Education is a kind of continuing dialogue and a dialogue assumes different points of view. –Robert Hutchins– I was once working for a publisher who had given me a stack of short stories to look at, with the provision of telling him what I thought of each one and whether they were publishable or not. There was a lot of dross there, but I remember one in particular that exhasperated me to high heaven until I scribbled in one margin, pressing the pen down hard, 'For fuck's sake, nobody speak likes this, NOBODY'. That's the major issue insofar as dialogue is concerned dear reader: we all know how to speak, yet go stilted and moronic once we need to translate that knowledge onto the written page. This story I am talking about featured a woman and a man. She was concerned he was cheating on her and so went through his mobile, found a supposedly incriminating text message and called the number it came from (obviously, it wasn't just badly written, it was also greatly original, as you can tell). It turned out her husband had been talking to a car salon instead, but judging by the dialogue, you'd think the woman was reading out instructions from a washing machine manual and the guy on the line from the back of a toothpaste tube. Before you jump into a dialogue, try this classic exercise: Go to a public place (a café is superb for this) and eavesdrop. Do it properly... Read more →
