Wednesday, 17 February 2010

23. Writing dialogue

Writing is hard. Writing a novel is very hard. Writing dialogue is fun.

(Question to self: Why must you ALWAYS make your life as difficult as possible?'

The sentences in between stretches of dialogue are painful, tortuous exercises in psychological hoodwinkery and primary school grammar. I surf the interweb, I stare out of the window, I make up ridiculous blog entries, I put my hair in curlers, I call my mother, I even do sit-ups - rather than write prose. When I'm writing conversations, Tina Fey could walk into the room and I wouldn't notice.

(Comment to self: Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha)

On my prestigious, illustrious Masters course (total published alumni: 1) I was told that my dialogue was excellent, which is the MA version of 'the set dressing was superb.'

(Ha Ha Ha Ha)

If only there was a way to make dialogue the preponderance of the writing, rather than the whatever the opposite of preponderance is. That might be something I could be good at. In the meantime, I'm going to keep going with the novel.

(Sigh)

1 comment:

  1. Scriptwriting? Speechwriting? like toby ziegler?

    you are very good at dialogue and it is the hardest thing to do as far as i am concerned so that makes you the cleverest.

    and, the punctuation on dialogue is super hard.

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