Roads to Writing 1. Making Your Characters Speak

By David McRobbie

David McRobbie is an Australian writer for children and young adults who has written and published more than forty books, ten radio plays and three television series, all of which employ dialogue. He’s been at the writing game for fifty-six years and now wants to put some of his techniques on record. Roads To Writing, the first e-book in a proposed series, looks at how to lay out dialogue when it comes to telling your stories. The book contains many examples, which not only show how to make your characters speak, but also to demonstrate the effects that a writer’s words can have on the reader. There are pitfalls a-plenty in the writing game so why not let these gentle words guide your hand?

• Language: English
• Publisher: David McRobbie
• Release date: Aug 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311333995

David McRobbie

David McRobbie was born in Glasgow in 1934. After an apprenticeship he joined the Merchant Navy as a marine engineer and sailed the world, or some of it. Eventually he worked his passage to Australia, got married and settled down for a bit only to move to Papua New Guinea where he trained as a teacher.Subsequently he found work as a college lecturer, then a researcher for parliament. Back in Australia in 1974 he joined the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as a producer of radio and television programs for young people.In 1990 he gave up this work to become a full time writer for children and young adults. He has written over thirty paperbacks, mainly novels, but some are collections of short stories, plays and ‘how-to’ books on creative writing.Three of his novels were adapted for television, with David writing all of the sixty-five scripts — the first being The Wayne Manifesto in 1996, followed by Eugénie Sandler, PI then Fergus McPhail. These shows were broadcast throughout the world, including Australia and Britain on BBC and ITV.The BBC adapted another of David’s novels for television — See How They Run, which became the first BBC/ABC co-production.At the age of 79, David is still at work. His most recent paperback novels are Vinnie’s War, (Allen & Unwin) published in 2011, about childhood evacuation in the second world war. This was followed by To Brave The Seas, in 2013, a story about a 14-year-old boy who sails in Atlantic convoys during WW2. Both books are available online.

Book preview

Roads to Writing

A Personal View

1. Making Your Characters Speak

David McRobbie

Copyright 2014 David McRobbie

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Cover image: Alice-Anne Boylan

Contents

Part One - The Basics

Part Two - Some Tweaks

Part Three - Embellishments

Part Four - Bringing It All Together

About the Writer

Other Books By This Writer

Part One — The Basics

Welcome to your first essay on creative writing ideas. This one deals with dialogue — the things you want your characters to say in your stories. It’s all about how to set out conversation in your written work, the punctuation, the ‘he said-she said’ parts and a whole lot more. In coming weeks and months, I hope to present further bits and pieces of the writing game — the nuts and bolts of it, how to get ideas and what to do with them, the business of exposition, ways of creating conflict, characterisation, describing things and other useful stuff.

If I were teaching creative writing in the classroom, this is how I’d go about it — not the ‘write-a-whole-story-in-a-forty-minute-period’ method, but between us we’d make each lesson an exploration into the components of writing. Then we’d use what we’ve learned to create stories in our own time, in private and in solitude, not in a busy classroom with an eye on the clock.

The schoolroom is fine for doing exercises, but perhaps not for serious writing. That requires time to yourself. To be fair to teachers, I think they have moved on in their teaching of creative writing from my primary school days in the early 1940s.

So in this first venture into parts of the writing process, we look at handling dialogue — the words, phrases and exclamations that your characters utter. There are rules and conventions that cover this sort of thing. It means there are a certain ways of laying out dialogue, but in your reading, you’ll possibly find other methods that writers have used from time to time. What we’ll look at is a mainstream way of doing it.

There’s a lot of material here, so don’t try to absorb it all at once. If you’re new to the writing game, then start with the basic layout, using just the methods you need for your stories. Later, when you gain more experience, you can come back to this essay and read more and maybe use some of it your work.

So why start with dialogue? The answer is, apart from making sense of your words, it helps with the layout of your whole story, as we’ll see. I mainly write for children and