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/lit/ - Literature

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8744660 No.8744660 [Reply] [Original]

How do you write compelling dialogue?

>> No.8744672

>>8744660
Have the smart characters puppet all your opinions and have the dumb characters provide over emotional and fallacious attempts to disagree with them

>> No.8744695

>>8744660
i think about what kind of far flung melodramatic dialogue people would have in their heads or wish they would have with people

realistic dialogue is the worst for fiction. filler words constitute like actually 40% of most peoples spoken words (uh, um, like, you know, whatever, etc) and most people repeat themselves if not verbatim than close to it at least once, sometimes three times. people also stop in the middle of sentences, get interrupted and get derailed.

i understand my audience wants to escape reality, so my characters speak in complete sentences without filler words, respond substantively to one another and i try to hand-hold the reader to abstract ideas

>> No.8744702

Compelling dialogue happens every day and all around you.

Make conversation your study. Savor each sentence and pay attention to cadences, intonations, and word choices. Become an eavesdropper. Pay attention to how people speak and for what reasons. Then mimic it.

>> No.8744704

>>8744672
>t. Ayn Rand

>> No.8744707

>>8744695
>realistic dialogue is the worst for fiction

Demonstrably false. From Joyce to Hemingway, good dialogue is not dressed up but normal.

>> No.8744716

>>8744707
If you don't think Joyce or Hemingway are hugely stylistically divergent from reality you need to get out more

>> No.8744746

>>8744660
Go outside and talk to people. Learn how normies interact in the world. Speak with men and women in different social classes and career fields in life. Only through experience can you assemble a complete understanding of realistic conversation.

If you already know these things, then try speaking the dialogue aloud to measure if it sounds natural or not.

>> No.8744747

>>8744660
By not writing dialogue.

>> No.8744748

>>8744716
If you think redacting some "um"s is a "hugely stylistically divergent" you have no business discussing the matter at all.

>> No.8744760

>>8744748
Oh fuck right off you bullshitter.
Its also the redaction of a great deal of "fluff" conversation, they use vocabulary that you wouldn't see elsewhere, people are far more astute and clever than they'd realistically be, people don't make mistakes in speech with anywhere near real frequency.

I can go on and on. Life doesn't sound like fucking Ulysses

>> No.8744779

>>8744660
Long, Dostoevsky-esque outbursts which run for pages in effusive and fevered tones