I see dead people.
Okay. So not really.
However, I do hear imaginary ones. Lots of them.
They talk in my head.
All. The. Time.
I can barely hear myself think with the incessant jabbering going on inside my head. Characters come out of nowhere and invade my mental space. And most of them don’t pay rent. So, I carry with me, at all times, my special writing tools (fine tip Sharpie writing pens) and a variety of notebooks (one for each story idea floating around in my head) in order to transcribe their ramblings in a place where I can access them when I’m ready to write the story.
Each of them has a different story, a distinctive voice that scratches and claws to be heard. For many people that would be cause for great consternation (and possibly medication). For most writers, those voices are welcome sounds and a great cause for celebration. Those voices are the seeds from which great stories are born. From those ramblings I usually get the best ideas and the beginnings of the all-important dialogue.
I love writing dialogue. I’m often told I have an ear for it. I learn more from my characters through dialogue than narrative. And my characters are usually nothing short of spunky and this side of hilarious.
When I first started writing novels, just a few short years ago (and without the forethought to purchase a book on the craft of novel writing), I didn’t really understand the purpose of dialogue so it read more like purposeless witty bantering.
For this, I would like to apologize to my early readers. I was stupid. I didn’t know. As Oprah says, when you know better, you do better. Now I do better. Writing compelling dialogue isn’t easy. Now that I’m a writer, I think I read with a new eye. And the fact of the matter is I’ve read (and written) a lot of eye-rolling, crap dialogue in my days. So right now, I’m not gonna give you the standard blow by blow on dialogue, we've heard most of it before. I just want to share a few notes that have popped into my head through my own writing journey as I've started yet another edit of my J.J. McCall novels.
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