Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Stephen KingRead
It's dialogue that gives your cast their voices, and is crucial in defining their characters.
Interpretation
Dialogue is essential for character development in storytelling.
In this quote, Stephen King emphasizes the importance of dialogue in literature and film, highlighting how it shapes the personalities and voices of characters. Effective dialogue not only reveals character traits but also drives the narrative forward, making it a crucial component of storytelling.
In practice
During a writing workshop, a speaker quoted Stephen King to emphasize the role of dialogue in character development.
Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
That's the day's business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn't matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you're alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them.
Late last night and the night before, tommyknockers, tommyknockers knocking on my door. I wanna go out, don't know if I can 'cuz I'm so afraid of the tommyknocker man.
I shall, in due time, be a Poet.
Art in its highest form is art that serves and instructs society and human development.
Inscribe all human effort with one word, artistry's haunting curse, the Incomplete!
I'm not an actor because I want my picture taken. I'm an actor because I want to be part of the human exchange.
All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.
Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger
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