I do a one-woman show based on my book Dancing in Combat Boots, but few people know that the show actually started out as a fundraising effort for a local theater, and I performed it with several actresses. As we were back stage prepping before the show, one of the actresses was running some of her lines. She was tripping over one sentence, and I heard her mumble, “damn writers.”
Um, the writer is sitting right here, I wanted to say. But that’s when I realized just how many ways artists interact with the written word. Whether you are a visual artist writing a description of your piece for a catalog, a dancer reading an introduction you wrote for the performance, a singer working on the lyrics to a new song, or an actor editing a line of dialogue that just doesn’t work for you, understanding the basics of good writing will take you further.
So please click the link below to watch How to Write Great Dialogue-Part II. We’ll dig a little deeper in this second video, examining some of the more difficult areas of writing dialogue, including how to use slang and cussing, accents and dialect, humor, and much more. Enjoy!