Wednesday, May 29, 2013

On the neverending importance of the dialogues

I did not dare to write fiction for over 5 years, and when I think about it, the most complicated problem I have to cope with is the way in which my characters should speak. No, it is not about their accent or vocabulary, but about how the dialogue is such should be built up in order to be relevant for the story. Once, while editing someone else's draft, I noticed without pleasure pages after pages of discussions between the main characters exchanging dozens of 'yeah', 'oh', 'ah's and other non-informational words. I always admired the capacity of many French writers, especially Simone de Beauvoir, to create complicated dialogues and a coherent exchange of ideas. 

Those days, I am reading - especially when walking, a recent addiction of mine - Melissa Bank's The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing. The story as such is not exactly my style but the dialogues, oy, the dialogues, are as good as a fine champaign worth 300 Euro the glass. Spontaneous, smart, funny and alive, very much alive. I don't know what class of creative writing I should follow, but at the end of the learning I want to write dialogues at least as good as Bank's. 

Till then, I will continue my cold and serious plans of nonfiction writing, with more and more unfinished projects laying open on my desktop. Each month the same mantra: at the end of the month I am done, promise, all I need is to do some small corrections and check what is the format requested for Kindle, eBooks etc. You know what? This kind of dialogue with myself is extremely boring. 

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