Sometimes I don't actually have anything to say when it comes time to talk about writing. I'll sit down in front of this page and feel like I've given every good piece of advice I have, talked about every issue that's irked me, and shared everything I have. When that happens I get online, and I start looking for what other people have had to say about writing problems, and their fixes for said issues.
This is how I discovered the term "marshmallow dialogue" over at Writers Digest, and it is the most perfect summary I've seen in a long time for an issue entirely too many of us struggle with.
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Puffy, Soft, and Sweet
Dialogue is one of the most important parts of your story, but despite its importance it is also a very easy aspect of a narrative to get wrong. Because while good dialogue can immediately draw a reader into the story, bad dialogue can leave them feeling glutted, confused, and less-than-entertained.
So how does one recognize marshmallow dialogue? Well, some of the signs are:
- Puffy: Marshmallow dialogue tends to take up a lot of room on the page, despite not saying much. It's mostly made up of hot air that just eats word count.
- Sweet: While not all dialogue has to be combative, there should be a back-and-forth when people are talking and sharing information. Generally speaking if characters are in agreement, and they aren't discussing anything of substance, it's probably a marshmallow.
- Samey: Imagine you've just eaten an entire bag of marshmallows. Now, did any one of them taste different than any of the others? Probably not... but that's a problem if each one of those marshmallows was supposed to be their own character with their own, distinct voice. If you can't tell who's talking by word choice, inflection, etc., then you might be crossing over into marshmallow territory.
As an example of what I mean, consider the dialogue in the above short story. While each speaker has their own, distinct voice when it comes to sound, there's also word choice, brevity, and no one is speaking just to fill the air. Every exchange between the characters shows us something about them, and either tells us something about their situation, or about their relationship to each other.
The thing to remember here is that there is no universal definition of good dialogue. However, we do know the traits of a marshmallow, so the key is to make sure that your story doesn't start looking too soft and sucrose in between the quotation marks.
During October of 2022 I put together an audio rendition of my 50 Two-Sentence Horror Stories, Warhammer 40K Edition. I'd been putting out little audio dramas all year, and I felt I'd finally reached the point where I could put together the right sound effects and appropriate background tracks for a lot of short, punchy stories that each had to hit the audience hard. It was the 4th video on The Literary Mercenary's Dailymotion Channel, and it managed to climb to the top spot for a while. It's still sitting pretty in my #2, and it's at nearly 2,500 views at time of writing.
Needless to say, I'm quite proud of it.
Something happened after I'd put this video together that stuck with me, though. Because once it was uploaded and ready for viewing, I shared it everywhere I could think of that it might be appropriate. Facebook, MeWe, Twitter, Tumblr, and by the time all was said and done there were even about 70 separate subreddits where I dropped a link to this video over the week after it went up. It was in one of those spaces where someone left a comment that I can't shake.
"I respect the hustle and all, but why are you sharing this in so many places?"
Regular readers already know the answer to this, but I thought I'd get back up on my tired old soap box one more time for folks who haven't heard the message. Because if you're someone who doesn't want to see creators talk about their articles, their videos, their books, or their supplements, we get it... we wish we didn't have to bother you with it, either.
But that's capitalism, and if we don't do this, then we don't eat.
Lastly, Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!
If I Didn't Have To Do This, I Wouldn't
While I'm still really proud of this video, I want to be crystal clear with what my promotional efforts got me, and what that put in my pocket at the end of the day. Because all things considered, I probably shared the link to roughly 150-200 different social media pages, forums, etc. within the month of October. All of those locations were in some way dedicated to tabletop gaming, audio dramas, Warhammer 40K specifically, or sci-fi in general. The total view count at the end of that month was 2,300 views.
What did it earn me? About $0.15. And given that Dailymotion doesn't give you a payout until you reach $100, if I were to keep up my best-traffic-to-date numbers, I would receive my first paycheck in about 90 years, give or take. Given that it took me something like 12 hours of work to record and edit the video, I'll let you do the math as to what that worked out to be.
For added perspective, if that many people had just read the article on Vocal, it would have netted me about $14. At least I would have made about $1 an hour for my efforts.
I literally would have made more money walking through a drive thru and picking up loose change.
Why did I share my video in so many places, this commenter wanted to know.
I shared it in that many places because algorithms specifically make it hard for your content to be located as a creator. I shared it in so many places because I knew Dailymotion doesn't have a lot of discoverability, but I cannot get paid on YouTube, so uploading my video to that platform would be pointless. I shared it in so many places because I had run the numbers, and I knew quite well that if I ever wanted to get a payout for what I'd earned that I would need hundreds of thousands of views, and nobody was going to find my video on their own. I shared it because I wanted to find people who saw what I did, who liked it, and who would make it worthwhile for me to keep making things like this instead of just closing the door on all that work and writing it off as a lost cause.
To be clear, though, I did not want to do this.
I don't enjoy the fact that I have to trawl through social media sites looking for fresh communities I don't post in yet, seeking out new eyes to share my work with. I actually hate the fact that I have to spend the first 2-3 hours of my day just doing promotional posts for my work, and for fellow creators' work, just to keep the wheels turning. It depresses the hell out of me that most of the time I have to pick blog, article, and even video topics that act as vehicles for me to sell my books or TTRPG supplements, rather than just writing things I enjoy, or that I think people might find useful. Because, like most writers I've met, I don't want to be a salesperson. I just want to write.
