Whether you're writing an argument, a love scene, a powwow among sixth graders or scientists in a lab, this book demonstrates how to write dialogue that sounds authentic and original. &break;&break;You'll learn ways to find ideas for literary discussions by tuning in to what you hear every day. You'll learn to use gestures instead of speech, to insert silences that are as effective as outbursts, to add shifts in tone, and other strategies for making conversations more compelling. Nuts and bolts are covered, too - formatting, punctuation, dialogue tags - everything you need to get your characters talking.
Dialogue is a many-sided critical concept; at once an ancient philosophical genre, a formal component of fiction and drama, a model for the relationship of writer and reader, and a theoretical key to the nature of language. In this clear and concise guide to the multiple significance of the term, Peter Womack outlines the history of dialogue form, illustrates dialogue in the novel and on stage, interprets the influential dialogic theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and examines the idea that literary study itself consists of a ‘dialogue’ with the past.
Distilled from decades of teaching and practice, 'Creating Short Fiction' offers no-nonsense advise on structure, pacing, dialogue, getting ideas, and much more.
Experimentation with the speech of characters has been hailed by Gérard Genette as “one of the main paths of emancipation in the modern novel.” Dialogue as a stylistic and narrative device is a key feature in the development of the novel as a genre, yet it is also a phenomenon little acknowledged or explored in the critical literature. Fictional Dialogue demonstrates the richness and versatility of dialogue as a narrative technique in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels by focusing on extended extracts and sequences of utterances. It also examines how different versions of dialogue may help to normalize or idealize certain patterns and practices, thereby excluding alternative possibilities or eliding “unevenness” and differences. Bronwen Thomas, by bringing together theories and models of fictional dialogue from a wide range of disciplines and intellectual traditions, shows how the subject raises profound questions concerning our understanding of narrative and human communication. The first study of its kind to combine literary and narratological analysis with reference to linguistic terms and models, Bakhtinian theory, cultural history, media theory, and cognitive approaches, this book is also the first to focus in depth on the dialogue novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and to bring together examples of dialogue from literature, popular fiction, and nonlinear narratives. Beyond critiquing existing methods of analysis, it outlines a promising new method for analyzing fictional dialogue.
The Book of Dialogue is an invaluable resource for writers and students of narrative seeking to master the art of effective dialogue. The book will teach you how to use dialogue to lay the groundwork for events in a story, to balance dialogue with other story elements, to dramatize events through dialogue, and to strategically break up dialogue with other vital elements of your story in order to capture and hold a reader’s or viewer’s interest in the overall arc of the narrative. Writers will find Turco’s classic an essential reference for crafting dialogue. Using dialogue to teach dialogue, Turco’s chapters focus on narration, diction, speech, and genre dialogue. Through the Socratic dialogue method—invented by Plato in his dialogues outlining the teachings of Socrates—Turco provides an effective tool to teach effective discourse. He notes, “Plato wrote lies in order to tell the truth. That’s what a fiction writer does and has always done.” Now it’s your turn.
Jake Mishkin has a seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer. But a case involving the search for a lost Shakespearean play has put him at the centre of a deadly conspiracy and the hunt to find a priceless treasure.
Writing Compelling Dialogue for Film and TV is a practical guide that provides you, the screenwriter, with a clear set of exercises, tools, and methods to raise your ability to hear and discern conversation at a more complex level, in turn allowing you to create better, more nuanced, complex and compelling dialogue. The process of understanding dialogue writing begins with increasing writers’ awareness of what they hear. This book provides writers with an assortment of dialogue and language tools, techniques, and exercises and teaches them how to perceive and understand the function, intent and thematic/psychological elements that dialogue can convey about character, tone, and story. Text, subtext, voice, conflict, exposition, rhythm and style are among the many aspects covered. This book reminds us of the sheer joy of great dialogue and will change and enhance the way writers hear, listen to, and write dialogue, and along the way aid the writers’ confidence in their own voice allowing them to become more proficient writers of dialogue. Written by veteran screenwriter, playwright, and screenwriting professor Loren-Paul Caplin, Writing Compelling Dialogue is an invaluable writing tool for any aspiring screenwriter who wants to improve their ability to write dialogue for film and television, as well as students, professionals, and educators.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, the major proponent of philosophical hermeneutics, reveals himself here as a highly sensitive reader and critic of the German literary tradition. This is not the work of a specialist as narrowly defined in the typical literary study. Although he is a master of the techniques of criticism, Gadamer always sees the study of literature as a fundamentally human activity where human beings, generation after generation, pose their questions to an encroaching darkness that threatens to rob them of their confidence in the meaning of life and death. Never pedantic or antiquarian, these studies show such literary giants of the German past as Goethe and Hölderlin as our contemporaries. Gadamer demonstrates his ability to achieve the creative interplay of literature and philosophy which, in isolation, easily degenerate into sterile academic games. Typical of this dialogue are essays on Rainer Maria Rilke, including an examination of a problem of punctuation in one of his poems. What would be, in less capable hands, one more solution to a literary problem, turns out to be one of Gadamer's creative approaches to the mystery of man's relation to time and death.
