Clay Burell

• 大清聖祖仁皇帝（康熙）實錄 三百卷  Da-Qing Shengzu Ren Huangdi shilu  1661-1722 (Kangxi), ed. 1741

• large amounts of Chinese ceramics and Indian rouletted ware remains, also the ruins of stupa at the foot of Bukit Seguntang.
• Hindu-Buddhist statuary
• Zhao Rukuo's 13th century Chinese account Zhu Fan Zhi confirmed this; "The residents of Sanfo-tsi (Srivijaya) live scattered outside the city on the water, within rafts lined with reeds.
• only Kedatuan (king's court) and religious structures were built on land,
• The inability for terrestrial transportation results in movements of all goods through water routes, lining up economical patterns with the dendritic patterns formed by the streams. The second being the overseas centre is economically superior to the ports found at the mouth of the rivers, having a higher population and a more productive and technologically advanced economy. Lastly, constraints on the land work against and do not develop urban settlements.^[32]
• ancient man-made canals, moats, ponds, and artificial islands, suggesting the location of Srivijaya's urban centre. Several artefacts such as fragments of inscriptions, Buddhist statues, beads, pottery and Chinese ceramics were found, confirming that the area had once been densely populated.^[33] By 1993, Pierre-Yves Manguin had shown that the centre of Srivijaya was along the Musi River between Bukit Seguntang and Sabokingking (situated in what is now Palembang, South Sumatra, Indonesia).^[13] Palembang is called in Chinese: 巨港; pinyin: Jù gǎng; lit. 'Giant Harbour', this is probably a testament of its history as a once a great port.

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• How to Create Conflict in a Story

   

  A great story builds conflict and tension in every line. Characters should always be pursuing something they desire and can’t have, whether because of external circumstances or their own internal flaws. As you write and edit your fiction, keep these 5 tips in mind for creating conflict in a story.

   
   
  1. Focus on motivation. What drives each character? Why do they get out of bed each morning? What goals do they pursue? Even small, simple goals, like “wanting a vase” or “being thirsty,” can lead to surprising conflicts.
   
  2. Think about fatal flaws. Most characters have some internal problem that prevents them from achieving their goals (hamartia). This problem sits in the character’s blindspot: they don’t realize they have this problem until it’s (almost) too late. What flaw does your protagonist have, and why can’t they acknowledge it?
   
  3. Link flaws to contexts. Often, a character’s flaws are the result of their upbringing and sociopolitical context. The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for example, cannot advocate for herself because of society’s sexism. Considering context adds more depth to each character.
   
  4. Let your characters make mistakes. Characters should not be perfect, and an author rarely agrees with every decision a character makes. A character’s fatal flaw should force them to make bad decisions. These bad decisions build tension and bring us towards the climax.
   
  5. Create relationships between internal and external conflict. Internal and external conflict are usually related to one another. In “Sticks,” for example, the narrator’s father is an unkind, miserly control freak (internal) who cannot communicate his feelings (internal, fatal flaw) and thus pushes away everyone he loves (external).
   
   

• How to Write Dialogue in a Story: 4 DOs of Dialogue Writing

• 1. How to Write Dialogue in a Story: Differentiate Each Character

   

  Each character will have their own style of speaking, and will emphasize different things when they talk.

   

  Your characters’ dialogue should be like thumbprints, because no two people are alike. Each character will have their own style of speaking, and will emphasize different things when they talk. You can make each character unique by altering the following elements of dialogue style:

   
   
  • Sentence length: Some people are verbose and loquacious, others terse and stoic.
   
  • Dialogue Punctuation: Do your characters let their sentences linger… or do they ask a lot of questions? Are they really excited all the time?! Or do they interrupt themselves frequently—always remembering something they forgot to mention—struggling to put their complex thoughts into words?
   
  • Adjectives/adverbs: Characters that are expressive and verbose tend to use a lot of adjectives and adverbs, whereas characters that are quiet or less expressive might stick to their nouns and verbs.
   
  • Spellings and pronunciation: Do your characters omit certain vowels? Do they lisp? The way you write a line of dialogue might reveal a character’s dialect, and adding consistent quirks to a character’s speech will certainly make them more memorable.
   
