Ian Lamont's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"

Over the weekend, author Ursula Pearson sent me the manuscript for the sequel to Soulene, one of a small number of fiction titles published by i30 Media. Soulene is set in feudal times, and tells the story of 16-year-old girl mastering the healing arts as an apprentice of Hospice de Coeur Rouge, known as the Red Heart Healers by the local peasantry. Using a backdrop of 12th-century English and French history, Pearson weaves a fascinating tale about a young woman discovering her identity in troubled times. The sequel, called “Soulene II” in its draft state, continues the story of the young healer, and her trials and tribulations in early medieval Europe.

In this blog post, I am going to describe an issue that I spotted in parts of the draft manuscript for Soulene II: Dialogue that doesn’t seem conversational. It happened a few times, usually with new characters whose relationships with established characters hadn’t been fleshed out. I gave Pearson some suggestions on how to turn these one-sided passages into true dialogue, and I am going to share my way of handling it, using an example from the manuscript.

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