Chapter Four - dialogue, dialogue, dialogue!

The majority of my day today has been writing.  Writing, writing, writing.  This chapter is going to need some reworking, but at least it has some substance to it (probably too much).  Right now, there is no flavor to the writing - I'm focusing mostly on getting some information down rather than style.  Other than trying to revise the first three chapters (then throwing that work out) and a short back story that may or may not be anywhere in the actual book, this is my first work that will actually continue the plot and story that I have written in about a month and a half since my quarter ended in school.  This is both exciting and exhausting.

Mainly, I am worried about the overwhelming amount of dialogue currently in the draft.  One or two characters are telling the main character the history of the made up world in order to get to the end of the chapter where they reveal how that relates to her own life.  I'm hoping I put enough narration and interjections of other characters to break up the immense amount of information I tried to say as concisely as possible without leaving out the importance of each event or topic (whew that was a long sentence!).  That's hard to do!  AND, this is all related through dialogue, which I was told by my writing group last week is my biggest issue.  Great.

In my efforts to become better at dialogue, I am reading a book on writing dialogue and tape recording people in public (creepy, huh?) so that I can study how people talk to one another.  I find that I am not the most observant person and have a horrible memory for details (i.e. names, etc), let alone trying to remember an entire conversation so that I can write it down later for reference.  The book I am reading suggests what I am doing, and I am trying to be as respectful as I can to the people talking.  For example, I am in a coffee shop right now and I have the tape recorder (which is actually a digital voice recorder, but I think the name 'tape recorder' stuck from my younger years) in my purse recording away while I type.  I plan to listen to this recording later and see if there is anything of note - catchy comebacks, phrases, etc that give me a better idea of how dialogue works.  Well, I may feel a little creepy and like an intruder, but I have also recorded myself on a phone call - man do I sound like a complete moron.  Maybe my dialogue in my writing isn't very literary because of my own speech issues...

Well, time to turn my laptop off before my brain or eye balls explodes (which ever comes first).  The one drawback of writing is the endless headaches I get from eye strain - it doesn't matter if I'm hand writing or on the computer.  More Tylenol down the hatch!