Thursday 12 April 2012

Dialogue and Styles

My first novel, Sign of the Times - already out on Amazon -

Am improving - 1700 words today and started at 11am!  Having a blog definitely helps concentrate the mind and spur me on to write. I haven't written much dialogue in the novel so far and I love writing dialogue.  There was a lot of background and scene setting to do with the beginning of this novel, so that's done. Now I can get on to dialogue.  Maybe I am a natural (I hope) at writing dialogue, because I am a chatterbox myself.. who knows. I do find it easy to write though.  I think people spend too much time trying to think of other ways to express, 'he said', 'she said', ie retort, replied, supplied, offered, etc.  I read years ago, forget all that, just use 'said'.  It doesn't matter if you repeat it.  And, if you look at the majority of authors, they do this.
Profiles and adverts I find more difficult to write, as usually I can't decide which is the best style.  I try to get the basics down, leave it for a day and with a couple of rewrites, I get there.  Am now halfway through chapter 6 and hit 14K words today.  Ok, back to work - thanks for checking in.  Sooz

4 comments:

  1. Susan, I agree - things like 'he retorted' just sound plain silly to me. I like writing dialogue too. It's one of those things that, if you get it right, sound effortless, but if you get it wrong, jumps out from the page and ruins the whole thing. I have just read two American novels where the speech of a character purporting to be English was so clunky that it was laughable. Apparently we all say "Darling" every 2 minutes, and a man who is supposed to be a Cockney starts off with "Look luv" and then proceeds to say he "needs to review his situation". This is probably a message to me never to try to write American English.

    Good luck with your writing today!

    Rosemary

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    1. Hi Rosemary. And that's a very good point. When you right dialogue, particularly in dialect, it has to be right. I'm a linguist, so have quite a bit of experience of this, plus I'm Scottish and when I used to work in the US, had to translate everything into American English, or they had no idea what I was talking about. thanks for checking out the blog. Sooz

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    2. Well ahem, I think my 'jumps' should probably have been 'jump' too, but let's not beat ourselves up....we know what we mean (I think...)

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  2. OMG, this is why I should do Preview, right/write, dearie me, am more tired than I thought!

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