Friction in Dialogue

Hi everyone,

Today, I worked on my first selected page to improve its micro-tension for dialogue on page 319.

But before I did that, I took two published novels and looked at their page 319.

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins-because I love this book and have studied it quite a bit.

Legend Born by Tracy Deonn-because I recently finished it.

Hunger Games page 319 (on my kindle so it might be off a bit), is also dialogue like my page 319, so I lucked out here. And it has amazing micro-tension.

Spoiler alerts to follow for hunger games if you haven’t read The Hunger Games (Book 1).

The Hunger Games: Page 319:

In this extract, Katniss is accusing Peeta of eating their cheese, but really it’s about her being angry that Rue died and afraid he’ll be next. There are some uneasy thoughts about the berries, too making the reader feel uncomfortable.

It seems like such a silly conversation: who ate the cheese, but because it’s really about, please don’t die and about her underlying the fear—when will he be next to be carrying into the sky, a dangling corpse—it’s not boring or silly—also the stakes in the novel help here.

So it’s not about the cheese at all. She even says she doesn’t care about who ate the cheese. They could be talking about anything. The Interaction is really about love, protection, anger and fear. And because of this subtext, it’s rifle with tension.

Even though I’ve read this novel more times than I can count, I still had to read more than the page. That’s micro-tension at its best.

Maybe the two emotions at war here are fear and love. Not sure. I’m not great at this yet and verbalising it is hard.

Hopefully, I’ll get better.

Legendborn-page 319 ( I own the printed book, so this page number is accurate.)

This page doesn’t have a lot of micro-tension, but I will say that I looked at five other pages in her novel that are on my list and they all had micro-tension, so I think I’m just unlucky. There is some micro-tension, though.

Bree is having a fighting lesson which she desperately needs. She wants to quit. She says, “I want to scream” but then she gets up and continues, without screaming or complaining. The tension here are the warring desires: quit (scream) v’s learn (get up without complaint). The last two thirds of the page don’t have much micro-tension, but she does try to hide her fatigue to keep her secret in the last line so there is some there.

What does all this mean for me? Well, I think it’s helpful to see the micro-tension in published books and from what I’ve seen from Hunger Games so far (I looked at a few pages), it’s teaming in micro-tension.

Each day I’ll study the same page that I’m revising in their books—hopefully they’ll have the same kind of micro-tension type as mine (dialogue, action, exposition), if not, I’ll check a few pages until I find the same type.

For my own work today, I took out the relevant witness interrogation (which is really just a pleasant conversation) and put it in another file.

For the conversation/interrogation I added in different agendas of the two speakers.

Main character: find out information/truth

Other character: get her to stop investigating because it’s becoming too dangerous

When the other character complies finally with her question, my new micro-tension source comes from the internal conflict of my main character. Trust the speaker or not. They are friends. I suppose it is remain objective v’s trust a friend. Also, truth v’s lies. So warring ideas?

I’ve finished my rewrite and I think it works better.

My problem is that this is now, obviously longer than my original version. And I don’t have the words for it. I’m already on the long side for YA fantasy. So I’ve taken out the entire chapter so I can delete stuff that came before the interaction or after it to make room for the extra words the micro-tension requires.

 I’ll set it aside for now, then come back to it when I’m more objective and delete words so the enlarged section is roughly the same length but now with the added micro-tension.

Okay, that’s it. Tomorrow will be my next page.

Till then,

Happy writing,

Joanne.

* If you want to learn more about micro-tension see Donald Maas’s, The Breakout Novelist: How to Craft Novels That Stand Out and Sell. Chapter 17.

He’s also given webinars on it which can be bought from the Free Expressions website I linked on my courses recommendations page. Here’s the link directly to the webinar recordings. https://www.free-expressions.com/webinar-recordings