  • Repetitions and emphasis: Do your characters have any catchphrases? Do they use any words or phrases as crutches? Maybe they emphasize words periodically, or have a strange cadence as they speak. We tend to repeat certain words and phrases in our own everyday vocabularies; repetition is also a useful device for writing dialogue in a story.
   
   

  You’ve already seen character differentiation from the previous quotes in this article. In this scene from The Catcher in the Rye, notice how differently Holden Caulfield speaks from the young woman he’s talking to—and just how much characterization is implied in their divergent voices:

   
   
  “You don’t come from New York, do you?” I said finally. That’s all I could think of.
   
  “Hollywood,” she said. Then she got up and went over to where she’d put her dress down, on the bed. “Ya got a hanger? I don’t want to get my dress all wrinkly. It’s brand-clean.”
   
  “Sure,” I said right away. I was only too glad to get up and do something.
   
   

  Aside from these two characters being different from one another, Holden speak differently than characters in other works of fiction. Can you imagine Holden Caulfield being Romeo in R&J? He’d say something stupid, like “Juliet’s family are all phonies, but the funny thing is you can’t help but fall half in love with her.”

• A more contemporary example comes from White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Every character in this novel is exceptionally well differentiated, even the minor characters—like Brother Ibrahim ad-Din Shukrallah, who appears only briefly towards the novel’s end. Here’s an excerpt:

   

   

  “Look around you. And what do you see? What is the result of this so-called democracy, this so-called freedom, this so-called liberty? Oppression, persecution, slaughter. Brothers, you can see it on national television every day, every evening, every night! Chaos, disorder, confusion. They are not ashamed or embarrassed or self-conscious! They don’t try to hide, to conceal, to disguise. They know as we know: the entire world is in a turmoil!”

   

   

  Pay attention to the dialogue. What do you notice? What’s odd about the way he speaks? If you don’t notice it, the novel’s narrator gives us a hint:

   

  “No one in the hall was going to admit it, but Brother Ibrahim ad-Din Shukrallah was no great speaker, when you got down to it. Even if you overlooked his habit of using three words where one would do, of emphasizing the last word of such triplets with his see-saw Caribbean inflections, even if you ignored these as everybody tried to, he was still physically disappointing.”

• 2. How to Write Dialogue in a Story: Consider the Context

   

  A common mistake writers often make when writing dialogue in a story: they use the same speaking style for that character throughout the entire story.

   

  For example, if you have a character that tends to speak in wordy, roundabout sentences, you might think that every sentence of dialogue should be wordy and roundabout.

   

  However, your character’s dialogue needs to take context into consideration. A wordy character probably won’t be so wordy if they’re being held at gunpoint, and their words might stammer or falter when talking to a crush. Or, in the case of Jane Eyre, the context might make your statement more powerful. Jane proclaims:

   

   

  “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you—and full as much heart!”

   

   

  As she lives in a society with strict gender roles, Jane’s statement—to a man, no less—is thrillingly bold and controversial for its time.

   

  Your characters aren’t monotonous, they’re dynamic and fluid, so let them speak according to their surroundings.

• 3. How to Write Dialogue in a Story: Space Out Moments of Dialogue

   

  If your characters just had a lengthy conversation, give them a page or two before they start speaking again. Dialogue is an important part of storytelling, but equally important is narration and description.

   

  The following excerpt from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy has a great balance of dialogue (underlined) and narration.

   

   

  “Are there any papers from the office?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, taking the telegram and seating himself at the looking-glass.

   

  “On the table,” replied Matvey, glancing with inquiring sympathy at his master; and, after a short pause, he added with a sly smile, “They’ve sent from the carriage-jobbers.”

   

  Stepan Arkadyevitch made no reply, he merely glanced at Matvey in the looking-glass. In the glance, in which their eyes met in the looking-glass, it was clear that they understood one another. Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes asked: “Why do you tell me that? don’t you know?”

   

  Matvey put his hands in his jacket pockets, thrust out one leg, and gazed silently, good-humoredly, with a faint smile, at his master.

   

  “I told them to come on Sunday, and till then not to trouble you or themselves for nothing,” he said. He had obviously prepared the sentence beforehand.

   

   

  You can see, in the above text, that about 1/3 of the writing is dialogue. This allows the reader to see the full scene while still viewing the conversation, making this an excellent balance of narration and dialogue writing.

