Let’s continue babbling about how to use dialogue and the things I don’t understand.
DESCRIBE WHAT THE CHARACTERS DO AS THEY TALK
This technique is used to keep interest and to add subtext and tone.
It isn’t the same to say:
Mariana, very angry, said he was an @__35-;!
To to say:
Mariana said he was an #44_67 whilst trying to scratch his face.
Mostly, bad words are enough to show how much of a bother the guy is. Unless we use this:
Mariana said he was an #4#4, holding the front flaps of his jacket and licking his lips.
That turns everything into an erotic game. It all belongs to the rule: show, don’t tell in the technical side of things; plus, avoiding the adverbs.
USE TAGS
A common place in manga and webtoon are ‘lost’ dialogue balloons associated to no one. They’re upsetting and make reading difficult. So, to avoid your reader getting lost, make dialogue as clean as possible. Andrea Camilleri won’t as much as use identification tags to name the person speaking but, in exchange, he would write dialogues of only two speakers alternatively speaking.
Unlike what happens in a meeting room filled with people. Here, we need the tags and those have to be as invisible as spider cobs are to flies. Reason why not to say: ‘her voice fell like a leaf on the woods’ and that’s the second convention I’ve broken. And I remind you, I never been published and I just write nonsense.
TO BE CONTINUED
