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Description. Action. Dialogue. Exposition. Thoughts and Feelings (introspection, or introspective description). Perception (sensory description). Back-story. Rhetoric.

These are not all the modes that fiction writers use. Some writers would name modes that others would omit.

I think that, when it comes to fiction writing, far too much emphasis is put on this. Because the fiction writer's job is to tell a story, not to make sure the piece is modally correct.

Look at a jazz guitarist. He's in the middle of his solo, his head's shaking, his foot's stomping, and he is burning that thing. Is he thinking, "Man, this Mixolydian mode really cooks over these chords!"?

Hardly. And it's his technique and his passion that makes that solo cook, not the mode he's playing in.

It's the same with writing.

You should learn about the different ways you can write dialogue. But as for the appropriate place for it, the rules don't matter. You want your character's speech to reflect real life as closely as possible, and people talk whether it's appropriate for them to do so or not.

I once used an exercise that consisted of original paragraphs of prose. I would diagram each paragraph and label it accordingly: dialogue, exposition, or whatever. And I would try to write a story this way.

Everything I "wrote" with that method belonged in the trash, which is where I put it. The text was modally correct, I guess, but that's what it was: TEXT, not prose.

Let's diagram a sentence, using modes.

She thought, You're nuts, but she said, "I see what you mean."

In that sentence, two modes overlap. In the first half, she's thinking, which is introspection. In the second half, she's talking, which is dialogue. It's the type of sentence that comes off the cuff, with no thought to modes or whatever. And that off-the-cuff feel reflects real life.

Emotion is considered a mode of fiction writing. But isn't emotion the whole point? If the reader doesn't care about the character's feelings, he or she will stop reading.

And the best way to describe emotion is to do so invisibly. If you can clearly describe a character's actions, reactions, thoughts and ways of speech, how that character feels comes through without ever having to state it outright.

Modes work subconsciously, and the best writers aren't even aware of them when they write. Because these modes are intrinsic parts of Story.

If you write a story with a well-developed character, and if you're able to bring out her emotions, thoughts and desires, the modes will be there naturally.

You can't learn how to tell a story by studying modes. You can't learn how to tell a story by studying grammar, for that matter.

One should understand the different modes, of course, but if you draft a story with modal correctness in mind, your story will suffer. Besides, every story has a heart and a mind of its own; the same modes serve different purposes in different stories, or even with different characters.

The only way to learn is to read as much and as widely as possible, and to write as much as possible. Don't worry about how to use different modes. They will be there, working subconsciously, as long as you read and write regularly.

Learn more about this author, Jason Lusk.
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