hear her name, no matter how many books she writes. I recently rewatched one of my favorite movies from childhood, Highlander, and realized that it had some really rough sections in it in terms of dialogue and character building… not to mention 80’s vintage hair. Even after I’d just seen it, however, I found myself remembering the story the movie told, the spell it wove around me as I thought “hey, what if” — and that story will continue to bring me back to that movie, no matter how much time passes.
But when it comes to that one indefinable “something” that makes me fall in love with a book or a movie over all other things… it’s still all about the hero.
So what about you? What is the most important element of fiction — the ”something” you remember about all of your favorite books and movies? All qualifying entries (posts that name an element and explain why it matters to you!) will be entered in a drawing for a $15 B&N gift certificate to help you fall in love with your next favorite book!
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