week of 3/19/13

3/21/13

Goal: Outwit, outplay, outlast. More on characters.

Homework: Catch up over break if you need to. Don't wait on Infinite Campus! Go back over the blog ( http://ahscreative.blogspot.com/ ) and make sure you've done all assignments!

First Step: Think about the character you have been working on. Describe your character's face and body in as much detail as you can. 

Then, have the character describe his or her own face and body in 1st person.

Then, on the top of a separate sheet of paper, 
Write one interesting line of dialogue. Make it something your character would say. 

For example, if my character was a "sixty-year old man" who "cut his finger off on a table saw today,"
the line of dialogue might be, 

(Yelling up from the basement)"Hey honey! You pick up that wood glue?"  

Dialogue activity based on A Clean Well lighted place. 

Make a circle of about 4 or five people.

This is a "write and pass" activity based on your first line of dialogue.

1. First piece of dialogue
2. Response from the next person's character
3. A line or two of narrative.
4. Line of dialogue
5. Line of dialogue
6. Line of dialogue
7. Line of dialogue
8. Line of dialogue
9. A line or two of narrative
10. A line of dialogue.
11. Give it a creative title.



3/19/13

Goal: Revisit Character Sketches, talk about dialogue.

First Step: Some character sketches to read?

HW For Thursday: Post on your blog: Dialogue sketch using the character you wrote over the weekend.

Example of Dialogue:

A Clean Well-Lighted Place


Listening for Dialogue:

Watch for how Hemingway does the following: 

The following tips come from "Top 8 Tips for writing dialogue"

1. Really listening to speech: notice how people basically communicate. Do they have to explain a lot, or is much understood? Do they talk in complete sentences or fragments? How does rhythm come into play in everyday speech? Also pay attention to how little it takes for you to understand what they're talking about.

2.  Not exactly like real speech: Alfred Hitchcock said that a good story was "life, with the dull parts taken out." This very much applies to dialogue. A transcription of a conversation would be completely boring to read. Edit out the filler words and unessential dialogue

3. Not too much info!  It should not be obvious to the reader that they're being fed important facts. Let the story unfold naturally. You don't have to tell the reader everything up front

4. Break it up with action. Remind your reader that your characters are physical human beings by grounding their dialogue in the physical world. Physical details help break the monotony of dialogue.

5. Don't overdo the dialogue tags. Veering too much beyond "he said/she said" only draws attention to the tags — and you want the reader's attention centered on your brilliant dialogue, not your ability to think of synonyms for "said."

6-8: Read widely, avoid stereotypes, and punctuate properly.