Narrative Gaps: Vehicles and Movement

Remember narrative gaps? These are points in the story where something is left out—perhaps a character does something a second time that they never did a first time or a character remembers learning information that the author forgot to have them learn before. Narrative gaps are one of the primary reasons most authors have alpha and beta readers—because after you’ve gone through your own book a dozen times, it can be difficult to spot errors on your own.

There is one type of common narrative gap that you can look for on your own, however: gaps regarding vehicles.

For some reason, vehicles in stories attract narrative gaps like a shiny clean car attracts bird droppings. They usually go something like this:

     “I think this is the place,” Afonso said, pointing out the window to a ramshackle nightclub.

     Graciana slowed the car enough to make out the small sign over the door. “Gaspar’s Place? Are you sure?”

     Afonso shrugged. “It’s the only club we’ve seen in the area. We might as well check it out.”

     “I guess,” Graciana said. “Just don’t wander off and leave me alone in there, okay?”

     “Deal,” Afonso said as they headed inside.

See the problem? Graciana and Afonso are in a car; he points out the window, she slows the car down, and then suddenly they’re headed into the club. Unless they’re driving the car through the door, that means they had to have stopped the car and gotten out at some point—but that point was never shown.

This might not seem like a problem; your readers are certainly intelligent enough to figure out that the characters are no longer in the car if they’re going into the club, after all. But most people picture the scene they’re reading in their mind, and there are few things as jarring for readers as having their image of the scene they’re reading suddenly violated. It will knock most readers solidly out of the story.

This rule applies even to someone who can literally teleport to place to place; you still need to inform your readers when your scene changes.

Another vehicle-related error occurs when characters move in ways that they should not be able to, usually because the author added something in at some point and forgot the scene was taking place in a vehicle:

     Graciana slowed the car as they passed the store. “Can we stop and buy those shoes I wanted?”

     “We’re kind of in a hurry, dear,” Afonso said.

     “I’ll be quick, I promise. Please?”

     Afonso sighed. “Fine. Hurry.”

     “Thank you!” Graciana said with a laugh. She clapped, jumping up and down like a little girl.

Most people are much too large to jump up and down in a car, wouldn’t you say? Particularly when they’re driving.

The good thing about these errors is that they can be easier than most narrative gaps to track down. Simply look for any section of your story where your characters are in or on any sort of vehicle—from cars to bicycles to horses—and double-check for these errors. 

Note: These errors can occur with any sort of movement from one place to another or any sort of enclosed space. Don’t have your characters walking down the street and then suddenly have them talking to a shopkeeper in a store without having them first enter the store, and don't have your characters crouched in a three-foot high tunnel and then have someone start jumping.

Punctuation Problems: Unfinished or Interrupted Dialog

When a person is speaking and doesn’t finish their thought, it happens in one of two ways. Either they trail off gradually, drawing out the last word and dropping in volume, or they cut off abruptly in mid-sentence or even mid-word.

Trailing off can indicate that the person has become lost in thought (and possibly forgotten to finish their sentence), that they have become distracted by something they see or hear, or that they are trying to suggest the unspoken final words without actually saying them. Whichever the circumstance, trailing off will always be indicated by ellipses at the end of the sentence:

     “Well, the experiment might work if we switched out the copper conductors . . .”

     “What in the world is going on . . .”

     “We do know someone who takes care of these sort of problems . . .”

Most writers use ellipses properly to indicate trailed-off dialog. However, I also often see them used to indicate speech that has cut off abruptly or been interrupted, which is incorrect. In those cases, the em dash is the appropriate punctuation:

     “I’ve figured it out!” Javid shouted. “The murderer is—”

     A gunshot cracked through the night, and Javid suddenly collapsed.

     “I am speaking,” Bernadette said, “even though I don’t—”

     “I am interrupting you, madam!”  Gabriel interrupted, “because I love the sound of my own—”

     “Well I shall simply interrupt you back, sir! For I must—”

     “Fool! My capacity for interrupting others far exceeds your own.”

Remember: ellipses indicate trailed-off dialog, and the em dash indicates abruptly cut-off dialog. No exceptions.

It's unfinished and incomplete, see?

Look, some elements of grammar and punctuation just don't lend themselves to perfect visual metaphors, all right? Trying to find a good picture for this post was hard. Thanks for reading, just move on now.

Constructing Proper Paragraphs with Dialog

In this post, I answered the question, “How do I know when to end one paragraph and start a new one?” I also mentioned in that article that we would discuss a few of the rules of paragraphing later. Welcome to later, friends!

