Blog Post #16

More dialogue time!

This exercise asks you to write a dialogue scene and then read it aloud, figuring out which parts sound forced and which parts sound natural.

I wrote a short scene between two of my NaNoWriMo characters. I'm thinking about including the scene in some form in my novel.

After reading the scene out loud, I realised a few things. Firstly, I don't use enough contractions when I'm writing dialogue, so my characters sound a little bit like robots. I also need to work on making my dialogue sounding more casual in general: perhaps I should take some of the commas I use in the text and insert them into the dialogue.

I also need to vary my sentence length. Hopefully that will make my dialogue more snappy. It's definitely an art, making dialogue sound realistic.

I also think my main problem with dialogue is related to the previous exercise on dialogue: I don't know my characters well enough yet to write accurate dialogue. I'll need to do some more brainstorming and planning for my minor characters, otherwise my dialogue won't improve.

Although I do think just doing this exercise has already improved my dialogue, simply because I made myself think about every word before I wrote it, and then thought about it again once I'd read it aloud.

I'm also including the next exercise in this blog post, because that section on dialogue wasn't very long.

The next exercise is about using emotive language. It asks you to write a short scene from the perspective of a character who is angry, then one who is happy, and then one who is terrified. Sarah also phrased the reasoning behind this exercise amazingly, so I'm just going to copy it here:

"If you’re having a bad day, and it’s raining outside, you’ll probably think of the weather as gloomy and miserable. If you’re feeling more positive, you might be grateful to be curled up inside or even see things as romantic. Likewise, a character’s perception of their world should be filtered through their emotions."

This exercise was awesome. This is something I'm good at, writing scenes depending on the mood of the character. It was nice to have an exercise that was relatively easy for me, especially considering I've got just over three hours until NaNoWriMo.

When I'm writing in this way - viewing the scene through the mood of the character - I do several things. First, I choose specific words - I would use scraped or screeched in a scene where the character is stressed, but I might use squeaked or slipped in a scene with a lighter tone. The way I use punctuation is also important - I use more dashes in a scene where the character is angry or scared, and more commas when the character is happier.

I also wrote all these scenes in third person and past tense, which seems to indicate that I should use that when I'm actually writing my NaNoWriMo novel.

It's amazing to see how much richer this makes my writing. It's a really great way to get into the character's head, and add personality to the writing. It could also be a good character exercise - picking a situation and then writing the scene through the emotional point of view of each character.

It would be interesting to see how this would work in first person. Maybe I'll try that sometime.

If I survive NaNoWriMo.