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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26601
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26601
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

In addition to what Chris Sunami said, I would point out that a scene is a lens, not a window. A great scene works by focusing your attention on just one thing. You can have many different things going on in a story, but in each scene you want the focus to be on just one thing. All you have is words, and words line up one after another. There is no foreground background in prose. If you try to have multiple things going on at once, what the reader actually receives is a narrative full of context switches. The effect is not rich, it is distracting. It does not immerse the reader, it expels them from the scene.

Any tricks of language in a passage of dialogue, therefore, draw attention away from what is being said. In some cases, they may be part and parcel of what is actually being said. How certain characters speak is indivisible from how you interpret what they are saying. But there is a limit to what you can convey synchronously through a single stream of prose. A light touch is essential.

And, as I seem to keep saying a lot, setup is essential. Because you can only describe one thing at a time, any complexity in the reader's reception of a scene depends on the setup you have done. If a character's diction has to be decoded in a particular scene, make sure that you have decoded it already so that the reader recognizes it in content rather than being distracted by having to decode it in the moment.

Original score: 3