There is one simple rule of writing paragraphs that I often see broken by new writers, and it relates to dialog: don’t have the dialog of more than one character in a single paragraph. If a new character begins to speak, make a new paragraph. It’s that simple.

     “Wait, so that story of you protecting the girl was made up?” Dinah asked.

     “Not all of it,” Rachelle replied, hunching her shoulders. “Those men were leering at her, and they could have been about to mistreat her. So I just made sure to walk between her and them. As protection.”

     “So . . . all you did was walk to work?”

Usually, you can connect a character’s actions to their dialog, as with Rachelle hunching her shoulders above. So if you have a character performing actions in the middle of dialog but they’re not speaking, it is often a good idea to give them their own paragraph as well.

     “I didn’t just walk to work! I put myself out there.”

     Dinah shook her head, rubbing her temples.

     “I was protecting the girl,” Rachelle continued. “I was stopping the problem before it could begin.”

     “It’s not a problem until it begins,” Dinah replied. “You protected her from a problem you made up. And now the police are out there looking to arrest a couple of men that didn’t actually commit a crime.”

     Rachelle somehow hunched her shoulders even further and folded her arms in a pose that Dinah could only describe as “petulant.”

The only easy exception to this rule that I can think of is if you are listing a few related bits of dialog in a row:

     Dinah sighed. This was partially her fault. She should have known better than to simply trust Rachelle on this issue. She thought back on the day before. “The way Rachelle sees things and the way things are ain’t usually very similar,” Bank had warned her. “Rachelle always wants to see herself as some sort of paragon instead of just regular folk like the rest of us,” Ginny had said. Why hadn’t she listened?

But that is something to be used sparingly. Most of the time, keep to the simple rule that when a new character begins speaking, a new paragraph should begin.

Eating During Dialog

Last time, we discussed the need for a character’s actions during dialog to be meaningful—to demonstrate something about their state of mind or to be part of a task that they are trying to carry out, rather than simply being inserted to create the necessary ebb and flow in the conversation.

One task I often see characters performing during dialog is eating. It is usually a good method for achieving the goals we discussed last time: it gives you plenty of distinct actions to fill in the gaps of the conversation; it can be used to reveal a character’s personality or state of mind (for example, a character who eats in the middle of an important conversation could seem flippant or disinterested, while a polite character might be very careful about chewing with their mouth closed and always swallowing before they speak); and it is a realistic task that people often carry out while they eat (especially if the conversation takes place at a meal or if the character is played by Brad Pitt).

He is having a conversation in every one of these scenes. (Image from Cracked.com.)

So if you want to have a character eat during a conversation, go for it! Just be sure to look out for these common pitfalls:

Food that doesn’t affect the conversation

     Brad took another bite of his sandwich. “You should have just killed him when you had the chance.”

So . . . is Brad speaking with his mouth full, or are we supposed to assume that he chewed and swallowed before speaking? If he is speaking with his mouth full, how are the other characters reacting to that? Is it disgusting to see? Are they having trouble understanding his words? Or, if he’s waiting before he speaks, how are the other characters reacting to that awkward pause?

This is a little problem that becomes increasingly incongruous the longer the conversation goes on. We all know that a conversation with someone who is eating doesn’t usually flow quite the same way that speaking with someone normally does; and if you fail to acknowledge that reality in your story, it can make the conversation seem subtly unrealistic to your readers.

Now, fixing this problem can also be a little tricky. You don’t want to have to clarify whether or not the character is speaking with their mouth full or not every time they take a bite—it would clutter up the conversation very quickly.  A better option would be to simply describe the character’s combined eating/speaking habits at the beginning of the conversation and only briefly allude to them once or twice later on. You can also try to rearrange the prose so that it raises fewer questions about how the food is affecting the character’s speech (i.e. having them take bites after they speak instead of before). So, our previous example could be reworked in this manner:

     “You should have just killed him when you had the chance,” Brad said. He took another bite of his sandwich.

Simultaneous biting and speaking

     “You should have just killed him when you had the chance,” Brad said, taking another bite of his sandwich.

Remember what we discussed about “ing” verbs in this post? The above construction implies that Brad is speaking at the same time that he takes a bite of his sandwich. Go try to take a bite of something while you speak. It doesn’t work, does it? Your mouth can’t handle both tasks at once—even Brad Pitt has to eat before or after he speaks a line. People can chew and talk at the same time, but they can’t take a bite and talk at the same time.

Too much attention to the minutiae of eating

     Brad took another bite of his sandwich. “You should have just killed him when you had the chance,” he said around the mouthful.

