Saturday, February 12, 2011

Talk That Walks: How Hemingway's Dialogue Powers A Story

John L' Heureux wrote an interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal about Ernest Hemingway's use of dialogue in his fiction.

"Young writers often confuse dialogue with conversation, under the assumption that the closer you get to reality, the more convincing you sound. But dialogue is not conversation. Dialogue is a construct; it is artificial; it is much more efficient and believable than real conversation. Just as fiction itself distorts reality in order to achieve a larger truth, so dialogue eliminates all the false starts and irrelevant intrusions of real life in order to reveal character and move the encounter toward a dramatic conclusion," L'Heueux wrote. "Ernest Hemingway demonstrated over and over that dialogue alone can carry a story. One of his best stories, "Hills Like White Elephants," is almost totally dialogue."

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704422204576130681760339992.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

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