#025 – Get-up and Go … crisp conversation that flows!

Carrying on with our post #24 we listed ten considerations to ensure your 'get-up and go' had simply not 'got-up and gone'. The first two asked you to consider Clarity and Thrift which we did, and Style and Sentences as reviewed previously. So let's now have a look at what might well be described as crisp conversation and the way it flows.

Is Conversation Crisp?

One of the keystones of writing conversation must be to simply write as you speak and having conversations in your book that your character would have in real life. You have invented your characters, so it must be fairly straight forward to mimic their conversation. This will put a stamp of uniqueness and authority on your work, allowing you to stand out from other submissions littering the crowded editor's desk. As stated earlier, it will be to your advantage to avoid long, rambling paragraphs unless you have the grammatical skill to make the words flow correctly. The words you use and more importantly, the words you allow your characters to use, also dictate the tone of your writing and that tone translates to how the reader views your work, how involved he or she may become with your characters and most importantly, how they will react to the actions of your characters. Conversation is king!

Does It Flow?

When your characters are having a long and serious thought, it's a good idea to make sure it's actually part of the plot. It can be all too easy to fall in to the trap of giving out long and confusing thoughts that are not really related to the story line. The reality is, unless a beautifully crafted thought has some positive influence on the outcome of the current situation, then it stands the chance of diverting the reader's attention away from the action. If however, the 'musing' described as a 'thought' is important to the plot, make sure this adds to the tension of the moment rather than subtract from it. When you have changed an item of script from something that may impair the process of 'pace' and 'flow' to something that adds to it, you will find this pushes the reader forward, wanting to know if the involved character actually did have some sort of 'thrill'!