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Jim Van Pelt has a great one: In a nutshell, two students talk to each other so that each speaks twice. One of them records what they said. That produces four lines of raw dialogue like this:...
Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-12T20:05:58Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/3942 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T01:56:09Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/3942 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
[Jim Van Pelt has a great one:](http://jimvanpelt.livejournal.com/322874.html) > In a nutshell, two students talk to each other so that each speaks twice. One of them records what they said. That produces four lines of raw dialogue like this: > > “Are you practicing with the band tonight?” > > “Yeah, we qualified for state, so we’re doing extra time.” > > “Congrats! Where’s state this year?” > > “Colorado Springs. The same place we did it last year.” > > The exercise is, without changing any of the dialogue, to insert thoughts, actions and descriptions so that the reader is in a scene instead of just seeing a record of speech. It's worth reading the whole entry, for student responses. The key here is that dialogue, and its effect, are heavily dependent on the surrounding description and action. You can play the same dialogue a dozen different ways - and trying to do that is a great exercise for understanding how to choose which way to play yours.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2011-09-13T20:11:45Z (over 12 years ago)
Original score: 6