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Creating a setting
Setting is a particular time and place. It surrounds your characters and impacts on them. Go into a landscape in your imagination and try to paint what you see and feel with words.
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"For me, describing settings is intimately linked to character. I find it impossible to enter into a character's ideas or philosophy without describing where they are, and what they are surrounded by. Use your own experience, plunder the sensual information stored in your body and your memory. Use all your senses."
Michèle Roberts
The many functions of dialogue
- Dialogue can reveal character, advance plot, it's a great potential source for humour, and it can permit characters to discuss the central themes of your novel. Remember that dialogue is not real speech - but it must give the impression of real speech.
"Dialogue can do so many things, that's the fun of writing it. Really the sky's the limit for the potential for dialogue! Make the dialogue as realistic as possible - a character might swear for example, or use slang, but I try to write in a more eloquent, impersonal mode in the prose surrounding the dialogue. That's a good rule of thumb."
Elliot Perlman
- Read your dialogue out loud in the privacy of your own workroom to check if it's effective. You'll develop a gut feeling about how much dialogue to write, if you read plenty of other novels. It's worth remembering too, that dialogue can speed up the pace of a novel.
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