Last week, I talked about the narrative part of a dialog scene. This week, I’m going to talk about the dialog part. The first thing to remember about dialog is that it is not a transcript of a conversation. It’s a model of a conversation. A transcript
Read more →There are very few novels that don’t depend heavily on dialog for everything from plot exposition to characterization. So if you want to write novels, figuring out how to get the most from dialog is important. (If you want to write plays or movies, it’s even more
Read more →Even in a novel that has a prologue, the writer will, at some point, need to get more context into the story somehow. (Most novels don’t need a prologue–see last week’s post–and those that do, don’t need the twenty-plus pages that would give the reader everything they might
Read more →… I bog down in considerations of what the readers need to know, and if don’t put it right at the beginning then when, and how many flashbacks can one novel support? Part two of the now-three-part answer to this, i.e. “There are a lot of ways
Read more →As I’ve said before, dialog isn’t a transcript of the way people talk. It’s a stripped-down model that takes out the majority of verbal pause-fillers that don’t add meaning most of the time, such as “um,” “er,” “you know,” “like,” “uh,” “well,” etc. The catch is that
Read more →Suggestion-box requests: (1) Dialog, in particular mixing stage business with dialog. It’s been a while since I’ve done a post on dialog, and I have a request for one, so here ‘tis. So-called “stage business” in fiction follows the theater definition; it’s “an incidental action, such as
Read more →First, a public service announcement: the Worldshaper’s podcast which did an interview with me a few months back is running a Kickstarter to fund an anthology of short fiction by authors they’ve interviewed. The URL is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardwillett/shapers-of-worlds-volume-ii The authors involved will be people who were interviewed in
Read more →One of the first tasks most writers face is improving their dialog. This seems to happen in stages. In my experience, beginners start by writing dialog the same way they write narrative, in long, formal, complex sentences without idioms or contractions. Characters frequently speak in paragraph-long speeches
Read more →Dialog is a balance of opposing forces. On the one hand, it’s supposed to be two or more people talking to each other, so it can be considerably less formal than most narrative; on the other hand, it’s not a transcription or recreation of an actual conversation,
Read more →The workhorse of conveying tone and delivery within dialog is punctuation. Dialog certainly can follow the standard English rules for punctuation, but often it doesn’t. The differences are as much about leaving out “required” punctuation as they are about adding more or less of it than the
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