Workshop - Dean, Grimly: Or, How to Dialogue Good

[thirstyrobot]

Hi! I'm Mercy aka thirstyrobot and I love dialogue. Writing it, reading it, and, apparently, talking your ear off about it while committing jokey grammatical errors

Comments

[thirstyrobot]

Hee! Glad to have edutained you! :D

[aubade_saudade]

yes. i seriously can't even with fics where the younger man sadly whispered and the older man exclaimed

i've seen people tell others to replace "said" with other interesting words, which they've ~smugly bragged (c wut i did der?) about learning from writing classes and i don't understand that at all. i'm not a writer but it seems like the opposite of awesome to want to interrupt whatever the characters are saying in order to tell the reader that the characters are saying something

[thirstyrobot]

Well, the zaftig brunette mused sagely, I had adverbs beaten out of me and was taught that it was lazy, to the point where I probably under-use them, so anytime someone things a thing thingly, it sticks out to me and sirens go off. It just seems to me that a lot of the time, there can be an indication of the way in which the thing was thinged that doesn't have to be directly attached to the dialogue, e.g. a description of what the smugly bragging people's faces might have been doing while they were smugly bragging, if it can't be gotten across with just the speech. OTOH, doing that for every single line could get annoying too. :P

[tabaqui]

Zaftig brunette! I am so snaffling that.
*has fellowship*

[roxymissrose]

Thank you! This was very interesting. I've only fairly recently had it knocked into my head that there's nothing wrong with a simple 'said' and that it's a-okay to use the characters names over and over if you have to. Writing is a constant learning experience and posts like this (and generous friends) have taught me that I don't know as much as I think I do. :)

[thirstyrobot]

Nobody knows as much as they think they do, and probably everyone has a cringeworthy turn of phrase or twenty lurking in their past (I know I do). I think that's the fuzzy awesome side of the internet (also, kittens), getting to play around and get better without bad grades or rejection letters.

[tabaqui]

All very sound advice! I will tell you, though - no matter *how* good the fic, if Dean is getting his jumper and torch out of the boot, i'm outta there.

[thirstyrobot]

Haha! We all have our threshold, I guess. For some reason, I can stand Britishisms in American settings more easily than I can the reverse. Dean can eat crisps in a lorry all day long and I'll flinch slightly and read on, but as soon as Sherlock says 'mom,' I'm gone. It's possibly some kind of lingering psychological trauma from Harry Potter fandom. (And maybe Dean has women's clothing and a flaming stick that he keeps inside an enormous fire-retardant-- yeah, no.)

[tabaqui]

Some characters i could probably take it if i *really* wanted to, but Dean and Sam are *so* very American, it just doesn't work.

[chemm80]

So much this, for me. It only takes one "spanner" to throw me out of the story. It may be crappy of me, but hey, this is one reason I don't try to write in fandoms where the characters and/or setting are British, or somewhere else I don't know the language/dialect. On the other hand, I really admire ESL authors who manage to do a wonderful job, and they are out there.

[tifaching]

Very useful advice, here. Thanks for the links to the punctuation guides. It's one of my biggest pitfalls.

[thirstyrobot]

You're welcome! Punctuating dialogue can be HARD, which I guess is why there's already a bunch of instructions on it. You're lucky you didn't get stuck with the one I started before I realized I didn't need to reinvent the wheel-- there was a lot of, "Dude, you're an angel."