This week two of our members teamed up to take a look at dialogue.
We started off with a simple definition:
“Dialogue is the exchange of spoken words between two or more characters in a book, play, or other written work. Dialogue is often critical for moving the plot of a story forward, and can be a great tool for characterisation – conveying key information about characters and the plot.”
Then we took a whole bunch of examples of interaction and asked if they were dialogue and why/why not. Events like face to face conversation, text conversation, smoke signals, gestures, facial expressions, and telepathy. We tried to narrow it down to factors like immediacy, communication consensus, verbal vs nonverbal cues, etc., as measures of whether or not something is “dialogue” or, if it’s gradable, how “dialogue” it is.
We came upon a really interesting (and confusing) theoretical debate and didn’t really arrive at any answer in particular. Alas, academia.
We then looked at dialogue in the wild – in prose, poetry, and plays/film scripts. We considered dialogue as a tool for exposition and characterization through the use of slang, colloquialisms, jargon, register, etc.
We ran through some the nitty gritty of dialogue, in terms of punctuation and dialogue tags (helpful resources below), and we considered the impact of breaking these conventions, as exhibited by writers like E E Cummings (prominent poet, eg. “May I Feel Said He”) and Cormac McCarthy (prominent novelist, eg. The Road).
We finished off with a very involved writing prompt this week, in the spirit of two-person teamwork. Each member wrote half of a conversation between two people, each member writing approximately 8 utterances, and then were randomly teamed up with someone else to create a full franken-dialogue. The two members then spent some time editing their spliced monstrosity, and attempted to produce something with a coherent tone, genre, and style. The results were dissonant, unpredictable, and astoundingly entertaining. There was so much variety in that there were dialogues in the style of comedy, sci-fi, drama, and romance, among others, interesting and original concepts, and more than one person ending up writing outside of their comfort zone.
This prompt exercise is highly recommended to any group of writers (divisible by two, of course) who want to try something a little challenging and different.
Helpful Resources:
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