     I don’t even want to kill him now,” Jose replied.

     Brad swallowed and brushed crumbs from his chin. “Seriously? He sure seems to want to kill us.” He took another bite of his food.

     “That doesn’t mean we can’t find a peaceful resolution to all this.”

     Brad swallowed again and took another bite. “Death is peaceful.”

     “Dying isn’t.” Jose shook his head. “There’s got to be another way.”

      “So we kill him in his sleep.” Brad shrugged, swallowed, and finished off his sandwich. “Peacefully.”

This happens quite a lot in the manuscripts I edit. Your audience doesn’t need a blow-by-blow account of every single bite, chew, swallow, and face-wipe. We understand how eating works. Focus instead on the less usual parts of eating—if you need a beat in the conversation, have the character drop a fork, or get something stuck in their teeth and try to get it out, or bite their tongue. They could spill mustard on their shirt or choke and cough up a disgusting spray of crumbs and spittle. Any of that would be more interesting than bite, chew, swallow, repeat. And if you don’t want the meal to take any of those particular turns, that’s fine—just space out the biting, chewing, and swallowing enough that they don’t grow tiresome and intersperse them other actions and information.

To close, here’s an example of all of this done well from Charlie Holmberg’s The Paper Magician.

     [Mg. Thane] stabbed his fork into two pieces of pasta and raised them to his lips. He tasted them, chewing, and his eyes brightened just a bit more. “I’d say, Ceony,” he said after swallowing, “had I not been present for the lessons, I’d think you’d found a way to enchant pasta.”

     Ceony smiled. “You like it?”

     He nodded, scooping up another bite. “It tastes just as good as it smells. That’s a sign of a well-rounded person. I should congratulate you.”

     “On my person or my pasta?”

     Light danced in his eyes. He didn’t answer.

     Ceony tasted her chicken, relieved it wasn’t too dry. Three bites into her own dinner, Mg. Thane said, “Oldest of four.”

     “Two sisters, one brother,” Ceony replied. “Do you have a large family? You seem like someone who suffered through a great deal of sisters.”

     “I’ve suffered through a great many people, but none of them sisters. I’m an only child.”

     That explains a few things, Ceony thought.

     A few seconds of silence passed between chewing bites. Not wanting the time to grow long, Ceony asked, “When do you get groceries?”

     He glanced at her. “When I run out, I suppose. Groceries are my most dreaded chore.”

     “Why?”

     He lowered his fork and leaned his chin onto his hand, elbow on the table edge.

     “They require going to the city,” he stated. “And it’s hot out, besides.”

     Ceony paused as she cut into the next morel of chicken. “Do you freckle?”

     He laughed. “Now there’s a conversation turn—”

    “I mean,” Ceony began, “I could understand not going outside if you freckle.” She glanced to her hands, spotted with freckles of her own. They had a tendency to cover any bit of skin exposed to the sun between March and October.

     “I don’t freckle,” he said. She must have been frowning at her hands, for he added, “And there’s nothing wrong with freckles, Ceony. Heaven forbid you look like everyone else in this place.”

     Ceony smiled and shoved some pasta in her mouth to keep the grin contained.

     “And since you have so much extra time,” Mg. Thane said, “your first quiz will be tomorrow morning.”

Making Movement Meaningful

Pure dialog can get confusing and even boring; it can also fail to convey the many subtleties that people communicate through means like expression and body language. This is the reason that writers often insert small actions into passages of dialog. The actions could be changes in a character’s expression, small movements or gestures, or specific tasks that the character is performing while they talk. For example:

     “I don’t think we should go after her,” Sofia whispered. She shifted in her seat and closed her eyes with a sigh.

     Matilde glanced at Sofia and then looked away. “Why not?”

    “She decided to leave all on her own. No one made her.” Sofia shook her head and bit her lip. “She obviously doesn’t want to be here.”

     “Maybe . . .” Matilde replied, looking down at her feet while she shuffled them back and forth. “But what happens when she decides she wants to be here after all and it’s too late for her to come back? Chiara tends to be pretty impulsive.”

     Sofia stuck out her tongue. “We still can’t force her to do what she doesn’t want to,” she said, waving her hands.

     Matilde looked up with a frown and then turned away again, wringing her hands. “We could. And maybe we should.”

Now, that passage was packed a little too full of actions—every single line of dialog was accompanied by at least one action. That’s partly because I wanted to fit as many examples as I could into one passage, but many people do write their conversation scenes this way.  But why is that too many actions? Am I saying that you should never have an action to accompany every line of dialog? No. The problem isn’t the number of actions so much as it is the lack of purpose behind so many of the actions.

