Well… What a show! So, this past Wednesday I was picked up by a couple of friends and taken in awe to one of the finest showrooms in Lisbon, Portugal, the Altice Arena, to watch this amazing concert of Hans Zimmer music. It was in-cre-di-ble! As you might know already, I’m a sucker for movie soundtracks and scores. I wrote something about it here. And Hans Zimmer is one of my favorite composers, of course – he’s a superstar of movie music, the Spielberg of soundtracks.

So on April 3, after a rush dinner, I entered this hall at the shore of the Tagus River where about 10,000 people (or more) were waiting for the music of the master to pour into their souls. Portugal is a small provincial country stuck at the end of Europe – I had no idea there were so many nerds like me, fanatical about Zimmer, eager to drool over his music played by a talented orchestra and a few superb soloists. But there they were. Thousands of them. And here I am, a few days later, ready to describe 7 moments of that night that made me shiver.

1. The Opening: DARK KNIGHT + KING ARTHUR: I made a bet with a friend before the show that the DARK KNIGHT score would be the first music to be played and GLADIATOR the last. I actually won the first part of the bet. The thumping DARK KNIGHT drums put us at the edge of our seats right at the onset as I scrambled to my phone to WhatsApp what was going on to any heathen out there that didn’t know where I was. To some, DARK KNIGHT is the best of Nolan’s movies – not to me. But the score is something else indeed. And after a few minutes, we started hearing an exotic flute: what was this? GLADIATOR? THE LAST SAMURAI? No, it was KING ARTHUR – that mediocre Fuqua movie with Clive Owen but with a great score. Great combo!
2. Some introductions followed and then a video with Zimmer sitting comfortably in his home in America and talking to us. He was talking to Ron Howard as well. Howard is a good director – one I respect – he made many good movies and a few great ones as APOLLO XIII or A BRILLIANT MIND. Zimmer composed the music for a few of them and soon the score for RUSH was coming up. I didn’t particularly liked RUSH but grown fond of the music. It has one of those combinations of emotion, sadness and thundering power that Zimmer is so good at.
3. Probably the best moment of the night came a few moments later: the DAVINCI CODE suite. What a mystic, profound moment! Joining the Symphony Orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre, the Belarus Radio and Television Choir made a stunning performance. But it was the violin solo by Rusanda Panfili that grabbed us all by the heart.  And then, of course, it finished with the Chevaliers de Sangreal theme, the one at the end of the movie – one of the best Zimmer themes ever.
4. There were several other themes played and several other videos. I was disappointed not to hear some of my personal favorites, as THE LAST SAMURAI or THE CROWN or the main theme to MADAGASCAR, but it’s always special to hear THE LION KING played with such passion.
5. The GLADIATOR was not the last piece, though, but it was, of course, one of the centerpieces of the night, with the great Lisa Gerrard singing on the stage. She wasn’t particularly happy with her performance, we could tell – and granted, it wasn’t her best performance for sure – but it’s Lisa Gerrard! I didn’t give a damn! I was happy to see her there! I’m a Dead Can Dance fan and a GLADIATOR score fan. It was a great moment! 
6. And then, when we thought the best had come and gone, we heard an amazing performance of Time, the INCEPTION theme. As you may know, INCEPTION is my favorite Nolan movie and this theme is also one of my favorites, it just prints a spinning toy in my mind. This theme was brilliantly played and it hid a special surprise – I will not spoil it for you. When it was over the whole room was screaming and shouting and clapping and going nuts! 
7. And finally, the encore. And for that, they gave us another surprisingly impressive rendition: the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN suite. POTC is not a series that I enjoy that much nor have I watched all of the movies. It’s just too comedic and absurd to me. And the score is also not one of my favorites. But the performance I saw the other night was amazing. What an orchestra! What a group of incredible musicians! Very well done indeed!

And that was it. I couldn’t resist speaking about this experience. Maybe I’m just an old pathetic nerd who hasn’t been at a concert for too long. But what the hell… THE WORLD OF HANS ZIMMER is on tour around Europe for a few months and I definitely recommend it to all you knights out there. Go watch it. Then tell me what you think. Cheers.

Next Friday at the Contacto Festival going on on the 5th and 6th of April in Marvila’s Library in Lisbon, I’ll be launching the Portuguese version of the DARK SEA WAR CHRONICLES, called A BATALHA DA ESCURIDÃO, by the hand of publisher Editorial Divergência. It’s an omnibus, comprising the three volumes of the saga in a 442-page volume. It has a few differences from the English version, courtesy of hard work with editor Rui Bastos – making it a better book. If you’re into Portuguese, you can pick up your pre-sale copy here.

The Festival will be an interesting SF/F literature event, with all kinds of stuff going on. Take a look here.  I’ll talk to you about it next week.

Come and meet me, even if you don’t know me personally. I promise I won’t bite! I’ll be there for the launch on Friday from 7 pm to 8 pm, and for a round table on Saturday from 2 pm to 4 pm, more or less. See you there!

