"i want it to be pink," he said.
"pink's so unnatural for maple though!" she said.
if you haven't gotten it yet - class number three was about dialogue. (ok, this is a couple weeks late - but i figure i should let you in on the lesson before i present my assignment).
apparently dialogue can be one of the most powerful part of the prose. it can say so much with what characters say and don't say. a lot of the lesson was about letting the dialogue talk by itself and to take away all distractions. keep simple tags like he said or she said and stay away from things like she exclaimed or he cried, etc. also - adverbs are apparently a huge sin.
the talk about dialogue did make me start to pay attention to the dialogue in books. usually i don't pay all that much attention to dialogue. maybe that's a sign of my introversion - i find the observations and internal musings of individuals much more interesting than their interactions with others. i found when i was writing this week that i really needed to put in more than just the dialogue - i needed more description. (apparently this was somethings i was supposed to stay away from in the assignment - we're supposed to work on things that we're weaker at and not to use our strengths at crutches or something like that).
thinking about it - i really should work on my dialogue more ... although, maybe it'd be better if i practiced talking to real people rather just writing about it ...
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does that mean you have to *gasp* talk on the *cringe* phone??
and i did notice that a lot of books stick to "he said, she said". it's funny how this is considered the "right" way to write and the other is not...yet in grade school, we were always told to explore different ways to say "said".
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