I spent most of today in the hospital while my husband had knee surgery. Everything went smoothly and he is doing well. Perhaps the most interesting part of spending five hours in a waiting room is watching the people, and eavesdropping on their conversations (under the flimsy guise of pretending to be engrossed in a Sudoku puzzle).
Some people would call this rude and unethical. I call it research. I pay attention to voices, cadences in speech, vocabulary etc. After a while I didn't even need to look up to see who was talking because the voices were so distinct.
So, this exercise is about voice: Write a scene of dialogue between two characters (make it interesting, maybe a study in contrasts, like Pollyanna and a biker babe). Then pick a setting (waiting room? The mall? A cocktail party?) Write a scene only using dialogue. No "he said" "she said" tags--just a script.
Think about speech habits they might have. How educated the character is. What they do for a living. Where they are from. All these things affect how a person talks.
Read it and see if the voices are strong enough to identify the speakers without a tag. Let somebody else read it and tell you if the voices are distinct. Does your work in progress have snappy dialogue? I sometimes get lazy and--whoopsie!--find I've fallen right out of a character's head.
Do you have any good exercises for strengthening dialogue?
2 comments:
This is a great exercise, and I'm going to try it later. Bruce Coville once said that character voices should be so distinct that the 'he said' 'she said' attributions become unnecessary. Something to strive for.
No ideas for exercises, BUT -- so very glad to hear your husband's surgery went well. Hope the recuperation period goes even better. <3
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