I've got a question for anyone that's been following my serial, Stephanie's Deal.
In Episode 16, Stephanie is going to have a session with a psychiatrist. So that will entail a long stretch where all the action is doctor/patient dialogue.
Would people rather read a scene where the dialogue is given word-for-word, or where what they say is just described?
Something like this:
Once Mom had left, the doctor started. “So, tell me what it’s been like for you having to dress like a girl everyday.”
“At first, I thought it was going to be tough. But after a couple of days being a girl, it just kind of got easier. There’s even some stuff that isn’t so bad.”
“You know, it isn’t bad or wrong if you actually liked something about life as Stephanie.”
“It doesn’t make me some kind of gay sissy weirdo?”
“No, it doesn’t. It makes you a three-dimensional human being. There's no shame for a male to get in touch with his feminine side. And I won't tell anyone you don't want me to."
"Okay."
"So, was there anything about your time in dresses that you enjoyed?”
“Um, I guess I kind of liked it that people kept telling me I was pretty. Not even family ever really told me how I looked when I was a boy, but as a girl even strangers say I'm cute.”
Or this:
After Mom left, the doctor started by asking how Steven's experience dressing as a girl was. Stephanie wasn't sure how to answer, until Dr. Howard made it clear that it isn't a bad thing to have enjoyed it a little. She told her that it was nice to get more attention as a girl. Stephanie had been getting many more compliments than Steven ever did, and it felt good.
Or does it not make a difference to anyone?
Comments
I prefer dialog, though it can be a lot of work for the writer
Narrative can be a big timesaver and helps move a story along when it's dragging or the scene is unimportant. But important, key scenes benefit from the added insight into the characters dialog provides. Mix in some internal thoughts and the right touch of narrative and a scene can sing.
I find I am using dialog, including internal voice, a lot more over time. Even most of my narrative is in the form of the central character looking back and reflecting on what happened.
You likely have your own preference. All I know is the first story I posted, Glacier Girl, was nearly all narrative and though I thought it was funny, it was a dry read,. I reworked it and added in some very few paragraphs of lines here and there and it became a much better story. It need not be all dialog or monolog to add spice to your work but do consider it.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
Dialog for me Too
Not being familiar with your story, my views should be taken with a grain of salt, but I have to say that I agree with John. For me, the narrative is much too constraining and rushed; whereas, the dialog opens the story up, allowing your character to explore, in a safe environment, what is happening. As an author, it provides you opportunities to explain the situation in a natural question and answer situation.
I agree with John
If it's something you want to get through or maybe even focus on the main character's reaction then narrative can work. If it's an important story element (which I think Stephanie's first meeting with a shrink will be) then dialogue will likely work better. You do both styles well.
Dialog please..
Dialog please...In my chapter of Tarja, I'm going to have dialog between Tommy/Tarja and Marion at the office. I hope it won't be boring!!
TGSine --
TGSine --958
Chit-chat
Sometimes it can be a bit boring if the characters don't talk to one another, but of course, it depends upon the story itself.
I love Ang's method of being able to bring her stories alive with the witty banter, but I also loved Fleurie's Alhambra story with its general lack of dialogue.
I think it's down to the author to decide whether or not to have "chit-chat" or whether to make it largely a narrative with much of the dialogue intimated rather than spoken.
Often, a character's traits can be better illustrated by speech. Here in the UK, we have such a wealth of accents, that it can often be interesting to illustrate that in the text with conversation.
IMHO, it depends whether the conversation is important. Often more can be conveyed in the way people speak to each other than in what is actually said, but again it's dependant upon the plot, style and in the end, the decision is down to the author.
I'm still looking for that perfect mix of narrative and conversation.
I'm probably wrong, but hey, I'm still learning.
NB
I don't just look it, I really AM that bad...
All Depends - I think.
The dialogue is going to give a lot more detail, and a lot more emotion, and it is going to draw the readers attention to that detail and emotion too (which isn't always what the writer wants.). Also, that means the writer must know the detail and the emotions and be able to convey it.
