Dialogue is the place that books are most alive and forge the most direct connection with readers. It is also where we as writers discover our characters and allow them to become real.
Interpretation
Dialogue in writing brings characters to life and connects them with readers.
This quote emphasizes the importance of dialogue in literature, suggesting that it is a vital element that breathes life into characters and fosters a strong connection with the audience. Through dialogue, writers are able to explore and develop their characters, making them feel more authentic and relatable, which enhances the overall experience of reading a book.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to inspire budding authors, one could quote this to highlight the significance of dialogue in storytelling.
It’s like losing gravity and falling into space – the moment of pitching headlong when the endlessness of space asserts itself and there is no more down, only an eternity of up, and you realize you can fall forever and never run out of stars.
Kizzy wanted it all so bad her soul leaned half out of her body hungering after it, and that was what drove the goblins wild, her soul hanging out there like an untucked shirt.
Never sit staring at a blank page or screen. If you find yourself stuck, write. Write about the scene you're trying to write. Writing about is easier than writing, and chances are, it will give you your way in.
When I turned to writing fantasy, and writing for young people, it was joyous. It was like discovering an underground lake of ideas that went on forever.
Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat and the thrill, and it was as bright within her as a swallowed star.
It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such. The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry 'Monster!' and looked behind him.
The literary world is made up of little confederacies, each looking upon its own members as the lights of the universe; and considering all others as mere transient meteors, doomed to soon fall and be forgotten, while its own luminaries are to shine steadily into immortality.
Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.
What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim 'You know exactly what I mean!' depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.
Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.
One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows.
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.