This week: He Said, She Said Edited by: Lilli 🧿 ☕  
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“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”
~ Toni Morrison
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
~ William Wordsworth
“The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
~ Joan Didion |
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Dialogue contributes to characterization by giving clues about the ages and backgrounds of the characters. Dialogue can also help to reveal the personality of the characters. As we will learn, dialogue can help develop characters in several ways.
 What is said
Dialogue can reveal a character's needs, desires, background, education, and social class. It can also provide insight into their motivations and relevance in the text.
How it's said
A character's diction (word choice) and syntax (sentence structure) can also showcase their traits. For example, the interplay between characters can reveal their relationship and power balance.
Dialogue can help writers flesh out their characters to make them more lifelike, giving readers a stronger sense of who each character is and where they come from. Using a combination of dialogue can achieve this.
Colloquialisms and slang:
Colloquialism is the use of informal words or phrases in writing or speech. Using colloquialisms in dialogue can 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 of the dialogue takes various forms, such as multiple books now being written as text messages between characters. This form immediately provides readers with some hint about the demographic of the characters in the “dialogue.”
The subject matter:
This is the obvious one. What characters talk about can tell readers more about them than how they speak. What characters talk about reveals their fears and desires, virtues and vices, strengths and flaws.
For example, in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s narrator uses dialogue to introduce Mrs. and Mr. Bennet, their relationship, and their differing attitudes towards arranging marriages for their daughters:
“A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”
“How so? How can it affect them?”
“My dear Mr. Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome! You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.”
“Is that his design in settling here?”
“Design! Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes.”
This above conversation shows readers, without direct explanation, that Mrs. Bennet is preoccupied with arranging marriages for her daughters, and that Mr. Bennet has a deadpan sense of humor and enjoys teasing his wife.
A great deal can be accomplished through dialogue between characters, so don't be afraid to try new things and spread your wings!
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A homeless girl finds an eyepiece in Central Park and ends up with more than she expected.
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Comments received from my last Short Stories Newsletter, "Understanding Dialogue" :
foxtale  said:
I often struggle with dialog, but "I think one can step around the 'he said' 'she said' by using more action verbs," he suggested.
 Very true! Dialogue tags can convey much!
Beholden  said:
Thank you very much for including my short story, A Slight Adjustment, in your Editor's Picks section. It's one that I'm rather pleased with as I began it without knowing that I could pull off an argument effective enough to convince the reader. I flatter myself that I did at least have a stab at it. And all this while in the pressure cooker of GoT! Small triumphs...
As regards dialogue and characterisation, I think I imagine myself as being each character in turn and then just record what comes out of my mouth. Even down to the accent the character has. Now that you've made me think about it, I realise that this may stem from the fact that I change my own character according to who I am speaking to. In fact, I think it's likely that we all do.
I absolutely agree that we change how we speak based on who we are addressing. |
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Short Stories: July 10, 2024 Issue [#12635]
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