@Da_Cat
Read your dialog aloud.
AMEN! That is one of my most oft uttered “pieces of wisdom” (and correspondingly probably my biggest pet peeve of all time WRT to scripts – ridiculously unrealistic dialog).
I read over a short script this weekend that was filled with words and phrases that are, indeed, English but that NOBODY who speaks the language has ever actually uttered, no matter their age. What IS it that makes people write dialog this way? I’m not even sure people realize it, even when actors flatly deliver the bad lines. You’d think it would be obvious at that point but…maybe not.
I often find that when I’m writing dialog or a scene in a script, I have become so closely identified with the character(s) that I often will have to walk away after writing a particularly intense scene, just to clear my head. The words the characters SAY has to be who the ARE and where they ARE at that moment. A good writer is someone who can deftly “become” a character before writing down what that character says.
@John
That’s a great piece of advice. Every story should really be able to be summarized and condensed down to One Sentence. That One Sentence should pretty much suggest the entire tension and plot of a story, a lesson I learned from one of the best online novel writing courses I’ve seen.
Protagonist with a need versus antagonist with a need in interesting
setting… with twist.
For example (also from the course):
A desperate radiologist, armed with proof of a president’s cancer, races against time and the attending physician’s plot to kill the president.
or
A young widow left with two kids when her husband dies in a car accident finds forbidden love with the echoes of him the universe has left behind.
This is extremely hard to do, BTW. I’ve spent weeks, literally, trying to create One Sentence for a story. It’s very difficult but as you say, John, it’s crucial.
Be Excellent.
