D Is For Dialog
For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.
Check out each letter’s post here.
[image error]DIALOG
As we discussed yesterday, the worst thing about any story is the characters, but if you insist on having some, they’re going to have to talk. I mean, they don’t have to, they can communicate exclusively through interpretive dance and eye blinks, but they’re probably not going to do that the way you want them to either because characters never behave themselves. You want one blink to mean “yes” and two blinks to mean “no,” but then someone blinks three times and a world war starts.
If you created characters, against all my caution, you dingus, and now they have to talk, here’s what you’re going to have to put up with:
– Lines of dialog that don’t sound natural and in fact sound as if they’re spoken by someone who learned English as a fifteenth language, because you somehow forgot how English works.
– When you read the lines out loud to see if they flow, you have to be careful how loud you get, because if you’re reading the scene where your characters are discussing a murder your neighbors might call the cops.
– If you have more than two characters talking in a scene, it’s going to turn into a mess of he said, she said, and the dog said that will make your head spin.
– Someone always has an accent or dialect in your head that’s impossible to write.
– Unique voice? Everyone has to have a unique voice? How do you manage that?!
One of the worst things about writing is trying to make your characters have a sensible conversation that flows well and conveys everyone’s special snowflake uniqueness. You write it out and think it’s brilliant, but when you go back over it, it reads like cats yowling at each other. It’s totally not worth it to keep practicing until you create a strong voice for each character, witty and snappy dialog that moves the story along, and engaging conversations that sound natural and brilliant. I mean, you could keep trying to make that happen, but that just proves how crazy you are.
**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh.
Filed under: A to Z Challenge, A to Z Challenge 2017 Tagged: blog hop, funny, writing
