Sunday 5 March 2017

Writing Dialogue

Welcome to the shadowy and not-so-shadowy space behind Sally's books. If you're not familiar with this blog, scroll down to see what it's all about.

Writing Dialogue (Post 64)

Writing Dialogue (2008/2017) is one of the how-to writing books that stem from my work at Affordable Manuscript Assessments. , As with Writing Metrical Verse (Post 61), 20 Top Tips (Post 33), and quite a few others, I wrote this to simplify my job and to give clients a much more detailed source of information that I could provide in a brief consultation. 

Poorly written dialogue is one of the major problems I see in manuscripts. It can be poorly written in the sense of being unnatural, unbelievable in context, or dull, and also in the sense of being incorrectly punctuated.

Writing Dialogue covers just about everything I've learned about this aspect of the craft by observation, by practice or by editorial input.  As usual with these how-to books, I discovered a lot by the act of writing it, including much information I hadn't known I knew. Explaining not only how-to but how-not-to made me think about why I think, believe, know this or that, and in clarifying it for clients I clarified it for myself.

Writing Dialogue is available as a PDF or paperback from THIS SITE, and an updated version forms part of a giant compendium on writing I produced in 2016. That's material for a different blog post.

ABOUT THE BLOG

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 is to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. This preamble will be pasted to the top of each post, so feel free to skip it in future.

The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist. 

 

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