I'm at the bit I expected to have trouble with, Dialogue. I am a man of very few words and rarely speak more than a few at any given time.
I am closing in on the end of the 1st draft of what I hope will be the first story I post here. The tale is at 72K words and there's a good 15-30 to go before I go back and put in the majority of the dialogue.
what advice can you give to someone doing this who is not inclined to mutter much of an utterance at any point. I'm guessing the dialogue will add yet another 15-30K words if I flesh out the scenes the way PP seems to suggest is a good way to go about things.
At the moment it's very much tell don't show but that was so I could get the bones down as quickly as possible while the juices were flowing as it were.
I'm expecting to write maybe 1/5th as many word words as telling words at a minimum though I don't know where this is going. Maybe 1/3rd speech would be a more noble aim. yes nearly all the plot points are written down. a lot of the scenes are well described but I need words to bring it to life and breath soul into the few characters that there are there. The story covers about 10-11 months and picks up every 4 weeks in a cycle so there has to be something. families don't got months without talking to each other or them selves when alone do they?
At a guess I'd say the dialogue will take as long as the whole rest of the story did in the first place even if there's only a minimal amount of it there.
I rarely talk. I don't like doing it, well doing it with my own voice. I'm happy to chatter away inside my head with thoughts all day as I go about my goings on here and there.
I'd gotten excited when I realised that I only had 6 weeks of story left in the draft but then I remembered the damned dialogue. it's not to say there's none there but it's maybe 2 - 5 % of what's needed to fill out the bones of my story that has taken far too long to write but I have enjoyed tapping away at a very loud keyboard for, for a few hundred hours all told with readings, edits in fits and spurts and cathartic streams of consciousness that spring forth seemingly at random.
I can describe quite well and with some level of craft when mood and muse permit. but dialogue has always been something I've struggled with. and yes I'm more than a little anti-social and don't get as much practice as I should even if I was in the mood to blurt out missives into the ether. So as stated i firmly fall into the suspenders train of though, dialogue bad. bad dialogue worse.
All the Dialogue needs to be between ~14 year olds ( a handful of them) and two parents (divorced), an uncle, a teacher and a lifelong friend with the honorary title Auntie.plus late in the piece a pair of tweens. One problem I have is that i barely remember 14 and the way speech was used even less, though I doubt I'll be setting any cats among the pigeons with decades out of date slang from a tiny spec at the arse end of the urban sprawl 100 Km from the nearest capital city.
I guess the question I need to ask is are any of the 'editors' here reasonable dialogue coaches?
