Dialogue. Dialogue is what I'm doing right now. I'm standing here, I'm talking to you, I'm talking out loud. If we're going to make a scene out of this for a story, what would we do? Will we write down every single thing that I was saying? Would that be boring? Instead, we pick and choose. "Dialogue is what I'm doing right now," he said. He was standing facing the camera he went on to explain how writing everything verbatim would become boring. Dialogue follows the same rules of description as anything else, you pick and choose. If I was going to describe this room, what would I put in it? Is every line of dialogue essential? If you're going to describe a scene in which you went to buy a cup of coffee, would you include every single line in that transaction? Hi. Hi. Can I help you? I would like a double espresso? Would you like that hot or cold? I'm not sure. In other words, you're picking and choosing what is essential to create this scene. Dialogue is important for another reason, it's a way for the writer to show the reader something without having to tell them. You narrate and then you give them a line of dialogue. Let's look at an example from a student of mine which she describes a scene with their father, where they're arguing over what should she wear. Notice how she's using dialogue to break up the narration. We short choice quotes from her father. "No sooner did I set one foot out the door than my dad asked me to change my shoes. He said they looked away out of place and odd, "inappropriate" to be exact. His tone was commanding. I could feel my muscles start to tense up as if an involuntary reflex to the impending choice between war and peace. A surge of justified anger took hold of me: How ridiculous is it to let your parents dictate what you wear? I snapped back saying that it was nobody's business what I wore. Before I was able to realize the effect of that response, my dad's loud voice reverberated around the room: "You do what I say and spare your nonsense!" From the way she's writing, she sounds as if she specifically remembered what her father said. "You do what I say and spare your nonsense," "inappropriate" that's in quotes. Notice that most of the dialogue is actually narrated. She's not putting in quotes this, I snapped back saying that it was nobody's business what I wore. In a sense she's paraphrasing that, it helps to keep the tempo going, it helps to create a nice flow to it. Sometimes I've written scenes from my childhood where I don't precisely remember what has happened, but I approximate it because I want to give a sense of what the action might be like. Here's an example from when I was four years old and I was having a conflict with my mother over a grape boycott in the United States, where I wanted to eat grapes and she wouldn't allow me to. "Is the boycott over yet?" I'd ask my mother. "Not yet," she'd say. "When will the boycott be over?", "When the capitalists give the workers their rights?", "When will that happen?", "I don't know." "When it happens will we eat grapes?", "Yes." Weeks passed. "Is the boycott over?", "No." Months passed. "Is the boycott over?", "No." Fall came. Then winter. Grapes we're no longer in season. "Is the boycott over?", "No." That was a scene between my mother and me. I was four years old. Again, do I remember exactly what lines we were saying to one another? No. But these were approximations of what you said. I wanted to show the reader what the conflict was like not just narrate it.
