18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue
Writing Excuses
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How to Compress Conversational Dialogue
I like to think of conversational dialogue in books as a compression algorithm. I don't know what the right compression algorithm is for everything, but I know that it has to be compressed because real conversations take a lot longer than they take in books. When you read a breakup conversation in a romance novel, when you see one in a romcom, it is not three hours. What got compressed? What were the key colors and how many pixels did they run for until the reader knew that that was the color that they needed?
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