   

  Simply put: balance dialogue with your narrator’s voice, or else the reader might lose their attention, or else miss out on key information.

• How to Write Dialogue in a Story: 4 DON’Ts of Dialogue Writing

   

• 1. DON’T Include Every Verbal Interjection

   

  When people talk, they don’t always talk linearly. People interrupt themselves, they change direction, they forget what they were talking about, they use pauses and “ums” and “ohs” and “ehs.” You can include a few of these verbal interjections from time to time, but don’t make your dialogue too true-to-life. Otherwise, the dialogue becomes hard to read, and the reader loses interest.

   

  Let’s take a famous line from The Catcher in the Rye and fill it in with verbal interjections.

   

   

  “I have a feeling that you are riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don’t honestly know what kind.”

   

   

  With interjections:

   

   

  Oh, man—I have a feeling, like, that you are riding for some kind of… a terrible, terrible fall. But, uh, I don’t honestly know what kind?

   

   

  What do you think of the edited quote? The interjections make it much harder to read, much less personable, and honestly, they become kind of annoying. However, the quote with interjections is much more “true to life” than the original quote. Your characters don’t need to speak perfectly, but the dialogue needs to be enjoyable to read.

• 3. DON’T Stereotype

   

  Everybody’s speech has a myriad of influences. Your characters’ way of speaking will be influenced by their parents, upbringing, schooling, socioeconomic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, and their own unique personality traits.

   

  Of course, these personal backgrounds will influence your character’s dialogue. However, you shouldn’t let those traits overpower the character’s dialogue—otherwise, you’ll end up stereotyping.

   

  Stereotyped characters are both glaringly obvious and embarrassing for the author. For example, J. K. Rowling didn’t do herself any favors by naming a character Cho Chang—both of which are Korean last names. Similarly, if all of your male characters are strong, charismatic, and loud, while all of your female characters are meek, helpless, and insecure, your writing will be both offensive and inaccurate to life.

   

  Let’s explore this with two ways of writing a policeman.

   

   

  “Don’t stand here,” said the policeman in front of the caution tape. “We need to keep this street clear.”

   

   

  And here is lazy writing that takes no real interest in the character beyond one-dimensional surface traits:

   

   

  “Move it along, folks, move it along,” said the policeman in front of the caution tape. “Nothing to see here.”

   

   

  Neither policeman is going to win a dialogue award, but the second policeman doesn’t even seem like a real person. He’s written in unconsidered cliché: phrases we’ve all heard a thousand times, general ideas of what policemen tend to say.

   

  Simply put, stereotyped dialogue is bad writing. Not only does it make your characters one-dimensional, it’s also offensive to whomever your characters resemble. If you’re going to be writing your characters from a careless, surface-level take, you might reconsider whether you want to write them at all.

   

  What to do about this? The safest way to avoid stereotyping is to write using identities that you know both personally and intimately. If your writing takes you beyond those identities, then do your research: seek out, and truly work to internalize, a diverse array of input from people whose identities resemble those you’d like to write about.

   

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• 3. Diction

   

  You’ll often hear that “diction” is just a fancy term for “word choice.” While this is true, it’s also reductive, and it doesn’t capture the full importance of select words in your story. Diction is one of the most important literary devices in prose, as every prose writer will use it.

   

  Diction is best demonstrated through analyzing a passage of prose, so to see diction in action, let’s take apart the closing paragraphs of The Great Gatsby. 

   

  
• Take a look at the highlighted words, as well as the opposition between different highlights. F. Scott Fitzgerald juxtaposes many different emotions in this short, poignant passage, resulting in an ambivalent yet powerful musing on the passage of time. By focusing the diction of this passage on emotions both hopeful and hopeless, Fitzgerald masterfully closes one of the most important American novels.

• he writer cultivates mood by making consistent language choices throughout a passage of the story. Take, for example, the cliché “it was a dark and stormy night.” That phrase wasn’t clichéd when it was first written; in fact, it did a great job of opening Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Paul Clifford. The narrator’s dark, bleak description of the weather brings the reader into the bleary, tumultuous life of its protagonist, building a mood in both setting and story.

   

  Or, consider this excerpt from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë:

   
• Charlotte is quick to build the mood, keying in on Jane’s sombre beginnings before juxtaposing it against the ironic perfection of her siblings. Jane’s world is clear from the beginning: a cloudy house amidst a sunny street.

