18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue
Writing Excuses
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The Importance of Intention in Dialogue
Every line of dialogue is doing two jobs on the page. There's the authorial intention, the reason that you, the author, need that line to be there. And then there's the reason the character is saying that - which can change depending on who they're talking to. So it's like I could not have that multi-syllabic partial utterance conversation with Dan with the majority of the listeners because we don't have any of that shared context. Those actually, it wasn't polySyllabic, it was multi-gruntle. Multi-gruntles are a very specific modality.
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