Recently I watched Ari Aster’s HEREDITARY horror movie. It’s a movie full of tropes: everything in there is something you’d expect and things you’ve seen in different horror movies all your life. Still, the film feels quite new and really different.

The other day somebody asked on Facebook the difference between clichés and tropes. It seemed obvious to me, but I had to think hard about it. A ‘trope’ is something familiar: like elves in a fantasy story, or the seductive vampire, or the quick-draw in westerns, etc. A trope is something people look for. In contrast, a cliché is something well… old. Something we’ve seen over and over and we probably are tired of. Like the perfect elf, or the ‘good-looking-good-boy’ vampire, or the ‘fastest gun in the West’, etc. A trope is something you can use and still have something fresh. A cliché is something stale that will not be interesting unless it is twisted and perverted – maybe we can use it here or there but at our own risk. If HEREDITARY uses clichés I didn’t notice them because the movie felt fresh: it surprised me, really. I really recommend it.

It also made me think about something else. We shouldn’t be complacent with our writing. Really. I see it all the time: people trying to write something in this or that genre and use a few tropes and in fact just ending up with a bunch of clichés. They make it too simple. And so it becomes uninteresting. People are drawn to what’s familiar, but also to what’s different. They want to learn something new, to be surprised. And so the unexpected is a writer’s friend. If it does not crush the hopes and expectations of the reader it is our friend, as contradictory as this may seem.

The unexpected happens all the time in life: we forget the keys, we run into a long lost friend, we drop the coffee cup on our lap, we trip on a dog. And so this could also happen in fiction. I would argue it should happen in fiction. It is our right and perhaps our duty to make things more difficult for our characters: because life is not simple. Here’s an example I sometimes use when I’m teaching: a man runs into a burning building to save the woman he will love. But if it is that simple, it’s boring. How many times have we seen the romance between a damsel in distress and the white knight that comes to save her? So make it more complicated: he comes to a door and it’s closed, he tries to smash it in and cannot do it; he goes back and sees a staircase, as he climbs it, the steps start to crumble, so he grabs the floor above and pulls himself up, but now the flames and the smoke push him into an empty room. He can’t see anything, maybe there’s no way out, but then he sees a cat slipping through a crack in the wall, and he goes into another room but then… Through the window he sees the woman he was going to save jumping down, killing herself: he was too late. Only later, when he meets the woman’s sister and she thanks him for his courage, will he fall in love. My point is: make it complicated. Complicated is the realm of fiction.

But complicated is not enough: it should also be creative. Our solutions must be different. We must not be complacent: if the situations and the characters are not different enough, we must change them, upgrade them. And this is, in my opinion where we must invest much of our energy. And, in many cases, this is what leads to Writer’s Block – being unable to be different enough. If you want to know more about the nature of Writer’s Block, I spoke about it here.

Now, when sometimes I need to spawn better and more interesting solutions I often do it through a particular creative process I picked up from 1940’s advertising agencies. First, though, let me speak to you about two kinds of thinking we have. Divergent thinking looks for many different solutions to a problem, as many as it can; Convergent thinking, however, looks for the right solution, the best solution. So if I ask you how many routes can I take from Lisbon to Madrid, you will use your divergent thinking and look for several routes. If, however, I ask you what’s the best route from Lisbon to Madrid, you’d look for the best route using convergent thinking. A Creative solution comes from a combination of both kinds of thinking. But if you look for the right solution, the best solution, when you should be looking for the most diverse solutions, you will most likely get blocked.

So this creative process I use goes through 5 different steps in order:

1. RESEARCH – Go fetch. You need as much data and information you can about the Theme, Scenario, Era, Characters, etc. You need to feed your mind.
2. FIND DIFFERENT SOLUTIONS – Let your mind go free. Go run, go to the beach, sleep, play, swim and… most of all, list the different solutions that come to mind about the situation you’re writing.
3. FIND THE RIGHT SOLUTION – Pick the most interesting solution of all to the particular problem. Choose an idea.
4. WRITE – Write the scene, go through the motions, put your character through the pain.
5. REVIEW – Review, re-write, get an Alpha-reader to look at it if you find it necessary. If it’s not good enough, if you’re not satisfied, go back to step 1.

I was watching my favorite Nolan movie the other day, INCEPTION, and I have to say I love the Final Image of the movie – the spinner on the table we never know if it’s going to stop or not. I just think it’s so clever! We can interpret it to death! At the same time, it’s really simple. It’s simple and complicated at the same time. And the image is cut at the absolute right moment. Sometimes, a single solution can change our take on the whole story altogether. But for that, we must not be complacent. We must not stop until we are fully satisfied with the solutions we use.

And that’s all I had for you this week. Hope it’s useful. See you around the next campfire, fellow knights.

