Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27708312-20170202163909/@comment-31166511-20170224141300

Ralphini wrote: Guyscopelevel wrote: Re: Chapter 2: Potential Boyfriends

I can imagine Mabel objecting to the way Dipper says "bug" so that it has an icky nerd connotation, when he should be saying "bug" as in a cute little lady bug.

"Mabel! It's exactly the same word!"

"Not even close, bro-bro. Try pronouncing it with more stress on the polka-dots!"

"Mabel, that makes zero sense."

. ..

"Hey, Dipper! Watch this!" Mabel suddenly melted down into a perfectly circular, but very shaggy patch on the hardwood floor. The individual shaggy fibers shifted color so that a large, flat, disembodied Mabel head appeared in the center, it's lip moving in synch with Mabel's somewhat muffled, but unmistakenly bubbly tone. "Guess what I am?"

Dipper instantly discarded half a dozen replies that he knew might hurt Mabel's feelings. The only safe reply left was the relatively lame: "You're a Mabel carpet?"

"No, silly! I'm as cute as a bug in a rug! Now laugh!"

Looking over the dialog I wrote, I notice that while I can easily hear the twins voices in my head that I provide the reader with zero clues to what the kids actually sound like.

It's these kind of over-familiar details that writers often forget to put in their writting. But if you don't put it down in writing, your reader can't read it.

It becomes a total blind spot for the writer. When an author re-reads his stuff all the visuals and sound effects fall into the right place--in his head. But when his audience reads the story, they only see what the words say.

If the actual words are only half as good as the mental movie that plays in the only in author's head when he read them, he will never write anything that is seen as half as good as what he thinks it is.

It is critical for a writer to develop the ability to objectively see his writing. This is a skill that many writers never learn and no one can learn it too well.

Homework Exercise: rewrite the example dialog above with the proper sound cues that would allow a reader who has never heard the twins' voices to understand what they sound like.