#on dialogue

[writersisland]

Types of Speech Presentation

Direct Speech (DS): He said, "Like it here in London!"

Indirect Speech (IS): He said that he liked it there in London!

Free Direct Speech (FDS): I like it here in London!

Free Indirect Speech (FIS): He liked it there in London!

Narrative Report of a Speech Act (NRSA): He expressed his pleasure at being in London.

Narrative Report of an Act (NRA): He liked London.

What to do with that information:

Practice using all of the above in your writing and consider how you can use the different types for achieve different effects.

Switch up your style of dialogue every once in a while to avoid repetition and tighten the writing by skipping unnecessary dialogue. For example, rather than writing out an irritating but not plot relevant conversation, you can simply give context for the characters bad mood with, "After surviving one of the most frustrating conversations I'd had all year, I could finally..."

Depending on which one of these styles you choose, the narrator or the character gets more control over the narrative; DS is much harder to twist than NRA ➛ For unreliable narrators, NRSA and NRA are perfect ways to mask when a conversation is not being relayed accurately.

[noosphe-re]

Matter may be infinitely subtle. Science doesn’t know all about it, and probably never will. But matter is not just mechanical. Therefore, it could respond to perception in very deep and subtle ways which may be beyond what science could even trace; there could be a change. That’s the notion: that insight or perception will affect the whole thing. It not only affects the inferential understanding, but it also affects the chemical level, the tacit level—everything.

David Bohm, On Dialogue

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Inside the mind of

* * * * *

"We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive."

— David Bohm, On Dialogue [noosphe-re]

[bookaddict24-7]

What are your thoughts on books with no quotation marks around dialogue?

I’ve stumbled upon a book with this and while I DO want to read it, I know it’ll be a slight adjustment. I know most Spanish books (if not all, I’m not quite sure—please correct me if I’m wrong!) don’t use quotation marks. But is this a common practice in novels from various parts of the world? Or would this simply be a stylistic choice?

I’m genuinely curious! Let me know if novel dialogue is presented differently where you live!

(My late night thoughts)

[commetombeunarbre]

people running faster and faster to get where no one wants to go

[redaloves]

Honestly - I think the best advice I ever got for dialogue in writing. Was Brandon Sanderson (that guy is soooo smart and soooo helpful and he just puts up his class lectures for free on the Internet and it's beautiful because successful best selling prolific author in the business who also has the degree and classes in creative writing to teach it well, like how often do you find that) But anyway. He said. Your brain has a narration mode and a dialogue mode. When you start dialogue up, you put the brain into dialogue mode, and the less you say in between your dialogue, the more it flows. So you want to put in a lot of description of where people stand and what they're doing before the dialogue. "Then you might have someone talk." Another person waves their hand. "And says something else." "Oh hi that's neat. But I think -" "Hang on, lemme interrupt you, buddy." Reda glared at her sister but let the conversation continue on. That's what happened. All too often, interruptions would break the flow and she'd have to give up the point she'd been trying to make in the first place. ^ Okay so in that quick, stupid little description, you can see how there's blocks of text on either side of the dialogue. And in the midst of the dialogue, there's one action beat. An action beat, or a "he said / she said" is useful to keep your brain from tuning out the dialogue. Because you need to switch between dialogue and narration to keep the readers mind from tuning things out. Too much narration or description at once can be tedious if there's not enough action. Too much dialogue is tedious if there's not enough movement. But you still want to have a focus of "this is dialogue time" before you switch back to narration. So don't crowd it with too much description. Set it up, then slide in short action beats before the dialogue to help with movement while they're talking. You can look up Sanderson's lectures on YouTube for a more professional look at it. But yeah, it's a little trick, and it takes work, but it helps A LOT.

[commetombeunarbre]

Our personal meaning starts to become incoherent when it becomes fixed. The incoherence increases when past meaning is imposed on present situations. As this continues, yesterday's meaning becomes today's dogma, often losing much of its orginal meaningfulness in the process. When this happens collectively, societies become governed by shadows, hollowed out myths from the past applied as inviolate truths for the present. This leads to incoherence on a large scale, patterns of thinking and acting that separate people from one another and from the larger reality in which they are attempting to live. Unchecked incoherence grows into absurdity.