[WRITING] Why Not Small Talk? #freewrite Writing Advice #1
This is a pretty big picture for a post on small talk, but here goes:
Small talk is anathema to a novel.
Yes, I said it and I'll say it again.
Small talk is anathema to a novel and most defitely short stories.
You see, small talk is that little stuff: "Hi. How's you? How's the weather?" That little stuff you say when you greet someone or when you don't have anything else to say but feel like you're expected to say something.
It's boring! It's even boring at the time usually. What's wrong with this in a novel or a short story?
Everyone has their own definition of how many words a short story or a novel is but here are my (vague) guidelines:
- A novel is 50,000+ words.
- A novella is 10,001 to 49,999 words.
- A short story is 1 to 10,000 words.
(Note: if submitting for publication, always check the publisher's guidelines on word count. They're much more important than mine.)
In a novel, you have to catch the reader's attention for them to continue reading. Well, usually. I ran into someone who said they read "War and Peace" by Tolstoy, on their own, and didn't like it.
If the reader is not interested, most likely, they'll not buy your book or put it down and never pick it back up. And in my world, that's a very bad thing that I don't want anyone to do with my work. There are too many books out there as well as the Internet and television that your/my books have to compete with to make someone want to put down your book. They may get caught on someone else's book instead and never return!
In a short story, again, you want to catch the reader's attention, but here you're limited by word length. Why waste 1000 words on small talk that is inconsequential to the story when you can use those 1000 words to grab the reader's focus and attention.
Here, you only have so many words and you're in a bit more of a bind in a short story. Every word counts -- and the shorter the story, the more the words count.
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With NaNoWriMo here, it's okay to put small talk in your novel. After all, this is just a rough draft. The idea is to get it all out on paper/into the computer so that way you can go back and make the changes you need to make.
But remember: small talk is usually boring. Unless it's not. And that's for you to figure out how to do if you really want.
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Now I have a new way of looking at small talk :)
So true!! if it is boring in real life, it is going to be even more boring in a novel!
I agree with this 100%, I read a lot of books and I'm immediately turned off if there's a lot of small talk especially in the beginning of the novel. Nice article!
Context and perspective, too.
My SO and I were scrolling movies at a Redbox kiosk. He clicked for the description of Destination Wedding and I informed him that I had heard it was a good movie. A lady at the kiosk beside us said, "it was really slow". We ended up choosing another film to watch that night.
Last night we found Destination Wedding free on Amazon Prime Video and decided to try it; if we didn't like it we could always find something else.
It was great! Not sure why the lady said it was slow, except for maybe because the entire film was only the two characters- Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder- talking to each other back and forth. That's it! But it was excellent- their on-screen chemistry and sarcastic bantering was perfectly on point. I recommend it, especially knowing what you're getting into so you do not expect anything other than what it is, lol.
The entire movie was small talk. Nothing big-picture "important" or "exciting", simply an hour and 26 minutes of small talk. But, taking in context and perspective, it was a very entertaining hour and 26 minutes :)