Structuring your text as a play

[Anonymous No.20699014]

Is superior to the usual style of "X..said" or "X...exclaimed" etc.
You can't prove me wrong, it's easier to read, keeps you more engaged with the text than a wall. And you can still put descriptive paragraphs in-between.

[Anonymous No.20699214]

>>20699014
I agree. I actually really like it when novels have chapters/sections that switch to a play for lengthy dialogue. I think Moby Dick and V both do this at some point.

[Anonymous No.20699498]

>>20699014
play-style segments really leave a lot up to the imagination too

[Anonymous No.20699682]

>>20699014
Wrong, if it's not immediately clear from the tone and prosody who is speaking then your characters aren't distinct enough which means you're a lousy writer who makes every character sound like them. If you're relying on the crutch of play-style formatting then you might as well abandon dialogue all together and use paraphrase.

[Anonymous No.20700677]

>>20699682
how's that young adult high school drama novel coming anon?ˇ

[Anonymous No.20700690]

>>20700677
Uhh actually its just using high school as an analogy for the geopolitical actors of our age thank you very much for asking. But no seriously, I stand form behind what I wrote. Hell even early playwrites didn't format like that, everybody knew who was speaking which lines. The gutenberg press has spoiled us.

[Anonymous No.20701818]

>>20699014

Dostoevsky, Jane Austen and PG Wodehouse do a lot of their novel-making in a play style format.

[Anonymous No.20701895]

The trick today is writing the novel as a play, and after that fill the gaps and turn it into a novel.

If you try to find publishers with a play they would not even read the first pages of your manuscript. Plays don’t sell. On the other hand, if you try to get the play staged you will struggle to find a company, and even if you find one audiences today are depressingly small (outside from a few hot spots like New York and London). And even if you find a company, and actors, and a theater, and founding, etc, you still will have constraints for the number of actors and the time of the show.

Best solution for someone who mostly enjoys dialogue and conflict via dialogue is to choose the hybrid novel-play form. Dostoevsky is an example. Of course, your language use, themes, characterization can all be very different, but in his work one finds mostly scenes of dialogue (and long monologues and soliloquies) that are somewhat glued together by hushed and simple sections of narrative.

Same thing with Jane Austen (although her style is completely different).

For a novelized Shakespeare, see Melville (the sections of Moby Dick that use dialogue).

[Anonymous No.20702967]

>>20699014

bump

This is an interesting subject to me

[Anonymous No.20703133]

>>20700690
>I stand form behind what I wrote.
ESLs can't be fucking serious...

[Anonymous No.20703981]

>>20701895
Of Mice and Men is also a play.

[Anonymous No.20704195]

>having dialogue in your novel

[Anonymous No.20704225]

>>20699014
Attributing dialog is generally a crutch for poorly developing the characters language usage. if you analyze the dialog of better writers they tend not to attribute much dialog and when they do they do it for a reason more than attribution. If you need to attribute dialog for every line than you probably are not much of a writer. This is not to say there are no situation where it is not useful, depends on what you are trying to achieve and attributing dialog can be very useful for other things like controlling the flow or providing contrast.

[Anonymous No.20704234]

>>20704225
It was the only way before modernism

[Anonymous No.20704321]

>>20704234
So? It is not 1793 anymore. Attributing every line of dialog is generally going to be clunky from the standpoint of style and separates dialog from prose. This can be useful but authors realized long ago that it breaks flow and started moving away from it during realism.