Prompt: Read Chapter 6: Writing Dialogue. What was interesting/helpful/informational that you found?

Response: This chapter focused on writing dialogue. Specifically, the author discussed what makes dialogue effective as well as what makes dialogue ‘bad’. Personally, I struggle with writing dialogue because I tend to overthink what my characters would say and what sounds right for that scene. I think most people struggle with dialogue for the same reasons, though there are many who overuse dialogue in the wrong ways. The short section about using adverbs and avoiding the said paradigm was especially helpful to me. Going back to our discussion surrounding description, I think I try to make everything 100% clear when characters are speaking, which causes me to fall into the adverb trap. While it’s okay sometimes, you can’t have lines that, almost comically, describe how a character said something. I’ve also heard the warnings of many teachers and writers who preach that we need to avoid the word, “said” at all costs, since it is overused. I’ve followed that advice, but seeing the reasoning behind why said is the quid pro quo was eye-opening to me. Said is overused, but it’s for a good reason. The author explained that using the word said is commonplace and expected by readers, allowing the dialogue to move in a snappy, conservation-like fashion. Obviously, this makes sense, as a writer wants to make their dialogue life-like enough to make the story poignant. In my future writing, I think it would be good to try using said more instead of struggling to find other placeholders.