So, I’m late again with my post. This weekend I was busy at a kick-off event for the multinational I work for. Thousands of people crammed up inside a theatre listening to tired old speeches about beating the market. I was not impressed. It is sad to acknowledge the deep problems of coherence many organizations seem to suffer from. As I think I’ve told you before, I don’t believe in the Left-Right Political Spectrum in today’s world. I made an XL table a while back listing a few political parties in the Western world and what they believe in (I write about it here). I ended up identifying the most with the American Democratic Party, even though that would make me left-wing in the US and right-wing in most of Europe. But even this identification with a kind of liberalism is vague and somewhat incoherent as well: the great struggles of our day are not between Left and Right anymore. They happen in two different arenas: in the first we see the geopolitical fight of the Liberals, defending the ideals of the American Constitution (the Rule of Law, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Religion, Democratic Values, etc.), against the National-Traditionalists, defending a return to a more divided, nationalistic, religious-based kind of world. This struggle is the most urgent and scary, as defeat can take us back to the environment that gave us two disastrous World Wars – actually, three, if you count the Napoleonic Wars – and would also leave us helpless against such global threats as Climate Change.

The other arena is a deeper and less obvious struggle. Along with the rise of Liberalism we saw in the last 200 years the rise of modern Capitalism. True capitalism, no matter what some people may say, has been here for millennia. In the ancient world, some landowners would ‘lend’ their properties and cattle for others to work them, getting back most of the ‘profits’ of that deal. Ancient Roman Empire, as recent studies show (it seems there were more stores found in Pompeii than actual homes), was based on an intricate system of international trade. Ancient Chinese Emperors had to ban interest-taking for the massive impact it was having on the unregulated economy. And some authors suggest that the Magna Carta would have never been possible in England if it was not for the rising merchants emboldened by some liberalization of financing.

Still, modern capitalism with its limited liability companies, public shares, banking system and innovative drive is a considerably more sophisticated animal. This animal has accompanied Liberalism through its journey, inspiring an economic rise of Humanity that was unthinkable not long ago. It has also been blamed for much of the misery going on in the world. Left and Right political stands have been judged by the way they viewed Capitalism. For some, the ‘capitalistic spirit’, or work ethic is too opportunistic, materialistic and egotistical. For others, it is called ‘The American Dream’ and is almost synonymous with happiness. In my opinion, both these views are based on actual fallacies, undermining the true value of Capitalism and blinding us to what actually are the illnesses of our society. Let me speak a little bit about these.

1. The Fallacy of Competition – it is said that Capitalism is based in competition and that this is prejudicial to most people. That is not true: Capitalism survives just as well in economies dominated by monopolies or oligopolies – meaning: with little or no competition. In truth, at the center of Capitalism we have collaboration. Before the 18^th century, the chairs we sat on, the pens we wrote with, other tools we used, the shoes we walked with, they were all made by one professional or a small group of artisans with their helpers. After the Industrial Revolution and the advent of Modern Capitalism, a simple pen demands the work of thousands of workers around the world: the ones that designed it, the ones who made the plastic, the ones who worked the factory, the ones that did the advertising, the ones that transported them to the shops, the ones who sold them at the shops, etc. Maybe the main virtue of Capitalism is actually its ability to instill collaboration in the workers of the world. The fallacy of competition, however, suggests that dangerous competition is the cause and/or justification for all kinds of unfair disloyal cruel and inhuman practices. All in favor of profit. But profit as a need is itself a fallacy.
2. The Fallacy of Profit – a very common fallacy is that the function of all companies is to create profit. That is a lie. Management theoreticians have known for decades it is not so. Peter Drucker, father of modern management said it: the function of companies is to satisfy the needs of their customers. Profit is the function of capitalists – it is what they aim for. But workers work for their salaries, customers want their products, suppliers want their pay – the profit of the company doesn’t really interest them much. The economy does not live on profits, no matter what people say. If today all the companies in the world awoke without a cent of profit the economy would still thrive for a long time, or at least solidly survive for a long time, as long as those companies didn’t have a cent of loss either. A ‘break-even’ world would still be a functioning capitalistic society – Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, for instance, is famous for never paying dividends, investors only earn with the valuation of their investments. Just as most countries in the world survive with deficits, many companies also survive and keep the economy going even though they do not have profits. And the fabric of our society, small or very small companies, often just pay the owners their salaries, not depending on profit for success. What is important is the health of the company. If the company is healthy, profit is a natural fruit and reward. This leads us to a third fallacy.
3. The Fallacy of Growth – the owners of companies believe that if these do not grow they will perish. But, as with profit, growth happens when a company is working well, not the other way around. There are studied cases of companies that haven’t grown for centuries and still remain healthy and profitable – they are even legendary in their own markets. But the capitalist buying shares on the stock market wants to profit from the growth of the company after a few months, selling it again, without regard for the health of the company itself, jobs, customer satisfaction, strategic investment, etc. The pure capitalist will remain immune if the company falls apart after he departs – even if no one else will.
4. And then there’s the Fallacy of Private Sphere against the Public Sphere – as if they are actually different and independent fields, putting in check one another and balancing the corruption of the system. I’ll speak of this last fallacy another time: it is the basis of the Left-Right Fallacy. Looking at successfully integrated societies as the Nordic European countries, we wonder if we haven’t really cracked the macroeconomic enigmas already, overcoming this fallacy.

