What are you working on now? Something about a dilapidated old building with torn shingles that has a
life of its own? An unsolved murder in
Well, write about it. You never know what’s in someone else’s head until you try to be like them and make up an imaginary life of a character that can come to life on the pages of your writing pad.
Now, what about some dialogue?
Dialogue also allows a character – not you – to assess other characters within the story. It’s very easy for the
author to throw in some little tidbit that is hers and it stands out; it’s much better if it comes from one of the characters, instead. “Your face is as white as a ghost” might be a good example of one character describing another, where “She didn’t have a chance” could be a phrase thrown in by the author’s thought processes.
I’m working on an unsolved murder mystery right now and have lots of dialogue, hoping it will reveal much about the character instead of paragraph and paragraph of descriptive writing about how someone looks or thinks. I think the dialogue makes a character come alive on the page if it’s not overdone.
According to writing experts, the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level should be about 80 and Reading Ease should be about 5 (both of these can be found by using MS Word’s Tools Spelling & Grammar). The higher the reading level and the lower the reading ease, the better it is for the reader. My novel, which will be published in June,
has a Flesch Reading Level of 78.2 and a Reading Ease of 6.0. The more dialogue you have in a piece, the
lower the reading ease goes and the easier the reading becomes.
In my current novel, the Flesch Reading Level is 90 and Reading Ease is 3.5. I hope to have it out to a publisher within the next six months so I can start on the next mystery for which I already have some of the characters and the backbone of a storyline.
So, get out that writing pad, pick those characters and make them talk. Let them take over and see just what happens when they start talking to each other.
George Thompson is a novelist and poet. He works as a reviewer for the pop culture site PopSyndicate.com.
Powered by ScribeFire.