can be tricky. Its not a few words here and there its the whole chunk of dialogue that has to work. I am still slogging away at my re write of chapter three which has a fair bit of dialogue, and difficult dialogue to boot in that it aims to show an awkwardness between two characters meeting for the first time. I am re writing POV from one characters(original draft) to anothers(my protagonist) which is taking time to get exactly right. Should be there in another session though I hope.
Bren Gosling
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Someone on my MA course said that the reason there wasn't much dialogue in their novel extract was that they 'hated writing dialogue'. That's a really odd position for a novelist, imho. Surely if the characters are real then a writer should be able to imagine them speaking?
ReplyDeleteThat said, I agree about dialogue being difficult. Unlike a narrative voice -- that can be consistent once you've found it -- each character is meant to have different speech rhythms, phrasing, favourite words and so on.
But also we're told not to make it too naturalistic -- to make every sentence and word count towards the plot or character development or be interesting -- which is not like real-life chat at all.
Maybe that's why really good dialogue is seen as something of a Holy Grail?