/lit/ - Literature

>>20540352
Don't write charming dialogue then. There's a kind of forced 'character banter' that's omnipresent in bad writing, and it's not necessary, and especially not if it doesn't come naturally to you. Being a good writer means inventing a style/voice that works with your limitations. Compare picrel with the Kafka dialogue below. Kafka characters basically speak like NPCs, but it's ultimately way more 'charming' than anything in, eg, a hack like Richard Laymon.

> ‘Then I’d better go back up right away,’ said Karl and tried to see how he might leave.
>‘You’re staying put,’ said the man, and gave him a push in the chest, that sent him sprawling back on the bed.
>‘But why?’ asked Karl angrily.
>‘There’s no point,’ said the man, ‘in a little while I’ll be going up myself, and we can go together. Either your suitcase will have been stolen and that’s too bad and you can mourn its loss till the end of your days, or else the fellow’s still minding it, in which case he’s a fool and he might as well go on minding it, or he’s an honest man and just left it there, and we’ll find it more easily when the ship’s emptied. Same thing with your umbrella.’
>‘Do you know your way around the ship?’ asked Karl suspiciously, and it seemed to him that the otherwise attractive idea that his belongings would be more easily found on the empty ship had some kind of hidden catch.
>‘I’m the ship’s stoker,’ said the man.
>‘You’re the ship’s stoker,’ cried Karl joyfully, as though that surpassed all expectations, and propped himself up on his elbow to take a closer look at the man. ‘Just outside the room where I slept with the Slovak there was a little porthole, and through it we could see into the engine-room.’
>‘Yes, that’s where I was working,’ said the stoker.
>‘I’ve always been terribly interested in machinery,’ said Karl, still following a particular line of thought, ‘and I’m sure I would have become an engineer if I hadn’t had to go to America.’
>‘Why did you have to go to America?’
>‘Ah, never mind!’ said Karl, dismissing the whole story with a wave of his hand