• 5. Foreshadowing

   

  A foreshadow refers to any time the writer hints towards later events in the story.

• 6. In Media Res

   

  In Media Res refers to writing a story starting from the middle

   

• 9. Flashback

   

  A flashback refers to any interruption in the story where the narration goes back in time.

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• What does “Show, don’t tell” mean? At its root, it means that rather than asserting something for the reader to accept, your writing transmits something for the reader to experience. The writer accomplishes this through a mix of vivid imagery, descriptive verbs, and immersive details.
• Tell, don’t show: The monster was terrifying.

   

  Show, don’t tell: The towering thing was constantly morphing, tumbling over itself as it drew toward her.

• ere’s another example, this time of a single “Tell, don’t show” sentence and lots of “Show, don’t tell” examples:

   
  Tell, don’t show: The man was cold.
   
   
  Show, don’t tell:
   
   
  • He shivered and pulled up his flannel scarf.
   
  • He ducked his head against the bitter December air.
   
  • The wind wicked heat from his exposed skin.
   
  • “Beauty is pain,” he said, wincing as the cryogenic gunk touched his warts.
   
  • The cashier’s glare froze his innards.
   
   
   

  Each example expresses very different emotions, settings, and conflicts—all within one sentence! By using “Show, don’t tell,” these sentences impart what kind of cold the man felt: was it a chill of temperature, of emotions, or of surgery? Is it a necessary chill, or a frightfully apathetic frigidness? Can we relate this cold to our own personal experiences?

• Should I Use “Show, Don’t Tell” Writing All the Time?

   

  Nobody uses “Show, don’t tell writing” all the time, because some pieces of information are better off summarized.

   

  Absolutely not. Nobody uses “Show, don’t tell writing” all the time in creative writing, because some pieces of information are better off summarized. Plus, lots of writing includes dialogue, and some people only talk using tell, don’t show language. Finally, readers need a break—they can’t be visualizing tons of images all the time, otherwise they’ll be exhausted quickly. A healthy balance of both is key.

• To make this point, let’s look at an example of too much “Show, don’t tell,” and a more balanced example:

   

  Too much show: His sheepskin boots gripped his calves tightly as he pulled them on one by one, the fibres quickly shaping themselves around his wool-socked toes. The olive-green nylon tent flap swung open quickly, casting subtle shadows onto the snow that danced briefly, then stopped. His lungs swelled with the sharp outdoor air, then reversed sharply. “We’re going to need medical help in our tent,” his voice boomed throughout the camp and the valley beneath.

   

  Too much tell: He got help for his climbing partners, who easily might not have been so lucky.

   

  A good balance of show and tell: He threw on his boots and rushed outside. “We’re going to need medical help in our tent,” he shouted to the others.
• In the first example, we’re slowing readers down by describing things that probably aren’t worth their deep engagement. Those pieces are best left to “Tell, don’t show” writing, which is quick, summaristic, and simple, and which is the quickest way from cause to effect. So understand what’s less important and tell the reader about that, so you get get to showing them what is richest and most alive.

• In this vein, times when summaristic, “tell, don’t show” writing may be preferable include:

   
   
  • Describing certain minor characters.
   
  • Glossing over periods of time that are uneventful or unimportant.
   
  • Transitioning between scenes.
   
  • Writing memos, notes, dialogue, or other declarative media.
   
  • Intentionally building a contrast with more evocative writing.
   
   

  To summarize: “showing” language helps spotlight the most important details. You will find this type of writing much more frequently in scenes versus summaries.

   

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• “In the eastern sky there was a yellow patch like a rug laid for the feet of the coming sun” — The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
• “The world will burst like an intestine in the sun” — “Passengers” by Denis Johnson
• “You lived your life like a candle in the wind” — “Candle in the Wind” by Elton John (lyrics by Bernie Taupin)

• Use metaphors:

   
   
  • As verbs: The song ignited his lust but snuffed out her interest.
   
  • As adjectives and adverbs: Her carnivorous brush ate up the canvas.
   
  • As prepositional phrases: The old man considered the scene with a blue-white vulture’s eye.
   
  • As appositives or modifiers: On the stairs he stood, a gawking scarecrow.
   
   

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