The Creative Writer. Level One, Five Finger Exercises by Boris Fishman

Author:Boris Fishman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peace Hill Press
Published: 2015-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

Mentor Materials

Section 3: Dialogue

Weeks 9–10

Week 9—Eavesdropping!

Purpose: To listen closely to the way people speak.

People speak very differently from the way they write. When we start writing, we become grammatical, formal, polished. When we speak, we’re casual, self-revising, fragmentary, colloquial. Dialogue conveys spoken speech, not written speech, which is why it’s so important for the writer to spend some time listening to the way people talk.

Help the writer by exposing her to new environments. Take her along on errands. Do something together you haven’t done before, with the aim of listening to the people there speaking. Join her for the assignment by doing it yourself and comparing notes.

If the writer is stuck for ideas on whom to listen to, tell her to listen to everyone who’s at the table for dinner, to listen during her favorite television program, or to listen to her friend as they speak on the phone.

In a sense, the assignment is merely a way to get the writer to listen closely to 20 conversations and to be reminded, from the perspective of a writer, just how informally dialogue works in real life. We’ll be practicing creating it from scratch next week.

To review punctuation and dialogue tags, a line of dialogue should look like this:

“Blah blah blah,” she said.

She said is the dialogue tag.

If you’re following the model of a script, the dialogue would look like this:

Samantha: Blah blah blah.

John: Blah blah blah.

In a short story, the writer would use dialogue tags, not script form. For this assignment, though, either is acceptable.

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