| Level: | Intermediate |
| Pages: | 136 |
| Published: | 2014 |
| Arbitrary Rating: | 5/5 |
| Plan to Reread: | Yes |
When I first started reading this book I was convinced I was going to hate it. James Scott Bell has a ton of short how to ___ books under his belt and that's usually a dead give away that someone is trying to milk a market. I must have gotten used to all the mediocre how to books that I just lost hope. Turns out, this guy is the real deal.
Added bonus, the text for this books run all the way to the very end without the extra page fillers like an index and pie charts that some people sneak in. If you've ever been reading a e-book and hit the end around 80% you know what I'm talking about.
James Scott Bell's "How to Write Dazzling Dialogue: The Fastest Way to Improve Any Manuscript" came across my radar when I started looking for some kind of guidance on how to make conversations more interesting. The first comic I decided to roll with is more in the vein of suspense / drama so I can't rely on pretty pictures and flashy action to carry it.
James gives examples of awful writing, followed by several iterations that offer improvements. He also offers some exercises to loosen up your writing style and break through writer's block.
Some of the suggestions in this book seem a little silly though. For example, he uses a random number generator (or dice) to pick a random page in a random book and then drops the first line of dialogue from the book into the piece he's working on. The odds are just astronomically against anything making sense, but maybe it's good for a chuckle. This is what I came up with using an random number generator I found on-line and "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo":
"Sorry. No hope," he said. Less outlandish than I was expecting but a little on the dark side.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and plan to revisit it after I've gotten a few rough drafts completed so I can experiment with some of the techniques to see if it jazzes up my dialogue.
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