The Help Thread

Bilbo · 11-22-2004, 06:12 PM

This works liek the Harry Potter Trivia Thread. Answer the previous plea for help in any literary context, then ask your own.
Let's start this off:
1: Whenever I try to write a book, all the conversations take up about a page, with one character talking constantly while the others butt in after a few lines. What can I do to solve this?

inked · 11-22-2004, 06:35 PM

Write out the statements made by the characters. Then cut each page into equal parts as the number of characters in the conversation. Then place the pieces of conversation like a puzzle 1, 2, 3, etc, and provide linking words, phrases, thoughts, or observations. You can vary the order of course and have 3, 2, 1 or 2, 1, 3, or any combination. The tough part is the linkage of course, but substitute a narrator or observable incident description to parallel or confute the 'conversation'. Before you know it, you'll have a tolerable conversation that you can revise to perfection.

sun-star · 11-22-2004, 07:13 PM

Also, go through every line and ask yourself why it's there. What purpose is it serving? If characters are just explaining situations to each other, telling their life history, or deciding what to have for lunch, it doesn't need to be in dialogue. You can summarise a lot more succintly through your narrator.

11-22-2004, 06:12 PM	#1
Bilbo Enting Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: The Last Homely House Posts: 52	The Help Thread This works liek the Harry Potter Trivia Thread. Answer the previous plea for help in any literary context, then ask your own. Let's start this off: 1: Whenever I try to write a book, all the conversations take up about a page, with one character talking constantly while the others butt in after a few lines. What can I do to solve this? __________________ Does God play The Sims?

11-22-2004, 06:35 PM	#2
inked Elf Lord Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: sikeston, MO, usa, earth, sol Posts: 3,114	Write out the statements made by the characters. Then cut each page into equal parts as the number of characters in the conversation. Then place the pieces of conversation like a puzzle 1, 2, 3, etc, and provide linking words, phrases, thoughts, or observations. You can vary the order of course and have 3, 2, 1 or 2, 1, 3, or any combination. The tough part is the linkage of course, but substitute a narrator or observable incident description to parallel or confute the 'conversation'. Before you know it, you'll have a tolerable conversation that you can revise to perfection. __________________ Inked "Aslan is not a tame lion." CSL/LWW "The new school [acts] as if it required...courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that requires real courage to say, and that is a truism." GK Chesterton "And there is always the danger of allowing people to suppose that our modern times are so wholly unlike any other times that the fundamental facts about man's nature have wholly changed with changing circumstances." Dorothy L. Sayers, 1 Sept. 1941

11-22-2004, 07:13 PM	#3
sun-star Lady of Letters Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Either Oxford or Kent, England Posts: 2,476	Also, go through every line and ask yourself why it's there. What purpose is it serving? If characters are just explaining situations to each other, telling their life history, or deciding what to have for lunch, it doesn't need to be in dialogue. You can summarise a lot more succintly through your narrator. __________________ And all the time the waves, the waves, the waves Chase, intersect and flatten on the sand As they have done for centuries, as they will For centuries to come, when not a soul Is left to picnic on the blazing rocks, When England is not England, when mankind Has blown himself to pieces. Still the sea, Consolingly disastrous, will return While the strange starfish, hugely magnified, Waits in the jewelled basin of a pool.

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