FlashFiction.Net

If your purpose is to draw your reader into your world for the duration, everything you put on the page—every word, every sentence, and every bit of punctuation—must be placed with a thought for how it will affect the reader. All other considerations are secondary (46).

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This book is chock-full of interesting examples and techniques for dialogue. I particularly am intrigued by this heavy focus on Reader. What's this mean for dialogue? Well, here's what Stansbrough said: 

• Realistic dialogue should be emotion laden...so that the reader assumes the same emotions to a similar degree (47).


• In every case, dialogue should have the spontaneity and free-flowing rhythms of everyday speech (47).


• Realistic dialogue will reveal (or hint at) the character's education level, the character's relationship with the other characters, and the character's reaction to her surrounding (48).

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Douglas Glover, in his essay "Short Story Structure: Notes and an Exercise" in New Quarterly reveals his "general rules of thumb for dialogue-writing." 

• "Dialogue in a story is highly organized...a form of action, and, as such, it must contain drama and conflict and motivation."


• "Often in writing a story it is worthwhile to consider ways of avoiding fully-realized dialogue scenes that are not on the direct conflict line. Often subordinate dialogue scenes can be implied with a couple of lines or less of summary and a single snippet of speech in quotation marks. Alternatively you can use free indirect discourse or reported dialogue to avoid a full scale scene."


• "Dialogue is often more lively and interesting if it uses a technique I call 'not-answering,' that is if the speeches from one character to the next are in conflict and do not simply go pit-a-pat like a friendly ping-pong rally."

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I've been working with a kind of "parallel cutting" in dialogue. For example, let's say I have a scene of action, then talking. Something like this:

Jack throws me the ball, end over end. My return throw bounces off his hands, deflects off his head. He hold the ball aloft, a spaceship.

Jack says, "But they can't leave the mountain. It used to be an ocean, you know. All of it. I bet my father can breathe underwater."

A mixing of action and dialogue produces something like this:

"But," Jack says, "they can't leave the mountain." He throws the ball, end over end. "It used to be an ocean, you know. All of it." My return throw bounces off his hands, deflects off his head. "I bet my father can breathe underwater." He holds the ball aloft, a spaceship.

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It works kind of like this famous "parallel" cutting in The Godfather:

So what are you up to dialogue-wise? What works? Let's talk about it.