69,000 words plus and counting. I finished a new chapter today and...I actually liked it. It's pretty heavy on the dialogue which, I believe, makes it more interesting for the reader and thus is pretty enjoyable to write. There are, however, some caveats. I struggle with doing huge dumps of information through dialogue because it can become stilted as you try to deliver data. People don't generally talk in facts (in my experience), they talk around them and when they do deliver facts, it's usually punctuated by gesture, reference to third-party material to clarify the subject, and, in general, use the world around them and shared experience to better express what they mean. I can't really do that when I'm writing a story because the idea is that everyone (meaning lots of people but not really everyone) will be able to understand what's being said. The writer and the reader have some similar frame of reference, of course, but not as close a frame as most people who are having a discussion. So, that's a challenge. The other challenge is that long blocks of dialogue can get boring, too. Something has to be going on in the background or I get bored when I'm reading. Today I took a stab at having a character work on a 1970s model Ford Pinto (orange) while he had a discussion with another character. I think it worked, but...we'll see.
Anyway, I'm still learning and as I learn it causes me to go back and retouch things that I've written before. I hope, hope, hope this isn't just turning into an unGodly hash of a mess. Oh well, if nothing else, this will be a well loved book that everyone hates. There have been a few of those before in the world. This won't be the first annnnnnd, I will have learned something.
:)
The picture? An orange Ford Pinto, of course.
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