Tiffany M. Davis

Total word count goal: 50,000

Total blog post goal: 30 

Today’s word count: 3,210

Today’s blog count: 2

Total words written: 4,944

Total blog posts: 2

Today was a pretty good day for writing! I wrote 3,210 words for my NaNoWriMo novel, which is a medical thriller. I got a lot farther than I thought I would, and I attribute that to dialogue. I am pretty good at writing dialogue, if I do say so myself, so it comes easily to me.

Dialogue is tricky; you really have to pay attention to how people really speak, versus how they should speak based on grammatical rules. It gets trickier hen dialogue is written for people who have known each other for a long time and/or are very comfortable with each other: there is a penchant for verbal shorthand that is sometimes augmented by nonverbal expression, and grammar tends to go out of the window (double negatives, anyone?). The key is keeping the dialogue true while making it accessible/understandable to readers.

I set up two key conversations that give hints to the plot. One was simply two friends running into each other in a store. The other was more complex and took more time: a layered conversation between a married couple. Setting those layers took more out of me, because no relationship exists in one dimension. In this case, a lot of things were triggered by what seems to be a simple decision on the surface; trying to convey those various emotions was an exercise, especially when buried emotions come to fore.

All that being said, I accomplished a lot today. I’m going to relax my mind with some NBA games, and a few rounds of Bejeweled Blitz, and perhaps a movie later. Meanwhile, I will work out tomorrow’s plot advances in my head.

Thanks for stopping by.