Only when we understand that on the left and on the right we have been misunderstanding Capitalism for centuries will we be able to leave behind our blindness and be able to tackle what’s actually wrong with our societies: the debris of aristocratic thinking that plagues most organizations (more about it here). We need sustainable systems, not greedy sociopathic ones. But ‘Small moves, Ellie, small moves.’ See you around the next campfire, fellow warriors.

First things first: I haven’t watched neither CAPTAIN MARVEL nor ALITA BATTLE ANGEL yet. I intend to watch both – and I probably will identify more with the latter because it is a story I know (see here) and love, unlike the Marvel hero, which I never followed nor have a specific affinity for. But the polemic about these movies, particularly the first, has climbed to a different level, far above the appreciation of this or that film. It is also not alien to the fact that this week we celebrated the Day of the Woman, and also to the fact that the Rights of Women have been gaining deserved attention in the last few years. I always thought of myself as a feminist of sorts, so here’s what I have to say about all this.

In a basically unrelated matter, I have been having problems with my car. It’s in the shop, it has been for a month, and the insurance company has been dragging its feet to the matter. I spoke about this to a family member who basically said: ‘I should rely on the goodwill of people and just talk to them, the insurance company, and they would probably help me.’ I felt annoyed. In my experience, things rarely get solved that way. But I understood one thing: in the experience of that family member, doors are easily opened and knowing the right people will assure you will be helped and successful. What this family member does not understand is that she is privileged. Privilege in our society reinforces itself and makes the privileged believe that other people will do what is right for them most of the time. They don’t recognize that that is privilege itself: being naturally helped in situations where others would be ignored or nudged away. Privileged people even believe that this is their own merit – that they are able to be effective by doing things in a different way, in a successful way, in a positive way.

Being a white male in the Western world is being privileged. Women and black people and others have been trying to tell us this for a long time, but it is almost impossible for us to understand it. We just don’t experience it. I could understand in a world where the dominant individuals would need to wield a sword or push a plow that women would be at a disadvantage, as unjust as that may be. But today? When most jobs are not physically intensive and many rely on intellectual power? It is abhorrent to me that women are paid less for the same work – just because they are women. It is abhorrent to me that women have more barriers to climb the career ladders than men – just because they are women.  It is abhorrent to me that they find it more difficult to choose what they want to be, more difficult to be free – just because they are women. And this in the Western world alone. It is impossible for me to even imagine what a woman has to go through in other cultures.

Last week I had a meeting with a British investor, a man of Indian ascent (yes, I work for a living). I told him the negotiations we were engaging were difficult because we had eight people on the other side. ‘Eight?’ he raised his eyebrow. ‘You told me they were four.’ I shook my head: ‘Four brothers and sisters, plus their spouses.’ He sighed in disgust: ‘Their spouses? Why? If there are men who are married, their women have no business negotiating any deal – it’s the man’s job.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and the meeting went south from then on. This was last week, my friends, not in the 1800s. Sometimes we forget that it was only in the last few decades that the most advanced societies in the world gave women the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to decide on conjugal matters, the right to have a job, to go to college, to keep the money they made, to get loans, to get married to whom they decide, to make decisions on their own bodies, etc. In many other countries, these rights are not yet asserted at all.

And this without even mentioning the abhorrent subject of sexual harassment and other types of violent behavior. Men suffer from sexual harassment and other types of harassment – these problems are hardly discussed and as they differ in nature from women’s sexual harassment, they are not in anyone’s radar. They are clandestine and ignored. Much as sexual harassment over women was so ignored for so many years. But the nature of harassment to women is for sure much worse, pervasive, perverse and grave. With the unveiling of characters as Cosby, Weinstein, Trump and many others, sexual harassment to women is becoming more and more obvious and fought against. It’s about time. And still, on the other hand, the large majority of victims of other crimes as domestic violence and sexual assault are women. It’s time to stop that as well.

I’ve been heard to say in public, and even in conferences, that I believe oppression of women is one of the worst problems affecting Humanity in its History, as every man has a mother and so everyone is affected by it. I’m not the kind of guy who goes to marches and walks with signs, but I’ve tried to address the subject in all my writing. Let me focus on my Scifi novels alone. In THE ALEX 9 SAGA, the hero who changes several worlds is a woman – Alex 9 is a woman, a powerful woman who still has doubts and flaws, but whose will no-one will be able to ignore. She seems to be in a story well beyond her comprehension and her destiny seems to be prepared for her by others – but still, she makes her own mind and her own decisions. In THE DARK SEA WAR CHRONICLES, the story goes on in another solar system, but the scenario mimics Earth’s WW2. So it starts by being chauvinistic, of course. World War 2 had a major impact on the role of women – they were so important for the war effort that things were never the same again. As the novel goes on, the role of strong women like Mirany Cavo becomes more and more crucial – in fact, she almost single-handedly wins the war (a mild exaggeration). When it comes to my latest work, LAURA AND THE SHADOW KING, women get an even more important role, from the child, Laura, to her impressive mother, Maria. I intend to continue to develop strong female characters, I believe, and, in fact, fall in love with many of them (resigned eye-roll).

