Dialogue vs Description
Triggered by the tidying of a still unexplored room in our house and finding some old “classic” French books, I remembered a belief I had when I was younger. Although I can’t exactly recall why I had it, I suspect it had to do a lot with studying a certain amount of said classic books at school.It could be summarized as follows: “description is better than dialogue”.That’s it, I thought that the longer and the more detailed descriptions were, the better the book would be, too. Dialogue? Some puny thing, used only to provide some relief to the eyes among heavy blocks of text. In fact, I’m more and more certain that our teachers had told us at some point that dialogue was “easy”, and that it denoted a lack of talent in writing.Tell you what, twelve years later, I’m not convinced of this anymore, at least not when it comes to fiction works, and frankly, where else would dialogue wield so much importance anyway?Read More
Currently perusing and comparing webhosting services, I went off a tangent in my head about how my perception of the internet has evolved since I started using it…I’m not one of the early children of the web, but I’m not too new to it either. My first contact with it was in 1997, when our teacher in Applied English class decided that we had to be open to the world, and dragged us at the school library for a few sessions on the computers. From 1997 to 1999, I went on accessing websites sporadically from college computers, when I had some time to surf; my main researches at the time were on the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Enoch, and websites related to Mage: The Ascension, so my use of the internet was a very basic one. Later on in 1999, the friend who was to become my boyfriend convinced me to take an e-mail address at the university, which I did: I had discovered the joys of e-mailing! From there, my horizons expanded, and by year 2000, I would access the web everyday, or almost.I suppose that all of us who went to gradually use this tool had our little lightbulb moments, as well as stupid beliefs on which we stood corrected later on. Here are some of the things I remember, mainly from these 1997-1999 years. In a way, it’s very funny:
The reason why I haven’t blogged about anything insightful since Thursday is the image on the left, and I must simply admit that s much as I wanted to finish my next planned entry yesterday evening, I’ve been too dead tired to go on with it. In any case, I’m glad I went to the European Fair no matter what.
A little musing on my mind today: in the case of fiction (since I assume that it’s not really appliable to non-fiction works), do some of you also happen to sketch their characters, or even landscapes, actions, and so on, instead of directly describing them in your books? This is regardless of style and skill, and only as a personal way of fixing your ideas, not as artwork in itself.My own style isn’t what you could call “realistic” (my influences mainly come from comics and manga, as well as a certain type of vector works), but I’ve found that more often, sketching helps me to write better descriptions, as what I want to show is clearly pictured in my mind already. Moreover, in the case of action scenes, it’s also a good exercise for me to see if said action can be performed by a human body, or is just looking nice in my own perception. If the latter can seem laughable, sometimes it really isn’t, and has already allowed me to avoid… many mistakes.
I’ve just finished reading Who’s There,