Tuesday's Inspiration - Dialogue - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly #MFRWauthor

Reading Bird By Bird and came to the chapter on Dialogue. This is a great book and inspires me every time I read it. Not going to talk much about what was found in the chapter but my take on Dialogue.

Good Dialogue flows and when read aloud sounds like real people talking. The speakers use some words that shwo their statue in society, their upbringing and their career choice. You can listen to what they're saying and suddenly know that's a doctor, a lawyer or a mill worker. Suddenly other pictures leap into your mind.

Bad Dialogue for me is where every character sounds like the other character. There's no sense of their gender or anything else that might give the reader a clue. Bad Dialogue is easy to write. It often flows from my pen onto the paper. Then I have to go back and look on the bits of speech and make then better.

Now the Ugly Dialogue is something I must explain. Using bits of dialect isn't bad. Overuse can be dreadful. I had a writer who I devoured every book she wrote until the last one of hers I ever read. The entire parts where dialogue was used was done in dialect. Before long I hadno idea what the characters were saying unless I sat and thought. The flow of the story was lost. I had no idea what the storywas about. I read three chapters and dropped thebook in the circular file.