This text is not an Ode to Women. That was the first title I thought of: Ode to Women; but then it came to me that women do not need odes dedicated to them – they have those in excess. Odes to women are mediocre clichés. What they need is for facts to be recognized, for discrimination to end. I still want to be chivalrous – I still want to hold the door for a lady. But I also do it for older men or my bosses. It’s a sign of respect, of deference, and I believe in that – in being humble and respectful – so I’ll keep doing it. It’s a sign of character, in my book.

Women are not equal to men. They will never be. As someone said: ‘Vive la différence!’ We are naturally unequal. But what has to happen – what has to be completely obvious – is that this difference does not imply superiority from one or another. We are used to saying: ‘Men are better at this; women are better at that.’ But these generalizations are basic, useless and for the most part prejudicial. Men are said to run faster, jump higher, be stronger – but I personally know a number of women who run faster than me, jump higher than me, and are physically stronger. That doesn’t make me less of a man: it just makes those generalizations more ridiculous.

The future holds a better world. I strongly believe that. So let’s keep fighting, fellow warriors. We have our work cut out for us. See you around the next campfire.

So here it is. The Dark Sea War Chronicles are coming out in Portuguese at the Contacto Festival, on Apr 5, by publisher Editorial Divergência. All of you in Lisbon or nearby, just come and meet me! Yey! Promise you a joke or two and some scribbling in the mix. Cheers! Btw: you can buy it here.

So life is a whirlwind. We all know that, I guess. Most of us are writers. And writers swirl in whirlwinds. So we know how it feels. It feels both exhilarating and desperate. So my life is a whirlwind right now. Things are just messy and challenging and almost overwhelming. Today is Carnival day here in Portugal (dunno how it goes in the rest of the world). Chaos and fun are supposed to run the streets even though it’s raining. As for me, I’ll run through the pages. This will be a different post. It will be mostly a ramble. I don’t have a particular structure in mind, which is unusual for me, but I believe I’ll speak about disasters and hope.

I’m not a particular fan of disaster-writing, even though there are a few instances in the genre I enjoy. James Clavell, for example, had the habit of finishing off some of his novels, like TAI PAN, with characters dealing with a typhoon or something of the sort. It does give them something major to overcome, no? And instances where characters deal with real disasters, some that are much larger than them, project that feeling of being overwhelmed we often feel in life, no? That’s the appeal, right? Characters that face and overcome overwhelming odds. So how come so many disaster-fictions miss this simple premise? I was watching today Roland Emmerich’s 2012 movie and all I could think of was: what a lousy movie. I feel much the same way about things like Leder’s DEEP IMPACT.  They just over do it. They paint such a picture of the catastrophe and over reach in its impact that the survival of the characters hardly feels like victory (even if you accept the ridiculous premises). Something like Stone’s WORLD TRADE CENTER falls into similar traps – they feel stale.

And then there are those who do it right, like Gillermin in THE TOWERING INFERNO or, of course, Cameron in TITANIC. In these, characters are bigger than life. Even when life almost beats them, they act as true motors, as people rising through. As people ‘making it’. Hope is an integral part of our lives. Maybe it is at the core. And it is at the core of these movies.

I was writing last night and one of my characters said the darnedest thing: ‘He who controls hope, controls the world.’ The scenario this character moves in is a ‘zombie’ post-apocalyptic world similar to something like THE WALKING DEAD, but without proper zombies. The reason I write about this kind of scenario is probably the same reason disaster-fiction appeals to many: because I wanted to write about hope. Against overwhelming odds, the characters find hope and overcome disaster. That is also the reason I don’t enjoy most of THE WALKING DEAD fiction: most of the time it is devoid of hope – there seems to be nothing but survival in the horizon… and survival is not good enough.

If sometimes we feel lost and not knowing where to go and we feel we hear Cheshire cats in every tree saying: ‘If you don’t know where you’re going any road will do’; then we feel we are losing hope. And hope is actually a valuable commodity. Something that is worth dying for, I believe… or live for. That is probably what appeals to us all in disaster-fiction.

And hope is a part of our lives as much or even more than disasters. We overcome one obstacle and another and another, and the cumulative effect of overcoming more and more obstacles leads us closer to what we want and/or need. That is what I believe in and that is, in a nutshell, what I call hope – that particular belief. Disasters only come every so often. And hope should be here all the time. Even if it falters every so often.

Well, anyway… It’s alright to feel tired, I guess. And this is me rambling, I guess. This past week was a strange week. Things keep falling apart and I keep rising up. The world is turning in a strange way as well. Presidents who are criminals, tyrants who burn humanitarian help trucks, politicians discussing follies. You would think that we would be used to this, but I’m still taken aback by the sheer madness we’ve been seeing in these past few years. So what keeps us going? One step after another, one obstacle after another. Optimism. Hope. Each other. The fact that you get back on your feet after getting dragged down once more.

