“Dialogue is a hard thing to write.”
“Oh, come on, why do you say that?” Jack asked, turning to face me. “Action is way harder to write than dialogue. You have to convey movements in text while making it easy to read. Dialogue is just people talking.”
“Yeah, but why are they talking?” I responded, still focused on my laptop. “Who’s talking? Do they like each other? Is the speech of one or both of them impaired in some way? How do you make it so you get the right feelings across? I’m not saying action isn’t hard, just that dialogue is harder.”
“I say you’re both wrong,” Sophie interjected. “Scene establishment and descriptions are the most difficult to write.”
“I’m quite serious. Take for instance where we are. How would you write it?”
“I…I mean, we’re in a cafe.”
“Describe it in a way that gives the reader enough information to picture it in their mind while not taking up too much time to read.”
Jack leans back for a moment and sighs. “Everyone knows what a cafe is.”
“But what does this one look like? Is there anyone interesting here? What’s the general feel of the interior? Details like this aren’t simple to pass along without it feeling amateur.”
“Okay then, you tell me how to write three people fighting in an open room with nothing around them. You gotta describe the movements they take, every step, every swing, every bend, but make it flow swiftly like the reader can see it.”
“Not every story has fighting in it.”
“But everyone moves! Everyone does something to get from point A to point B in a scene! You have to be able to tell people how they do that.”
“But you first need to set the scene the characters are moving in. You can’t leave out an important part of a scene and only bring it up when the character has to interact with it.”
“Ugh, I’ve got enough to do right now than argue with you about this again,” Jack grumbled, turning back to his computer in a huff. Sophie looked at me incredulously for a second before doing the same. I lean back and wipe my eyes, taking a breather from the screen.
“God, dialogue is hard to write.”
