A Discussion of Dialogue

Last week Joy of Fullness of Joy very kindly invited me to do a guest post on her blog. This is my first time writing one, so naturally I am quite excited about it. Here is a snippet:

I am not much of one for dissecting story structure. I never enjoyed Literature classes for that reason; it seems too bad to pick apart an author's writing until it is hardly recognizable for the story it once was. I don't deny that there is some help to be gained from such dissection; as in the biological world, it is crucial for knowing the interworkings of those living words. But I was never fond of dissections in biology, and I think that has carried over into my reading style as well.

Despite that, however, I do tend to look at stories in two great parts: dialogue and narration. Dialogue is anything inside quotation marks (I lump the protagonist's thoughts into this category, too, since they tend to be in monologue form); narration is, well, everything outside. Both can be hard to write, but the area of dialogue is the one in which writers tend to have the most difficulty. How closely should characters' speech resemble "real life" dialogues? How casual is too casual, how formal too formal? How do we get to the point of a conversation without it sounding abrupt? How do we differentiate between characters' ways of speaking? There are a dozen questions that come up and conflicting answers to meet them.

to read the full post, "the discussion of dialogue," drop by Joy's blog!