There’s a very interesting movie about this that I often think about. I only saw it once. It’s Franck Darabont’s THE MIST, based on Stephen King’s novel. For all intents and purposes, it’s a disaster-movie: it’s about the way characters deal with a total disaster going on around them. The apocalypse has come and the survivors don’t know what to do. They are thrown into the brink of despair. Actually, they are thrown into the depths of despair. But when you expect that bad surprises will happen you can also expect that good surprises will happen. It’s when you lose that vision of a positive outcome that you actually lose it. The characters in this movie just lose it. And that’s when they are overcome. We know so little, my friends. And the Universe is so much larger than us. We just don’t know what’s coming next. It could be bad, it could be good. Assuming one or the other makes us unprepared for the rest.

Well, that’s it. That’s my ramble for this Carnival. Forget about it. See you next week. You’ll have me at my best again. I promise.

 

In Part 1 of this post about Dialogue I went through a few techniques I use. Dialogues are a very stimulating and complex part of the work for me. I wish I really knew how to write only in dialogues like Hemingway used to do. In my youth, I wrote a couple of short-stories just like that – only with dialogues. I don’t think they were very good stories, but it was interesting to try. I wrote a few theater plays and many movie and TV scripts – maybe that’s the closest I got to it. Anyway, in Part 2 I’d like to go through a few more techniques I learned or picked up or developed myself. See if it’s useful for you. I’ll continue the list from Part 1.

6. Tone – When I write dialogues I like to focus on the music, on the rhythm, so descriptions are not the priority – descriptions will typically decrease the speed of the dialogue and that has a particular effect on the story. This said it becomes tricky to always convey the right tone to what’s being said. Emojis are very good for this, and that’s why we use them so much online.  I tried using emojis in fiction in the past, but it was messy and distracting. I don’t do it anymore. Still: context will give you tone most of the time, and other times you can use other tools. In spite of my editors’ complaints, I use other formatting at my disposal. Here’s a sample from my last novel LAURA AND THE SHADOW KING:

She’d put on the seatbelt just a moment before. Because her mother had screamed, ‘PUT THE SEATBELT ON! RIGHT NOW!’ Because she had cried instead of putting it on immediately. But this time she had obeyed. She had focused her attention and pulled the belt, but it got stuck and she whined. ‘Mommy!’ ‘Slowly! Pull it slowly!’

 See how I use the Caps? Caps means a different tone than a simple ‘!’. Or two simple ‘!!’. The context gives you part of the tone. The length of the sentences and the rhythm will also help. Read the first part of the post to see how to set the rhythm. But formatting also helps – use Caps, use punctuation, use what you can find.

 

7. Habits and Personality Traits – As I stated here, dialogues are great to develop characters. It’s not easy to get characters, especially characters that are of the same age and group, to speak in different fashions. Still, it’s important to try. It becomes boring if readers feel everybody is speaking the same way. I, for one, do my best to do both things at the same time: both develop characters and differentiate them. One of the ways I do it is by creating little habits in speech for this or that character. For instance: a word they use a lot, or an expression they use, or a quirk of some kind. You can invent a character that starts all his sentences by ‘Listen.’ Or someone who uses ‘Okay’, like Joe Pesci’s character in LETHAL WEAPON – ‘Okay, okay, okay…’.

 

8. Accents – Be careful with accents. They can be used to differentiate characters, that’s for sure, but they can be annoying and distracting. I use them all the time, I try to phonetically reflect the way a character talks because of an accent, but I always do it with supporting characters and not very much. Otherwise, it is both cumbersome and irritating. I also make sure I don’t overdo it: I just pick a few words to alter, no more. Here is how I did it with a French captain who would, however, never turn out again in the book:

The captain seemed relieved to see the American. He saluted back, wiped the sweat and dirt from his neck and spoke with an unmistakable French accent.

            ‘Gangs. They arre trrying to brreach in multiple points. Twenty or thirty attackers at least. RPG’s, mortars, heavy fire. This is big. We arre all engaged. At least two of my guys arre down. You’re the reinforcements? What happened?’

            ‘Suicide bomb at the HQ. My troopers are right behind me.’

            ‘Putain. Casualties?’

            ‘Multiple. Where do you need us?’

            ‘Right flank. Therre is another attack a hundred meters to the West and they arre coming back this way as well. We need to hold them here. Go to the right. Therre arre only a couple of my men up there.’

            ‘We got it!’

9. Plotpoints and Beats – What’s essential in dialogues, in my view, is that they serve the story. Just read a sentence by Stephen King: «In many cases, when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring’, the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.» In dialogues, the same thing happens: I read many authors, even some as experienced and high quality as Brandon Sanderson, who go on and on with dialogues way beyond the point they have been useful for the story. Way beyond the point when the ball stopped rolling. You must control your dialogues: they must have plotpoints and beats. What’s that? Plotpoints are changes in the direction of the story – readers will not feel the story is moving unless you have plotpoints. And beats are things happening, nuggets of action, an action-reaction combo. Let me show you – here’s an example from LAURA AND THE SHADOW KING I already used in Part 1:

After taking a few bites of some really good beef, I turned to her again. ‘Look, what I need to know is that your mind is in this thing. Is it?’

           She looked at me. ‘Yes. It is.’

