RE: The Ink Well Fast and Furious Festival Day 1 - Dialogue
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This is great fun, @raj808. Your character descriptions are very full and realistic. I can easily envision these ladies! I also loved the dialog with the little interspersed touches hinting at physical features. Well done!
Something I was always taught with dialogue was to allow room for the reader to fill out some of the character's traits in their own mind. Brief descriptions of body language during dialogue hint at the relationship between characters, their moods and motivations. This becomes a satisfying moment of revelation for the reader when the picture they have built up in their mind is confirmed by later actions in the story. It is a great literary technique, and very satisfyingly for the reader, when they later find out that what they had deducted from a character's dialogue and actions turns out to be true.
Fantastic. Maybe I should have you write one of the tips posts around this concept!
Ha ha, yes I could write a tips post about dialogue (if I had the time, maybe next month) as it was my Achilles heel at university and so the writing tutors used to always focus on drumming some hard and fast rules into me... as much as that was possible.
The upshot is that I've developed a very considered approach to dialogue now as I know I can fall into old habits if I don't watch myself. Glad you enjoyed the character descriptions. I went for a 'mean ladies of LA' theme 🤣