Comments on: Dialogue, A Handout

By: Paula R.

Paula R. — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 03:45:49 +0000

Great lecture today Julie…I finally got a chance to sit down and read it…it is very imformative…I have learned that I am able to apply some of the things I learn from these Saturday lectures to some stuff that I do in acting class…today we actually wrote dialogue, but we focused on what we wanted without sharing our objectives…it was a great exercise…we had to make sure that the scene was able to develop from the lines we came up with while working in pairs…some of them were really good, but others were inane…nobody would want to see that movie, which carries over into reading dialogue in a book…thanks again for sharing your expertise with us…the rock!!!

By: Jodie

Jodie — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 23:28:24 +0000

I just wanted to say thank you, again, for doing this for us. Hope everyone is having a great weekend!!

By: Tina Martinesi

Tina Martinesi — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 17:10:23 +0000

lol Patty, I was thinking the same thing!

Thanks Julie, I always appreciate, and respect your advice!

By: Vicki

Vicki — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 16:29:59 +0000

Yea! I’m so glad you guys are doing this. I think I have a pretty good handle on it but I know there are things I still need to learn.

By: Patty L.

Patty L. — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 16:05:51 +0000

Thank you for the advice. I appreciate the fact that the final decision is up to the author.

Tina I have had the same advice about the Mary/Bob he/she issue. I personally think that the scene should dictate the need for names vs. he/she. I think that if you are half way through a book and you don’t know the characters name you have more problems than the gender of the character.

By: Julie Leto

Julie Leto — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 16:04:41 +0000

Tina, another great question…and I’ll make sure we discuss it at length, too. But the quicker answer is…go with your gut on this one. If there are only two people in the room…seems obvious to me. In that case, if you use the name once a page, that seems plenty.

By: Tina Martinesi

Tina Martinesi — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 15:02:30 +0000

Patty, I second your question…lol
Although I wanted to know, how do you feel about over using he/she? I was recently told that I needed to refer to my characters more by name as opposed to he/she, which I thought was a little stupid because in the scene that was critiqued they were the only two people in the room, so why would I have to keep saying Mary/Bob? When I went back and added the names, I thought it kept the scene from just flowing, which just made me more confused HELP!

By: Julie Leto

Julie Leto — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 14:58:08 +0000

Patty L, I totally understand your question and we will absolutely address this in the discussion next week. It’s a very good question.

I will say initially that the amount of description/exposition/internal dialogue that exists in between external dialogue is stylistic. Some authors write a lot, some don’t. You have to find what works for your voice and storytelling style.

By: Patty L.

Patty L. — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 14:35:11 +0000

I have a question about writing a conversation between the hero and heroine. When you are writing the conversation do you have to put anything before or after the statement to signify who is speaking. I understand that you should explain who is speaking initially, but do you have to keep the doing the he said/she said thing. When you read the scenes out loud they make sense, because between the voice of the character and the normal flow of conversation make the statements obvious, but I had two critiques done on one chapter and both of them came back with different opinions for the scene. One said keep it the way it was you could indentify each character by their voice and the other said she felt it needed more description i.e. what the character was doing. What is the general rule, or is there one?

Okay I hope you understand the question, it’s so hard to write it out and explain it all at the same time. LOL Thanks for your time.