Over the past several years I've had a bad habit of losing momentum when writing stories but I wasn't sure why. A few weeks ago my mom found an old entry I wrote for the writers group I used to be a part of. I had completely forgotten that I used to write in screenplay format. It was almost entirely dialogue with only enough description and narration to keep the story grounded. I think I might go back to that habit.
I've heard from a lot of youtube writing teachers who recommend the basic dialog tags, but I think "said" is adequate sometimes. It makes it sound like the voices are robotic or passive speakers. A quiet person sometimes has to "Jump into" the conversation, or "Break in" or "cram his way in." A drama queen may have to "Exclaim." Dialog tags can tell us something about the characters.
@@NeoPokebonz Thanks, that's a helpful comment. certain dialog tags only need to be used a few times, I think, and depend on the situation the characters are in.
Key words. Dickens assigns menace to the word 'lock' in Our Mutual Friend. Betty Higden, dying, drifts in and out of consciousness. She has a terror of being shut away in the workhouse. A strange man appears. *I am the Lock, said the man. The Lock ? Betty repeats. I am the Deputy Lock, on job, and this is the Lockhouse.* The man is Rogue Riderhood, a lock-keeper on the River Thames. It's a moment worthy of Kafka as John Carey writes in The Violent Effigy. A useful exercise is to ad-lib dialogue from a poem such as Seamus Heaney's The Artist, his homage to Cezanne's landscapes & apples. *I love the thought of his anger ... The way he was a dog barking at the image of himself barking ... the vulgarity of expecting ever gratitude ... ^ Change the words, avoid any hint of plagiarism, and it could open unexpected doors in your narrative. Each character has her distinct own voice. In writing The Invention of Wings (2014) Sue Monk Kidd said she could hardly keep up with Hetty Handful's voice - talk, talk, talk. *Sarah came with a big historical script. I'd read Sarah Grimke's diaries, essays and biographies and I revered her history to the point I became boxed in by it ... I had to find her in my own imagination.* See interview with the author in the Tinder Press paperback edition of this admirable novel. John Carey's *The Violent Effigy - A Study of Dickens' Imagination* says much in 200 pages. The chapter on corpses is not for the faint-hearted.
Carey wrote just 183 pages including Index. Chapter Two, Dickens and Order, allows us a glimpse into the diary he kept in America. *Every patient in this (lunatic) asylum sits down to dinner every day with knife & fork.* This is in South Boston. *In the suburbs there is a spacious cemetery : unfinished yet but every day improving.* Dialogue can be witty. Study Oscar Wilde.
*Old Friend From Far Away - the Practice of Writing Memoirs* (2009) by Natalie Goldberg is the place to start. The several books of memoirs by Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakula (born 1949) are about the pivotal events of 1989 and after. Often funny and full of sensory detail : *How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed* *Cafe Europa* *Cafe Europa Revisited* As a child she would save empty wrappers from Western confectioners because chocolate produced in Communist countries was so bad. *Tell Me How It Ends : An Essay in 40 Questions* by Valerie Luisella the Mexican writer now living in New York is a kind of collective memoir. Valerie writes about migration, dislocation & loss the very heartbeat of autobiography. We all lose something even if it is only childhood. * Valerie Luiselli * Coffee House Press. * Valerie Luiselli : 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Life. * Both RU-vid.
@@emmanuelawosusi2365 Off the top of my head these memoirs have influenced me over the course of my life ... Praeterita - John Ruskin. Reminiscences - Thomas Carlyle. Memories, Dreams & Reflections - Carl Gustav Jung. Hope Againt Hope - Nadezhda Mandelstam. The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn. My Father's Son - Frank O'Connor. Homage To Catalonia - George Orwell. A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway. The Best Times - John Dos Passos. Out of Africa - Isak Dinesen. Memory Hold-the-Door - John Buchan. The Strings Are False - Louis MacNeice. Notes of a Native Son - James Baldwin. The Perfect Stranger - P.J. Kavanagh. Raven Seek Thy Brother - Gavin Maxwell. Midnight in the Desert - J.B. Priestley. Memoirs of Many in One - Patrick White. My Life & Travels - Wilfred Thesiger. Where I Was From - Joan Didion. My Invented Country - Isabel Allende. Living To Tell the Tale - Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Pentimento & An Unfinished Woman by Lilian Hellman I liked but she was a brutal unreconstructed Stalinist all her days. Marina Warner's memoirs, Inventory of a Life Mislaid is out in paperback, rich in incident and beautifully written. James Cameron's Point of Departure is the autobiography of a great foreign correspondent. John Gale's *Clean Young Englishman* touches me deeply because he was a friend and committed suicide age 47. He was a reporter for The Observer in London when it was owned by Lord Astor and he writes with haunting lucidity about madness.
@@emmanuelawosusi2365 After sleeping on it, I thought of all the great memoirs I had left out ... The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank. Night - Elie Wiesel. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (with Alex Haley). Kidnapped - Oroonoko. Up From Slavery - Booker T Washington. Conversations with Myself - Nelson Mandela If It Die - Andre Gide. Words - Jean-Paul Sartre. The Tongue Set Free, The Play of the Eyes, The Torch in my Ear - Elias Canetti. Autobiography - Gandhi. The Complete War Memoirs - Charles de Gaulle. Anti-Memoirs - Andre Malraux. Camus did not write a memoir : three volumes of his Journal are in paperback and his uncollected writings are in Penguin. Simone Weil's best writings have been published as a Penguin Classic; there is a good RU-vid documentary on her life & ideas. Before flying to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize, Camus sat in her apartment in Paris, reflecting on her life ...
You used to speak with a much more quavery voice and that made it hard to listen to you sometimes. Recently that's changed and listening to you is much more enjoyable now.
