Descriptions and Dialogue Made Easy(ier)
by Nancy Sackheim
Description and Dialogue Made Easy(ier)
For most of us, writing a novel is not easy. We spend hours thinking, writing, rewriting descriptions of, well everything in our novel. We're building a world our readers must be able to visualize. Descriptions can be sparse all the way to incredibly detailed, but descriptions of some sort there must be. Creating dialogue for our characters requires more hours of thinking, writing, and rewriting what our characters say and how they say it. Below are a couple of tips to make description and dialogue easy(ier) to write.
Take photographs of anyone, anything and any place that interests you. Download them or print them, whatever works for you. Refer to them when you need to describe whatever it is you need to describe. It is helpful to group them, i.e., interiors, exteriors, people, animals, items, in whatever fashion you organize (or don't organize). You might even further categorize the image by the novel you're currently writing or the various ones you plan to write.
Recording people in conversations can be helpful if you struggle to “hear” and write realistic dialogue. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of articles on how to write dialogue. The bottom line, dialogue is people talking to each other. People talk to each other constantly for countless reasons. Dialogue is everywhere. Get up from your desk (or wherever you write), get out of your solitude and listen. If you can write down what people are saying, do it. But recording conversations not only provides language, it captures cadence, pitch, accents, and so many other indications of who a person is..
Description and Dialogue, essential components of a novel that may be easier to write than you imagined!