           ‘How about the rest of you?’

           She almost laughed. ‘You tell me. You took a good look.’

           I clenched my teeth, irritated.

           She stopped smiling. ‘I can handle it. I’ve been working out. A bit too much, actually.’

           ‘Target practicing?’

           She hadn’t, I could tell.

           ‘I’ll be alright.’

           I stopped eating and looked deep into her eyes. ‘I need you to have my back, Drexler. Can you handle it?’

           She stopped eating too and looked back deep into my eyes. ‘I’ll have your back, King.’ And she was serious. ‘Thank you,’ she added. That was good enough for me. I wiped my mouth and prepared to leave. ‘Good,’ I said, getting up. ‘Let’s grab some bananas, we need to go.’

So in this dialogue, the reader needs to know a few things: that Paige Drexler will be serious about the mission, that she is capable, that she is grateful for the opportunity and that she will be loyal to Berger, and finally that Berger will accept her as his number two. So let’s make it short and sweet: 4 beats, 1 plotpoint. Beat 1: Is your mind on this thing- Yes, it is; Beat 2: How about the rest of you – I can handle it. Beat 3: I need you to have my back – I’ll have your back, King. Beat 4: Thank you – That was good enough for me. Plotpoint: ‘Good,’ I said, getting up. ‘Let’s grab some bananas, we need to go.’ And that’s it: everything that needed to be done is done – let the ball roll.

10. Subtext – Finally, subtext. I already spoke about it here. People talking to each other is a chaotic storm of implicit meanings. The more you are able to convey what’s implicit, the more interesting is the dialogue. Controlling the subtext in dialogues, my friends, is the mark of a master. Every time I happen to succeed at it I feel the luckiest guy alive. So go for it!

And that’s all I have to say at this point about dialogues. I hope it was useful for you. See you around the next campfire, fellow knights.

Influential and extremely nice Portuguese podcaster Cristina Alves recorded an interview with me about a week ago. Here it is:

Cristina Alves – RASCUNHOS – “Bruno Martins Soares is recognized in Portugal as the author of Alex 9, a YA series published in the TEEN collection by Saída de Emergência. But since then the author has been publishing mainly in English through Amazon! Bruno Martins Soares has an unusual view of the publishing market and shares this view with us in this interview, alongside some details of his creative process. Another distinguishing characteristic of Bruno as an author is his strong online presence through a blog where he talks about everything connected with his books.”

Here’s the interview, for those of you who can manage Portuguese: INTERVIEW.

Thanks Cristina!

I love dialogues. I like a good dialogue better than a good action sequence. They are not, however, the more obvious type of text. I also find that I go about them differently than many writers out there. I feel people get too hung up on words. I believe rhythm is much more important. I try to write dialogues in a musical way, following the reader’s mind. But that is not always simple to do. I end up using a bunch of techniques to help me – some I have learned somewhere, some I have figured out myself. I hope this post helps all of you out there trying to make it work – I’ll be posting the second part soon. So here are a few things I try to get right when writing dialogues.

1. Look who’s talking – one of the most essential things in dialoguing is always making sure the reader knows who is talking. For me, as the reader goes through a sentence he/she must be already aware of who is saying it (with few exceptions). Usually, people will assume that the person talking is the one that just made some kind of action. Think of it as operating a movie-camera: when you focus on someone doing something you assume the voice you are hearing is from that character. The same happens with writing. Like this: Jane moved to the other side. ‘Here we go.’ You will assume Jane is saying it. Of course, you can always put ‘she said’ to make sure: Jane moved to the other side. ‘Here we go.’ She said.

 

2. Talking Heads – I read a post somewhere where the author was warning against writing dialogues without describing the scenes or what the characters are doing. She called it ‘Talking Heads’ dialogue. I actually like doing that – but I am also aware that you have to be very controlled in this kind of thing, otherwise it becomes messy. Hemingway did it and did it well: pages and pages of dialogue without any action. I spoke about it here. But the action in these scenes of his simply didn’t matter, all the story was happening in the dialogue. As a norm, be careful with this technique – always make sure it works and don’t try it in a conversation with multiple characters unless you are very sure of what you are doing. Here’s a sample of how I do it, a sample from my latest book LAURA AND THE SHADOW KING:

After being announced, I knocked on the door.

           ‘Come in.’                  

           I went in and saluted him. He pointed to the chair and I sat.

           ‘How are you, JJ?’

           ‘Pissed.’

           ‘Sorry I took you off the pool.’

           ‘Yeah, right.’

           ‘I need you to go in.’

           ‘No shit. Where?’

           ‘Southern Portugal. Your territory.’

           ‘Algarve?’

           ‘Further north. We have a team missing.’

           I frowned. That was unusual. ‘A whole team?’

           ‘A whole team.’

           ‘Who?’

           ‘Fournier and the Belgians.’ 

           I frowned even more. ‘Those guys are pretty good. How long have they been dark?’

           ‘Seventy-two hours.’

