More on The Old Maid-Butler Dialogue
So today we’re going to talk about writing; writing fiction, specifically. And there’s a common critique of beginning novelists: “too much maid-butler dialogue!”
We’ve all seen it, whether or not we use that expression to articulate it. It refers to the choice of some authors to include backstory in dialogue:
“Well, Jim, as you know, we’ve been harvesting oysters around these parts for thirty years, and nothing like this ever happened before.”
“Oh? and what about two years ago, the incident around Christmastime?”
“You’re right. It’s very unusual for the harvest to dry up like it did then … and now.”
“Remind me, what was the reason for it then?”
Aie, aie, aie. Getting the backstory into a novel unobtrusively is one of the more difficult tasks facing the novelist or — even worse — short story writer. And maid-butler dialogue isn’t the worst of it.
But this article isn’t about backstory (though I’d be happy to do one someday). It’s on the picturesque names that we find to define these literary devices.
Being neither a science-fiction author nor a science-fiction reader, I probably come very late to this wonderful page: the Turkey City Lexicon. Here we have far more wonderful names (for far more wonderful literary devices) than I’d ever dreamed of. To name just a few:
- Card Tricks in the Dark
- Eyeball Kick
- Mrs. Brown
- AM/FM
- Brenda Starr Dialogue
Want to know what they mean? Go check them out at Turkey City. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in About Writing, Fiction on November 15th, 2007