But if I don't promote my work, then no one else will. And if it doesn't get promoted, it doesn't get seen, and I can't get paid.
I decided to talk about this again because I am fully aware of the sheer number of people out there who get sick of seeing promotional posts on their favored social media pages from all the creators just trying to stay one step ahead of their landlords. You don't want to hear about somebody's new novel, their new TTRPG, their new blog, their new video, or whatever else it is. You're tired of the endless promotion, and how everything just feels like a business transaction.
We know, we get it.
But I want everyone who feels this way to keep this in mind. Because there is nothing more frustrating as a creator, and nothing we hate more overall, than composing fake, sales-oriented posts and casting them out into the pond over, and over, and over again day after day, month after month, year after year hoping to hook an audience so we can keep our bills paid. However much you're sick of seeing it, I promise you from the bottom of my heart, we're even more sick of doing it.
So if there is a creator whose work you like, support them. Buy their stuff, donate to their Patreon, their Kickstarter, or give them a tip on Ko-Fi. Consume the free stuff they put out, and do your part to help it spread organically. And if you absolutely can't deal with someone because they're making stuff you're not interested in, don't get snide with them about how all they do is promote and you don't want to see it. You're not telling us anything we don't already feel in our souls. Just mute their signal, and move on. It saves you from seeing their posts, and it isn't going to make someone feel more defeated while they're going through the motions of trying to climb the treadmill wall that creators find themselves on every day.
I Could Also Use A Little Help (If You Can Spare It)
If you made it this far and you'd like to help me, specifically, here's some things you can do!
If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!
Most of us have heard of Plato's Allegory of The Cave, but if you haven't here's the simplified version. Imagine there are people chained in a cave, facing the far wall. Behind them is a fire. Objects are paraded in front of this fire, and their shadows cast on the wall. To the people chained in the cave, those shadows are all they know. It is their truth, and the totality of their understanding of the world.
Now imagine that someone gets free of their chains. They can walk backstage, so to speak, and they see that they haven't been looking at truth. They've just been seeing the shadows that presenters want them to see. Then they walk out of the cave, and into the light of day. There they see the world as it truly is, and their minds are filled with real understanding. Can they go back into the cave and explain what's happening to those who are still in chains? In one sense they can, but to those who have only known the cave, and who accept the cave as truth, they sound like raving madmen.
That's where the allegory usually stops, but imagine this final addition. If they stay in the cave long enough, surrounded by those shadows and the surety of the ignorant, they may even begin to lose their recollection. They might start to wonder if it was all a dream, or some wild imagining. They may regress back into the darkness, and ignorance.
And this is a perspective that I think can help a lot of us when it comes to writing cosmic horror.
Come with me, and I will show you the truth of the world.
Before we get into it this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron!
Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!
Of Ants and Smartphones
The idea that staring cosmic truths in the face can drive one mad by shattering their understanding of the universe is one of the central conceits of cosmic horror. However, too often we fall back on the age-old, "Gah, the monster was so hideous it has broken my mind!" trope. While that has its place in the foundation of the genre, a lot of writers have come and gone since the 1920s, and readers are a little more sophisticated than that.
Enter the ant, and the smartphone.
Social media... speaking of cosmic horror...
Ants are extremely intelligent creatures, in their own way. However, ants walking through our houses don't understand our technology. Now picture an ant stopped on your kitchen table, staring at your smartphone. In that moment, it recognizes that those shapes are letters, and that letters put together represent words, and meaning. That inputting those words can allow them to communicate with unfathomable beings across the world, to find information about any knowledge they desire, or to see images or moving pictures that depict nearly anything. That understanding is so crisp, so perfect, that it transcends everything the ant knew until that moment... but then it begins to fade. Soon the ant is just staring at this huge monolith with its bizarre symbols. The ant knows there's a deeper meaning, and a more important understanding, but it can no longer grasp it.
What would it do to recapture that knowledge?
This is an alternative way to look at the concept of cosmic horror, and the effects it can have on the minds of those exposed to it. The difficulty you face as a creator, of course, is that whatever truth it is the characters are faced with, it usually shatters the normal paradigms by which we understand the universe. Whether it's breaking the boundaries of linear time and experiencing everything all at once, seeing into dimensions our senses cannot perceive, existing eternally in a consciousness not meant to handle that experience, or something else entirely, it can sometimes feel difficult to express these massive concepts in a way that starts to crack one's sense of the world around them.
As the writer, that is your challenge. To conceive of something that would drive a person to madness, and then to ask how their obsession to understand it once more would push them outside of the Overton Window of reality. Then, at the end of it, ask how someone would look walking back into the cave, their eyes dazzled from the light, trying to explain to those who live in the dim, dreary reality of shadows and lies what really waits beyond the firelight.
Speaking of Cosmic Horror...
If you're interested in some of my own work that falls into this subgenre, consider checking out my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, since it walks a steady path into ancient gods and lost truths. If you enjoy the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG, and you've been looking for a little extra flavor to add to your map of Lovecraft Country, you might want to get a copy of 100 Businesses to Find in Arkham. I've even included a short audio drama of the introductory fiction, for those who enjoy such things!