Too much dialogue can drag a story down though (too much detail)
For this discussion I think you would want to show as much as you can get on the paper, however.
Jan
Not being an author I
Not being an author I couldn't say technically what's better.
However IMHO it depends on your intended audience, a reader of a genre like sci-fi, a fetish of some sort, or somewhere between.
If the story happens to contain a TV/TS character with a larger plot or the story is about what happens directly to a TV/TS character.
The first may be the short version, the second the long version.
*shrug* Me, I'd like the long version every time.
Di a log :)
I think the dialogue is nicer. The other stuff feels like a tech report to me. :)
Gwen
Stephanie has been a fun little part of our lives.
It's the closeness to the characters that makes them fun to read and identify with. I think that's why I like the word-for-word version a lot better, particularly in the example you have given. The "just described" version feels too clinical. Though it's probably OK when used judiciously. Thanks for the great story.
why am I always different?
I don't like long uninterrupted passages of dialogue, it's easy lose track of who's speaking and I tend to switch off. For me it gives the impression that the characters are just standing there reading out lines. I think it's more effective to leaven the passage with things like 'she nodded her agreement', or to have the speaker digress to imply something the other characters say, as well as having them move around, change facial expression etc.
I agree :)
That's what I meant by striking that happy medium.
NB
I don't just look it, I really AM that bad...
Nick, If You Strike :-)
A happy medium, would that not make the happy medium angry? :-0
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
Ouch!
No, but some large ones might get a little miffed with humour like that :)
I don't just look it, I really AM that bad...
The second excerpt
The second excerpt you posted is more in the style of the story so far. As I recall, you haven't used a lot of dialog so far.
If I had a question like this about something I'd written, I'd re-read the story from the beginning, soak in the way it's been.
It's a very engaging story. I think about it sometimes, even when I haven't read it for a while.
One thing I've liked about it is Stephanie's self-serving naivete. She does things that continue her time as a girl, but acts as if it's just part of the deal.
That's an old Two Ronnie's punchline
Ronnie Corbit -- the little guy -- had a story going once where he said something like,
"The fortune-teller looked at me and started laughing, so I struck her. I like striking a happy medium."
Oh, in agreement with Nick and Ceri and to further enhance and/or confuse my earlier suggestion, you can use a mix. Too much dialog can be tedious as is too much narrative. With dialog, whenever it seems hard to figure out who’s who, have them mention the other when they speak
"I know what I want, Cheryl. Stop treating me like a ..."
"Nikki is no good. He'll only break your heart. I want what's best for you, Leslie, believe me.""
or put in the occasional
.†said Rodger.
Or the like. A mix of the two provide one way of speeding a passage along without sacrificing all the little details dialog can provide. The trick is to know when to mix and at what percentage. Setting a scene, all narrative may well be best. Revealing character emotions might be best thru dialog though the actions of characters can be useful.
Play around with it and see what works. In the words of the immortal bard,
“Remember this isn’t rocket science, this is brrrain surgery.â€
No that’s was Charles Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
I Disagree With John
In real world dialogue the participants almost never use the other person's name. To do it it more than sparingly in dialogue would not sound realistic.
The basic rule of writing is "show, don't tell". Your narrative example seems to tell, while your dialogue, though handicapped by a lack of attribution or action/reaction through narrative detail, seems to show. While there is a time for narrative summary and a time for exposition through dialogue, the choice here is obvious.
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
As someone pointed out to me once ...
... the dialogue in a novel isn't the same as a real world conversation. Specifically, it was someone criticizing a play i wrote. He said, "You can get away with people talking like that in a novel, but on the stage, you're expected to stick a little closer to how people really speak."
Of course, he didn't say it that way, exactly. *grin* I'm rewriting it for this comment, since people don't speak the same way in comments as they do ... well, you get the idea. *grins*
Randa
I agree that constant use of first names...