Let’s list the actions from the passage again:

     shifted in her seat

     closed her eyes

     with a sigh

     glanced at Sofia

     and then looked away

     shook her head

     and bit her lip

     looking down at her feet

     shuffled [her feet] back and forth

     stuck out her tongue

     waving her hands

     looked up with a frown

     and then turned away again

     wringing her hands

What are each of these actions supposed to convey? Why is the character performing that particular action at that point in the conversation?  With some of these actions, the purpose is pretty clear. When someone closes their eyes and sighs, for instance, it’s usually a pretty good indication of weariness or irritation. Hand wringing and lip biting are decent ways to indicate nervousness or internal confliction. And frowns are pretty clear indications of unhappiness or severe confusion.

But even those examples could each have more than one meaning. As for the others, they don’t convey anything meaningful. What is the audience supposed to learn from the fact that Sofia “shifted in her seat”? Is the seat uncomfortable? Is she emotionally uncomfortable and the movement is a physical indication of that fact? Was she trying to relax or get a better view of something? There are so many reasons to shift in one’s seat that simply describing the action carries next to no meaning.

Why is it significant that Matilde looked at Sofia and then looked away? What does that mean? What does it mean that she’s looking down at her feet while shuffling them? Is her turning away after looking up with a frown supposed to tell us something about her thoughts? Because it isn’t. It might be vaguely sort-of hinting at some sort of emotional state, but it sure isn’t informing the audience of anything.

Even Sofia sticking out her tongue is confusing. There are so many ways and reasons that people stick out their tongues:

Each of these images conveys a different emotion, and yet they could all be described as someone “sticking out his or her tongue.” From the context, we could probably narrow down Sofia’s gesture to two or three of these, but it still wouldn’t be clear. Is she disgusted? Petulant? Nauseated? We just don’t know.  Remember—most expressions and movements can indicate more than one emotion, thought, or state of mind. Just because you know which meaning you were trying to convey doesn’t mean that your readers will get it.

“Looks” are probably the worst category of offenders on this front. Throughout the conversations I read, characters are “looking” all over the place. They look at one another, they look at their feet, at the wall, at the table, into the distance, into the sky, at their hands, at their clothes. And most of it doesn’t have any meaning whatsoever. Beware the meaningless look!

This usually happens when a writer can tell that the conversation needs a beat or a brief lull to break up the dialog, but they don’t have anything for the characters to do to provide that break. If you need a beat but you can’t think of a meaningful movement or expression for your character, then give them something to do! In our example above, Sofia could have been trying to finish some (plot-related) paperwork while they conversed or Matilde could have already begun packing to go after Chiara. The possibilities are endless.

Give your manuscript to a friend and ask them to highlight any point where the purpose of movements or expressions was unclear or confusing. If you can’t come up with a meaningful movement to replace the vague one, then don’t be afraid to cut it out entirely.

Using Actions to Avoid Dialog Tags

I told you here to avoid using any more dialog tags than you absolutely must. Here's another tip on how you can do that.

Often, your characters will be performing actions as they speak. For example:

"They can't have just disappeared," Jensen said. He peered at the dusty valley through his binoculars. "They're hiding out there someplace."

Having someone perform actions as they speak is natural and engaging—readers often have an easier time following dialog if they have a clear image of where the characters are and what they are doing while they speak. But having a character perform actions while they speak can serve another very useful purpose. Let's take another look at our previous example, but with the dialog tag removed:

"They can't have just disappeared." Jensen peered at the dusty valley through his binoculars. "They're hiding out there someplace."

See what just happened? Even though the text didn't explicitly state who was speaking, having Jensen perform an action in the middle of a line of dialog automatically implies that he was the one who spoke. This is one of the most useful tricks I know for avoiding dialog tags.

Look through your story for places where a dialog tag appears next to an action, and see if you can pare the text down to just the action. Sometimes you won't be able to—dialog tags can't always be avoided—but I bet you'll be able to cut out at least a few.

P.S.

As you're looking for places where you can apply this trick, keep an eye out for the words "as [he/she/they/it] spoke." New writers often use these words when they don't need to. Example:

The king took the sword and touched it to the shoulders of the knight as he spoke. “I dub thee Sir Gloudin of the Knights of the Broken Branch.”

Now, with the words "as he spoke" removed:

The king took the sword and touched it to the shoulders of the knight. “I dub thee Sir Gloudin of the Knights of the Broken Branch.”

If you place the dialogue immediately after a related action, readers will automatically fill in that the two are simultaneous. Neat!