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TIL my dialogue was flat because I kept writing what characters said instead of what they wanted
I've been writing short stories for about two years and my beta readers kept saying the same thing: the talking parts feel stiff. I thought they meant my word choice, so I rewrote lines over and over. Then a guy in my Tuesday workshop in Akron asked one simple thing about a scene. He said, what does she want in this moment? I looked at the page and honestly had no idea. I had her explaining the plot to her sister for half a page. Nothing under it. So I tried a dumb exercise where before any line of talk I jot one word in the margin: win, hide, stall, test, apologize. Been doing it for six weeks on 11 scenes now and the notes changed completely. People say the characters sound like people. The lines barely changed. The want did. Still figuring out how to do this with three people in a room though, feels like whack a mole. How do you all track what everyone wants when it's a group scene?
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barbarah1923d ago
Ha, I label each person in the scene with one want before I start writing, then check every line against it.
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