...can start to sound like a child's primer, but one of the many conversational habits that roughly distinguish the sexes is that women tend to use names much more often than men, and some women use them to extremes. I'm sure many have heard at least part of the Sarah Palin interview, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mThW5FdQO7g in which Mike Malloy, the presenter, hardly ever uses Palin's name and she uses his constantly.
Aside from the fact that she sounds like a bit of an airhead in the interview, that particular "overuse" of his name isn't *all* that odd, when women do it, especially women who are somewhat deferent to male authority, and demonstrate this by the conscious and continuous use of (especially male) names. She also does a wonderful imitation of a Texas accent, surely an homage to *someone*, and has "nukular" down pat.
Cheers,
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Not me!
She also does a wonderful imitation of a Texas accent, surely an homage to *someone*,
I swear, I've never met her! But I do like her style. :-)
Karen J.
"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
Useful feedback
Thanks all for commenting. I hear the scene in my head as dialogue and had written it that way, but I wasn't sure if that would be a problem for the reader, but it seems like most of you think that's fine. I'll add some "stage business" like "Stephanie looked at her shoes before answering" or "Dr. Howard's warm smile was reassuring" in places to make it sure who's saying what without it turning into soap opera dialogue:
that 'stage bizness'
really helps a dialogue passage from floating off away from the rest of the story, seeming too abstract. The writers of the t.v. show HOUSE, faced with having the doctors discussing a lot of clinical gobblety-gook, like to send them walking down a busy corridor or to be conducting some arcane tests while they convey all this information. Visuals. Dialogue can serve a lot of useful purposes; advance the plot, tell back story that would have to be imparted thru some dreary information dump, flesh out the characters and how they feel about each other, crack jokes ......... I'm writing a series that relies on dialogue more than anything else I've ever written. I'm just now learning to write dialogue that's a true interplay, and not alternating multi-paragraph monologues like a presidential debate or something; and am discovering simple tricks like stage business. In PLAY NICE PART 4 the girl is arguing with her sick hospitalized Papa. I have him laboring for breathe, lapsing into coughing fits, reinforcing the gravity of his condition. The next scene, girl and her Grandma discussing her horrible row with Papa, their activities can't be so dramatic, but I'm progressing them down the hall toward the elevators, mentioning details of the hundred year old building, to avoid things seeming static ........ There comes a point when even the best dialogue---like an aria or the jam portion of a rock song---has to end. Where if you add one more back and forth the reader's eyes are going to glaze over and your going to lose them, because nothing is really physically occuring, it's time for the next scene to happen. I might have to shorten it, summarize some of what was said (this works best at the beginning or the end of the dialogue passage), and haul the remainder of what they have to say to where some later dialogue is going to be + hope I'll be able to fit it in ....... Also I'm finding it helps if the conversation itself leads somewhere, internally, to a sort of climax or crescendo. When I first had girl and grandma discussing the father's old fashioned chauvinistic attitudes it was a lot of political blather, pretty lackluster. And for a sort-of comedy piece, not too funny. I hit upon the idea of condensing a big chunk of it into a manic revelation on Teddi's part; where having been a female for only a few hours, she's suddenly a raging feminist, and Grandma is sort of taken aback- "Whoah, down girl!" I lucked out there, it gave this passage the punch it was missing. The previous argument with Dad had ended dramatically, and this sort of counterbalanced it, composition-wise. As with a picture, it's all about composition, what feels right where; you don't want it all down in one corner. And that's what I've learned about dialogue this week. Hope this made some kind of sense.
~~~hugs, Laika
Well shit, I guess it really CAN happen here..,
.
I tend to find a blend works well.
The vast majority may well be verbatum dialog. Specially if it's emotionally charged, or little tidbits of information are dropped here and there. Compressing this into a few paragraphs of descriptive text does the reader a disservice, and takes away your opportunity to ease your user into certain things.