The action here is very irrelevant: there are two military talking across a secretary, so it’s pretty straight forward – the Talking Heads are not a problem. Also, the scene is not particularly long, so there weren’t more than a couple of pages of dialogue.

3. Follow the rhythm – For me, rhythm is the absolute most important thing. It commands emotions. So I use actions to create the pauses and hesitations in speech. See how J.J.Berger frowns twice in the sample above? Those frowns are not there by accident or just to convey the expressions in his face. They are there to mark the pauses in the conversation. Berger is surprised by what he is hearing and that makes him pause for a moment. Instead of saying that, I showed it by simply describing his body language. I do this all the time. A Talking Head moment shows a fast conversation. If I want a slower conversation, I’ll describe more actions to control the pace. Here’s another sample:

After taking a few bites of some really good beef, I turned to her again. ‘Look, what I need to know is that your mind is in this thing. Is it?’

           She looked at me. ‘Yes. It is.’

           ‘How about the rest of you?’

           She almost laughed. ‘You tell me. You took a good look.’

           I clenched my teeth, irritated.

           She stopped smiling. ‘I can handle it. I’ve been working out. A bit too much, actually.’

           ‘Target practicing?’

           She hadn’t, I could tell.

           ‘I’ll be alright.’

           I stopped eating and looked deep into her eyes. ‘I need you to have my back, Drexler. Can you handle it?’

           She stopped eating too and looked back deep into my eyes. ‘I’ll have your back, King.’ And she was serious. ‘Thank you,’ she added.

I’m not describing the action because it is important: I’m using it to slow down the conversation and emphasize some of the sentences. Pace is everything.

 

4. Look who’s talking now – When you have several people in a conversation, make sure they are always identifiable or it will be a mess. You can use actions for that, as above, or you could just point out who’s talking. If you just do he said/she said, it will be almost invisible to the reader and be alright. But there are other ways. For me, again, the most important thing is the rhythm – use the techniques to follow the conversation without compromising the rhythm. Here’s a crew of a spaceship preparing for battle in THE DARK SEA WAR CHRONICLES. As the Captain is naming each crew member you can always spot who is talking. It’s a tense exchange – notice how the disciplined sentence construction keeps the rhythm at a steady regular pace.

‘Contact, sir. Level 6, 12-and-1.’ Said Dalto.

           ‘Thank you.’ I said. ‘Here we go. Mr.Ojoe, you’re D&D.’

           ‘Yes, sir.’

           More dots came onto the screens.

           ‘Multiple contacts, sir.’ Said Dalto.

           ‘I see them. Just put them on the MID, please, Mr.Dalto.’

           But these were Silent Boats out there.

           ‘They’re gone now, sir.’

           ‘Never mind, Mr.Dalto, leave the signals on the screen. And please keep tracking them.’

           ‘Yes, sir.’

           ‘Mr.Alzira. Forward torpedoes?’

           ‘Forward torpedoes ready, sir.’

           ‘Give me a 30 count, if you please.’

           ‘Yes, sir. T-minus-30. 29… 28…’

 

5. Exceptions to the rules – So, when you get really comfortable with the techniques, you can start bending and breaking the rules. I always do this to make an effect, to benefit the story and never for the sake of breaking the rules. That’s amateurish, in my view. But sometimes I do start whole chapters with dialogue you don’t know who’s saying – even though I make sure not to maintain that obscurity and clear it up as soon as possible. Here’s an example. In this case, also from LAURA AND THE SHADOW KING, I actually have several characters speaking in Talking Heads without proper introduction. See if you can spot how and why I was able to do that:

 

‘Paige, this is Shadow team. Everybody, this is Paige Drexler. Everyone knows her?’

‘Hey, Paige.’

‘In case you don’t know everybody, this is Sergeant Ross, former Ranger turned Delta, he’s the team’s second and CLS.’

‘Hi, Bat.’

‘Hey, Paige.’

‘This is our AR, Corporal Gordon, also Ranger and Delta.’

‘Hi, Gordo.’

‘Hey, Paige.’

‘This is Mike. He’s Italian and his real name’s Michelle.’

‘Hello.’

‘What was the name of your outfit, Mike?’

‘Col Moschin.’

‘Italian Special Forces, really good. This is Tony, Portuguese. Formerly known as António. He was a Portuguese Red Beret. What? Commandos?’

‘Yes. Comandos. Hi, Paige.’

‘Hi, Tony.’

‘And those over there are our snipers. We call them Luke and Vader, guess who’s who. Introduce yourselves, boys.’

‘We know each other, boss.’

‘Luke’s Carter, the blond guy, he’s the spotter with the Mark 11, and Vader’s White, the big black guy, he packs the .50.’

‘Hey, Paige.’

‘Hey.’

‘Paige is going to be my second in 1-1 while Morris is out.’

 It’s obvious, no? I was saying their names before they spoke. By the context of the book it was clear that the first guy talking was J.J. Berger, so I started the chapter just like that and I think it works.

These are a few of the techniques I use and the way I use them when I write dialogues. There are a lot more, of course. I’ll write another post soon, Part 2, with a few more. I hope it’s useful. See you then, fellow warriors.