Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Action and Dialog

Sometimes I have to separate the writing of action and dialog in order to find my flow. Action is all visual to me, as if I'm blocking a scene on set and replacing dialog with "blah, blah, blah" so that I'm not hung up on words. But when I write dialog it's ALL about the word choices. I'm constantly reevaluating which words work best for a given situation, or how many times I've used a word in a scene, or what words a specific character would use based on his/her background. So my drafts can sometimes be long paragraphs of action descriptions with very little dialog or long exchanges of dialog with little to no descriptions. I then go back and insert the missing component whether it's action or dialog. This method helps me identify the right tone and pace, and sometimes allows me to vomit words onto a page then sort things out later.

#fbpro

No comments: