S.G. Browne

Ribald and raucous and soirée and eschewed,
Sibilant, dulcet, omniscient and (yes) dude.
Blimp, murmur, plethora, zeppelin, and nerds,
These are a few of my favorite words.

I was recently asked on my Goodreads author group about words that I loved and/or hated. While I provided a brief answer on the original post, it got me to thinking about some of my other favorite words, which eventually led me to corrupt the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music.

To be honest, I don’t make use of all the words included in the rhyming lyrics above on a regular basis, though I am fond of spitting out eschewed and omniscient and plethora whenever I can fit them into the conversation. Dude is my favorite word, because it can mean so many things with just a simple change of inflection. And I don’t think there’s a more amusing word in the English language than blimp.

Go on, try it. Say blimp. Then say it again. Repeat it over and over. I’ll wait. See? I told you so.

Some of my other favorite words include:

Susurrus, salubrious, lugubrious, onomatopoeia, omnipotent, gargantuan, quintessential, ubiquitous, denouement, verisimilitude, denuded, culinary, milieu, bogart, apocryphal, gasp, haunt, and loathe.

Speaking of loathing, while there aren’t any words that affect me like the proverbial fingernails dragging along the chalkboard, I’m not particularly fond of the word gherkin. I don’t know why. It just rubs me the wrong way. Other than that, I’m pretty easy to get along with.

How about you? Any words that you love or hate? That just roll off your tongue or make you squirm?

2011 speeds along toward its inevitable end, leaving Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day in its wake, the holiday season no longer on the distant horizon but rising up out of the depths like some mythological beast, ready to smash us to pieces.

As you might have figured out, I’m not prepared for the holiday season. It seems like just a few weeks ago I was dressed up like Uncle Sam, selling illegal fireworks to middle school kids.

How did this happen? Where did the rest of the year go? When did Thanksgiving follow summer?

I guess it doesn’t matter. Thanksgiving is upon us, or at least upon me, and that means it’s time to reflect upon the things in my life I’m thankful for. Which is easier than having to deal with New Year’s resolutions. That’s way too much pressure. At least with Thanksgiving, I don’t have to worry about breaking any promises.

So I’ve decided to list the things I’m thankful for in the universe of writing. No reason. I just wanted a theme. I chose 24 because that’s the date on which Thanksgiving falls this year.

So here they are, in no particular order. 24 Writing Related Things for Which I’m Thankful:

1) My agent
2) My editor
3) My readers (Thank you for the support)
4) Stephen King
5) Chuck Palahniuk
6) Ray Bradbury
7) The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
8) The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
9) Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
10) The screenplays of Charlie Kaufman
11) Haiku
12) Spell check
13) Copy editors
14) Brick and mortar bookstores
15) The comedic writing of Matt Stone and Trey Parker
16) Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
17) Oscar Wilde
18) Mark Twain
19) Book reviewers (positive reviews are a bonus)
20) My writer’s group
21) My writing community (both in the real and cyber world)
22) The song writing skills of Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day
23) Lyrics by Lennon/McCartney
24) Books that aren’t electronic

That about wraps it up. Now it’s time to go make garlic mashed potatoes for the annual family gorge fest. I’m always in charge of the mashed potatoes. I think it’s because I use two sticks of butter and a cup of sour cream.

Happy Thanksgiving!

When I first started writing more than twenty years ago, I was reading a steady diet of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, F. Paul Wilson, and Peter Straub. So most of what I wrote from 1990-2002 was supernatural horror. Alternate realities. Things that went bump in the night.

And Stephen King is the reason I wanted to become a writer.

That thirteen year period from 1990-2002 produced three novels and about four dozen short stories, several of which were more dark comedy and social satire than supernatural horror and written in the first person point-of-view.

In 2001, I wrote the last of those darkly comedic stories, “A Zombie’s Lament.” The following year, while rewriting two of my supernatural horror novels, I realized I didn’t like what I was writing. Worse, I didn’t enjoy the process. Writing had become tedious rather than joyful. So after several months of this, I stopped writing.

Nearly a year later, in 2003, after reading Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk, I was inspired to take “A Zombie’s Lament” and do something more with it. That something more became Breathers. With Breathers I found a voice and a style that resonated with me and made writing enjoyable again and also allowed me to maintain some of my roots in the supernatural and the fantastic.

In addition to King and Palahniuk, I’ve been inspired by authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Christopher Moore, and Douglas Adams. I’m also inspired by films like Being John Malkovich, The Big Lebowski, Fight Club, and I Heart Huckabees.

