 Short Stories: June 12, 2024 Issue [#12589] |
This week: Understanding Dialogue Edited by: Lilli 🧿 ☕  
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"Nothing teaches you as much about writing dialogue as listening to it."
~ Judy Blume
"There's a point I can get to where I start writing character and then through the dialogue, after all of this preparation, the thing starts to feel like it's a character developing through the dialogue. A lot of character traits do come from writing dialogue, but I have to be ready to do it."
~ Charlie Kaufman
"I like writing dialogue - I can hear my characters so clearly that writing dialogue often feels as much like transcribing something as it does like creating it."
~ Lauren Grodstein |
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What is Dialogue?
Dialogue is the exchange of spoken words between two or more characters in a book, play, or other written work. In prose writing, the use of quotation marks and a dialogue tag, such as “she said,” are typically identified lines of dialogue. Here’s a popular bit of dialogue from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
“Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.”
But wait - there’s more!
 Dialogue is defined in contrast to monologue when only one person is speaking.
Dialogue can help convey important information to the reader about the characters or the plot without requiring the narrator to state the information directly
Dialogue can be the ideal tool for characterization.
In all forms of writing, dialogue can help writers flesh out their characters to make them more lifelike, and give readers a stronger sense of who each character is and where they come from. This can be achieved using a combination of the following techniques:
Colloquialisms and slang:
Colloquialism is the use of informal words or phrases in writing or speech. This can be used in dialogue to establish that a character is from a particular time, place, or class background. Similarly, slang can associate a character with a particular social group or age group.
The form the dialogue takes:
For instance, multiple books have been written in the form of text messages between characters. A form that immediately gives readers some hint as to the demographic of the characters in the “dialogue.”
The subject matter:
This may be more obvious. What characters talk about can tell readers more about them than how the characters speak. What they talk about may reveal their fears and desires, their virtues and vices, their strengths and their flaws.
Stay tuned... in my next Short Stories Newsletter in July, we will go over more details regarding dialogue! |
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From my last Short Stories ML, "Really Short, Short Stories!" :
StephBee  wrote:
"Great look at Micro Fiction! Thanks for sharing! Lots of good tips here!"
 Thank you!
GeminiGem🐾  wrote:
"It is entirely possible that some of the texts I send could qualify as Drabble."
LOL, definitely yes!
Joy  wrote:
"Such an informative NL,  Lilli! Although, being of the wordy-kind, it would be difficult for me to succeed in writing short pieces. Maybe for that, I so appreciate coming across micro-stories. They are the most fun to read.  "
They certainly can be fun to read! |
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