Milestones and Tips From Daytime

Not Low Maintenance made it into the top 100 contemporary romances today.  So that's a big deal for me.

• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,100 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #34 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Comic
  • #11 in Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers > Legal
  • #94 in Kindle Store > Books > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Romance > Contemporary

Don't ask how any of this ranking thing works.  I don't know.

Let's talk about daytime.  "Hang on there, that's all you've been doing lately."

Too true.  Let's talk about what I learned about writing in daytime.

Some people would say all you pick up is bad ticks.  I think that's true.  Because of time constraints, you make fast/unwise choices that lack creativity or freshness.

That's a big lesson to learn.

Here's a good lesson I learned from story meetings.  If you think something is in the work, make sure it is there.  Clearly.  Be able to point to it.  Don't just feel it's there, or it's there in a nebulous sort of way.  Readers pay less and less attention as time goes by.  Everything in the world is moving faster, so people are geared to speed.  It's unfortunate but you need to consider it.  I see reviews of certain of my books and it's apparent the people are reading way too fast.  What they missed is in there.  If the point is important, billboard it.  Repeat it if necessary.

Dialog.  No, actors do not make up their own lines.  They say they do in interviews but let me assure you most of them are not clever enough to do it.  Nor do they know where the story is going.  The wrong choice of words can spoil months worth of work.

Know your characters.  I have read (yawn) a thousand times you should create a bio for your characters.  I never have and can't think of a better time-waster than that.  But you do need to know and hear your characters.

Listen to people speak.  Everyone has their own style and so should your characters.  Ideally you should be able to differentiate the characters by dialog alone, without identifying them.  Some readers get bugged if you don't throw in a he said she replied every couple lines.  If I had my way, I would cut down my usage of those by at least half but I don't want to hear the complaints from people reading too fast to be able to process who's saying what.

Dialog isn't conversation.  It's not a transcription of how boringly most people talk.  This is a way to reveal information.  Make sure your dialog is fresh and valuable.

Some years ago I had a meeting with an editor at I don't know, let's say NAL, they're all interchangeable anyway.  At that point there was an equation.  It was something like 3 pages of prose (what you skim over about carpeting and the like) to 1 page of dialog.  Amazingly even with books written all in email and such, people can still complain there's not the right balance of description to dialog.  I don't know what the right balance is.  I'm usually accused of too much dialog.  With the result that I don't write less dialog, I just write more about carpets.

Just make sure your dialog conveys information the reader needs.  If they read too fast to notice it, you can try to slow them down.  Break up the flow.  Throw in something unexpected.  Shift something.  Make them pay attention.

How many readers savor reading anymore?  I don't know.  Especially when a book costs 99 cents, I think the tendency is to blast through it.

I get complaints that the book isn't the way the reader thinks it should be--they should write their own book then. 

Do your best work anyway.