Pruning a Dialogue Scene by Vera Day https://twitter. com/VeraDayAuthor Last year I was a judge in the First Impressions contest sponsored by the American Christian Fiction Writers. It’s a writing contest for novice writers. One of the common weaknesses among entries was dialogue. Writers put extra details in the action-text (or the “beats”) surrounding characters’ speech. All that fluff distracts from what a character says.
To solve this, trim mercilessly. Consider this passage in which a young woman applies for a job:
He handed me the clipboard. I grasped it. He nodded at me, sat in the chair behind his desk, took a moment to scoot his chair in, then eyed me from across his desk. “Why do you want to work at Clive Associates food industry advertising agency?”
