Pat Bertram offers a guest post: She discusses the use of "beats" to enrich dialogue in our books. There are some helpful ideas for all of us in this example of writing technique.
I once read the entire oeuvre of a bestselling author, trying to figure out the reason for her popularity, and I had a hard time slogging through her words. It’s not simply that I find romance novels unappealing, it’s that she does not use beats. Beats, as you know, are interesting bits of action used as dialog tags:
“No!” Mary rushed
to grab the paring knife from her two-year-old son. So much more interesting
than: “No,” Mary said.
Beats make the
book; in many cases, they are the book. I first noticed this when I read an
Iris Johansen thriller. I got bored with her series character and, for a change
of pace, started reading only her beats. To my surprise, the entire story was
there. The character’s fear, lessening of fear, relief, escalating fear, despair,
desire, lust, all reaching to a crescendo of utter terror, and then finally
peace and acceptance.
From that, I’ve
learned to cultivate beats. When I’m looking at a movie that doesn’t capture my
full attention, I watch the actors and try to put what I see into words. The
other day I saw a character shoot a finger at a friend and smile as if he were
agreeing with him, then the smile faded and he shook his head no. Not only did
it have an element of humor (doing the opposite of what’s expected) it was a
brilliant beat, perfectly timed.
Obviously, not
using beats has not hurt the bestselling romance writer any, but for the rest
of us, the beat goes on.
The following is an excerpt from my novel Light Bringer, showing the use of beats.
Since there are only two characters, we’d know who was talking even without
identifiers, but the small bits of stage business help set the scene. The book is available at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/49822.
