Thursday, March 11, 2010

Dialogue in Action

Dialogue is among the most difficult aspects of writing. Last night we talked about, and wrote some dialogue.

Dialogue is conversation in action. The characters speak to each other to convey information, but, more importantly, to move the story forward. Good dialogue is rarely anything that would be said in a real conversation, and drops the "ums" and "ahs." Characters each gain their own way of speaking, and have their own voices. They interact differently with different characters. Simple punctuation and vernacular aid the writer in creating these different voices. Dialogue does all this and more.
Though speech is also people talking, it is different from dialogue. There's no narrator to interfere with attribution and description of action. Especially in large groups, often holes in conversation will be filled by other conversations happening around the primary conversation. Though real, speech generally cannot be used directly for dialogue, because it doesn't sound real to a reader.

Last night we worked together to help create dialogue by mixing up conversations, and having multiple writers touch the dialogue. Head over to the website tomorrow for a re-telling of the exercise we did as a group for you to do at home without a table full of writers.

What do you think about writing dialogue? Is "said" over used? Do you rely on a dialogue tag or the dialogue itself to convey emotion?

1 comments:

Unknown said...

My writing teacher was really against the use of any other tag than "said." Cutting all the other tags out for his class functioned like getting rid of modifiers... it hurts to do, but then you look at your writing and it's clean and clear and you're like, huh. Maybe they're right after all.

Plus it makes an interesting challenge: how can you convey sighing or sputtering or whatever, with the actual words that characters say?

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