dialog
Posted on 24 June 2009
I am studiously enraptured by its music. As a child, adult voices in the living room lulled me to sleep. Banter, a guffaw, the complimenting ice-chink notes on a glass.
The cadence of boys shooting the breeze always drew me. I shunned girls’ chatterings; besides, you couldn’t sit and listen to girls without being made to feel beholden to say something. What’s your problem? the girls’ looks, if not their words, chided. With boys, spoken exclamations were not required for entry.
My morning musings land on dialog, because someone pointed out to me (a man, who was probably a good shoot-the-breezer as a kid) that my use of dialog in a story did not, at one point, appear necessary. It didn’t come to much.
Dialog in writing needs to come to something. Without conscious effort, I always find conversations inhabiting my tales. But I so don’t want to write like the Internet, like politicians, like crowds of little girls, whose talking rarely comes to much of anything.
2 responses to dialog
I find the only way I can write anything meaningful of any sort is to just write in ‘real time’ stream of consciousness. Guess that’s why I’ll never be a writer, too much stream, too little consciousness:)
Hey, Mike, you’ve got a great start – stream of consciousness is harder to flow with than it sounds. And you’re witty in your conscious streaming. :o)