I write social satire because I enjoy poking fun at human beings. There’s a lot to poke fun at. Including myself. And I write dark comedy because that’s just my sense of humor. Plus I have a lot more fun trying to make myself laugh than trying to make myself wonder what’s lurking in the shadows.

Admittedly my main protagonists aren’t your classic heroes. They’re not imbued with a sense of honor or altruistic motives. They’re not someone you would necessarily want to bring home to meet your mother.

They’re selfish.
They’re cynical.
They’re decomposing corpses.

In other words, they’re flawed. But even if they’re zombies, incarnations of fate, or genetic mutants who have the ability to steal luck, they’re very much human. And my challenge is to find a way to make the reader want to root for them or be their friend in spite of their shortcomings.

I’ve often heard others say that in order to write good dialogue, you need to write the way people talk. You need to listen to speech patterns and expressions and emulate what you hear. The problem with this is that most real life conversations require a good editor. Everyday speech is filled with repetition and fillers and unnecessary adverbs like “basically” and “really” and “very.” Not to mention that many conversations tend to be unfocused and repetitive and stray off on tangents.

One way to think of it is that dialogue in writing is good conversation, but conversation in real life is not necessarily good dialogue.

So in order to write good dialogue, the trick is to write the way people should talk rather than the way they actually talk. You want to write dialogue that sounds believable but in real life never happens.

To quote Alfred Hitchcock: “A good story is life with the dull parts taken out.” Good dialogue is very much the same.

So what’s one of the best ways to learn how to write good dialogue? By watching movies.

Movie scripts have to be crisp and efficient. They’re all dialogue and action without the fiction writer’s burden of having to fill in the blanks with narrative prose. Obviously not all movies are great examples on how to write dialogue, but those that are contain dialogue that has a rhythm, is filled with conflict, and moves the story forward. Some of the films that get it right include L.A. Confidential, The Departed, Airplane!, Diner, and The Graduate.

I’d also recommend watching a selection of films written by David Mamet, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, Mel Brooks, and Joel and Ethan Coen. All of these writers have a flair for dialogue and do a great job of conveying the rhythms of speech and conversation. The Coen Brothers are especially adept at conversation.

Naturally, since we’re talking about writing, it’s a good idea to read dialogue, too. So read as much as possible and as many different authors as possible. Read mysteries, romance, social satire, and thrillers. And if you’ve never read any Elmore Leonard, Robert Parker, or Christopher Moore, you might want to give one or more of them a shot, if nothing else than to see how they handle dialogue.

I came across a blog post on Twitter yesterday via Publishers Weekly titled Shutting the Drawer: What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell? by Edan Lepucki. It’s a good essay about what happens when a writer has to admit defeat and give up on her first novel. To “accept the death of your first true darling,” to paraphrase Lepucki, who asks if she can “put my first book into the drawer and shut it?”

In Lepucki’s case, she’s talking about an agented novel that couldn’t find a traditional publisher, but it happens more often than you’d think. First novels by authors ending up in a drawer or in a box on the top shelf of your closet. Today it ends up in a virtual folder on your hard drive or on a flash drive rather than under your bed consorting with the dust bunnies, but the point is the same: eventually you have to accept the reality that it’s not going to get published and move on.

Of course, this was before Amazon and eBooks, when anything can get published now regardless of how many rejections you’ve suffered through. Or not suffered through. And with brick-and-mortar book stores folding like a bad hand in a game of strip poker, traditional publishing isn’t the same as it ever was. With apologies to the Talking Heads.

Although I don’t have any numbers to back me up, I’d venture to guess that the majority of “first” published novels aren’t first novels at all. They’re second or third of fourth. Maybe more. Lepucki lists a few in her essay. But it’s rare that a writer’s first attempt at writing a novel ends up on the bookshelf at your local stores.

I have three novels in my closet. Literally. The manuscripts are printed up and stored in Kinko’s boxes stacked one atop the other. My first novel is titled The Circle, followed by Mar Vista and finally Obsession. All three of them are straight supernatural horror novels and are devoid of the social satire and humor found in Breathers and Fated, which are technically my fourth and fifth novels.

I never had representation for the first and third novels, and my second, Mar Vista, had a short-lived relationship with an agent who closed up shop six months after taking me on. So my first three novels for the most part ended up in my drawer as studies on the art of novel writing. Six-hundred and four-hundred and three-hundred page exercises that helped to teach me how to write.

While it’s possible I could end up doing something with Obsession, my other two novels will remain in their boxes, gathering dust on my shelves.