Writing Twilight's World - 2

As a new writer, I had (have) a great deal of doubt about whether I could actually write a story.

I mean, from my days in high school English class, I knew I could write descriptive scenes. And even if I thought so myself, those scenes were pretty fair. But dialog? Ugh. Not dialog. Anything but dialog.

I imagined myself churning out highly stilted, robotic speech.

“Could you please pass the butter? Twilight.”
“Yes. Here it is. Mike.”
“Nice weather we are having today. Twilight.”
“Yes. It is nice. Mike”

You get the idea.

This really bugged me. I won't say that I lost any sleep over it, but I ended up avoiding the story.

I started writing Twilight’s World in late March; it only took me a day to write the first chapter (Since I'm somewhat adequate with descriptive scenes). And over the next week I hammered out chapter two, with frequent rewrites and enhancements of chapter one.

But chapter three would require dialog. The big bad ‘dialog’ which I had no idea how to write. I avoided it for over four months.

Finally, sometime in August, I managed to screw up my courage, and jumped right into writing chapter three. I started writing and let the muse take me and the dialog, wherever it felt like going. Good or bad, I would at least make the effort and write something.

It probably helped a lot that I had finally figured out the scene between Mike and Twilight. Putting them both into intimate contact turned to be hilarious. At least I thought it was. And so the words just started to flow.

If you ever wonder why my story is moving sooooo-slowly, it’s because this is how I taught myself to write dialog. Put the story's characters together and let them say whatever they need or want to say. It is being driven by the exact circumstance the characters find themselves in. Rather than allowing myself to put words into their mouths, I try to discover what it is they want to say.

And I'm sorry to say, I have not yet learned any other method to move through the dialog.

And on one certain instance, where I did force my characters, to try and hurry the story along, I got called out by one of my readers, telling me that Mike was acting stupid and Twilight had gotten Out-Of-Character (OOC).

So. Bring on the dialog. I think I'm ready now. It's slow and it’s still painful. And I do make mistakes. But it does come.

And you know what? I don't hear robots talking.

Comments

[PostPony]

this is real and may be useful. Not saying that you need it per se but it might help you like it helps me.