On the other hand, when the block of dialog would not really impact the story line and doesn't contribute to character growth and the readers understanding of the characters and their motiviations, I resort to narrative. Other times I've resorted to narrative included description of things that are described elsewhere. For example. You have a character tell a story once, to someone. Having the character go over it again and again can get tedius to the reader (& you the author). So, in this kind of circumstance I tend to go into narrative and attempt to make sure no character growth is missed.
Okay, I know this is kinda rambling, and not being much of an author it's probably of little value, so I'll stop it now.
Annette
dialogue is given word-for-word
I preferred dialogue is given word-for-word over just described. It makes the story better.
It doesn't matter a fig what style you use...
...as long as it is appropriate for your subject. If you read books, and like some in particular, deconstruct them. Copy them. The apprenticeship system is particularly easy for writers, because the works of many masters of the craft are available in any bookstore.
Read them aloud. The storyteller's art is a verbal one, and it's impossible to know how a story really flows without hearing it, and one's imagination, unless very well trained, is rarely up to the task, because our minds allow us to gloss over errors our ears can't miss.
Most stories will use a mix of description, action, and dialogue, depending on what's being conveyed. Setting up a scene in dialogue can be tedious, but all descriptions of action, other than an occasional "Oooof," as the villain (or hero) is hurled against a wall, can be just as boring.
An enormous amount of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is internal dialogue done in the third person, and even when external dialogue is present the protagonist, or more properly the narrator of the protagonist's inner thoughts, often dissects it in mid-paragraph, where a lesser writer might have used further dialogue or extravagant circumlocution to do what simple words can do when crafted from the proper perspective.
It's a cliche of "women's novels" that the characters "think too much," but women in general are far more interested in thoughts and motivations than men are, so a novel written for a female audience must necessarily use different techniques than one written for men.
There are scenes in Mrs. Dalloway specifically designed to encourage the *reader* to think, as when the skywriting aeroplane makes letters against the clouds upon which no one seems to agree, the letters themselves drifting into clouds from which meaning can only be recovered in memory. There is an infinity of metaphor there contained in the space of a page or so, on human intellect, the writer's craft, perspective, loss, take your pick. The best writing quite often has hidden depths, and if a story *doesn't* make one think, It's nothing more than an empty pastime, as useless as twiddling one's thumbs,
In general, there should be *nothing* present which doesn't drive the story forward, but it's not necessary for the mechanism to be transparent to the reader. We can discover things late in a book which illuminate the pages gone before, and there should always be *something* of a mystery in a story, if only to encourage us to read it and find out what happens.
It's my opinion, and many have done quite well with serial publication, that a story should be complete before it's posted, because it often happens that the writer changes course when an obstacle unexpectedly appears, and having the freedom to go back and change a scene, or even rip out whole chapters, offers the freedom to do one's best work.
On the other hand, it's entirely possible to dither away a lifetime without ever finishing a story. Islandia, for example, by Austin Tappan Wright is a masterpiece, published only posthumously, because Wright could never leave the thing alone and kept adding scenes and reworking others.
Cheers,
Puddin'
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The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.
---Norbet Platt
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
A combination is probably best.
Because its sooo difficult to write believable dialog... Its probably best to only put it in where it builds the story. Otherwise summarise and let the user fill in the questions that may have been asked.
Specially in those parts of the story where word for word... would take hours to read cuz it took days to write and bores both the reader and writer to death.
*laugh*
Dayna.
Both :-)
I have been reading a long series of novels (non-TG historical fiction) lately in which the author frequently recounts dialogue in a running description of the what he wants us to know about the conversation, and he breaks into verbatim dialogue during the section(s) of the conversation he wishes us to 'hear' word for word.
This author has been widely praised by many literary critics for years, including for his dialogue. (Patrick O'Brian. The Aubrey-Maturin series.)
Maybe the best thing about this solution is it is probably the most convenient and pleasurable form for the writer. Yay. :-)
Good luck with whatever choice you select.
Annemarie