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Interrupting Dialogue



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Sun Oct 22, 2006 3:38 am
Snoink says...



Oh gosh... I was reading an earlier version of FREAK and it was SO BAD. I was literally cringing in my seat as I read it because it was so awful. But, on the plus side, it has inspired tutorials, this being one of them.

So basically, one of the things that I thought was so good was that I was interrupting dialogue. Constantly. So I would have pretty good dialogue going on and then suddenly I would have the freak interrupt with some mental thought like, "I have no clue what they're saying!"

Um... yeah.

This was, of course, an effort to be a good writer. After all, the freak is my main character, so I should have her present in my story, right? The problem is that I thought that this meant she had to be in every paragraph. So what I ended up doing was interrupting the flow of dialogue and making it an angsty bowl of mush-flavored water.

Bad stuff.

So remember: though your main character is important, he's not THAT important. If there's some important dialogue going on, forget about your main character for a while and just go with the flow of the dialogue. Your reader knows that your main character is the main character, and that's enough. Now tell the story.
Ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est.

"The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly." ~ Richard Bach

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"Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life."
— Kate Chopin, The Awakening