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Printed from https://shop.writing.com/main/product_reviews/pr_id/107486-Writing-Dialogue
ASIN: 1884910327
ID #107486
Writing Dialogue   (Rated: ASR)
Product Type: Book
Reviewer: ElaineElaine Author Icon
Review Rated: ASR
Amazon's Price: $ 14.35
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Summary of this Book...
There are some books that are just fun to read. Tom Chiarella's Writing Dialogue is one of them. To give you a flavor of his tone, let me give you the first couple of paragraphs of his introduction:
 
Do me a favor. Pick nearly any two books of fiction from the shelves of a library or bookstore. Read a few pages of each, and compare the treatment of dialogue. Odds are, you'll find that the two are miles are apart. One writer is burying himself in dialect, while the other writer uses almost no spoken words at all. Or one writer's characters sound like fortune cookies, while another one's sound exactly the way your mother did when she was chasing you around with that wooden spoon when you were six. Who has it right? One thing is clear: Every writer grapples with dialogue in her own way, and for every reader there are certain writers who get dialgoue "right."
 
What's the secret? Well, if I had the answer, I'd put it in a spice bottle and charge you by the gram. Practice, I guess. Keep writing. To that sort of advice, I grant you my own first line of dialogue: "Thanks for nothing, babe!"
 
There is no secret, except to learn how to trust the language you hear, to learn to hear the people around you and to expose yourself to as many voices (and techniques) as possible.
 
CHAPTERS
 
Chapter 1 - Listening, Jotting, Crowding
Chapter 2 - The Direction of Dialogue (Examples and Possibilities)
Chapter 3 - Dialogue and Character
Chapter 4 - Compression
Chapter 5 - On Silence
Chapter 6 - Radio, TV, Movies (Seeing, Listening, Reading)
Chapter 7 - Using Dialogue to Create Stories
Chapter 8 - Nuts and Bolts
Created Jan 28, 2004 at 5:48pm • Submit your own review...
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