Wednesday 8 May 2019

7th May 2019 Dialogue and Dialect Workshop

At the meeting this week, Wilma delivered a workshop on ‘Dialogue and Dialect’

After a jumper and glasses malfunction, Wilma delivered a very informative session to the group.
She described how dialogue is conversation between characters in a story. This adds interest to the piece and moves the plot forward.

Wilma highlighted how punctuation should be used in dialogue and we were given an exercise where we had to rewrite a passage of text, punctuating the dialogue and using contractions where appropriate. This still proved to be challenging for the group but very worthwhile.

Wilma then focussed on what makes good dialogue. eg it’s always clear who’s speaking, develops the story and introduces new information while sounding natural with vocabulary used that’s appropriate to each character. The use of body language was also mentioned.

Wilma provided dialogue examples from popular books;
Exposition from a Christmas Carol.
Characterisation from Pride and Prejudice.
Humour from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

We spent the final part of the workshop on dialect and accent. Looking at dialects and accents from around the world.

Wilma then gave us a final exercise this was to be entirely in dialogue, involving three characters, allowing each person to speak but not using tags. Making each individual speech different in some
way to show that it showed their character.

Jacklin read an article from the Writers Magazine article which was a rejection letter from a Chinese Publisher which was pretty damming stating her effort was so poor that they would hope that they would never see anything as bad in the next 1000 years. There’s hope for all of us.

Hilary reminded us that next weeks meeting  will be the ‘Who done it?’Either a short story (500 words) or a poem. This will be anonymous, with each of the group selecting a reading and then we will try and establish who wrote the piece.







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