A rich and useful companion for practicing writers.
How to write dialogue that is convincing, effective, and original.
A popular lecturer in the art of story, McKee (Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, 1997) brings considerable expertise to this detailed, informative guide to creating dialogue for stage, screen, TV, and prose fiction. The book is organized into four parts addressing the art of dialogue, flaws and fixes, character-specific dialogue, and a sophisticated analysis of dialogue design. Although he usefully explicates specific excerpts of dialogue from many sources, McKee assumes that his readers are knowledgeable practitioners who will fill in references to works as diverse as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth, Seinfeld, Frasier, and The Godfather. The author distinguishes three levels of communication: the said (what a character expresses to others), the unsaid (a character’s inner thoughts and feelings), and the unsayable (a character’s subconscious urges). A writer “must master the double dimension of dialogue—the outer aspect of what is said versus the inner truth of what is thought and felt.” McKee offers many examples of “true-to-character talk,” contrasting it with generic, predictable dialogue; he cautions against using trauma—sexual abuse, for example—as explanation “for virtually any extreme behavior.” Case studies highlight scenes that are successful and those that “feel lifeless or false.” Although McKee cautions that “no one can teach you how to write,” he succeeds in defining “the shape and function of a scene” and laying out its components and inner workings. “Creativity is choice-making,” the author writes, and choices derive from the writer’s needs and goals. “This book,” he claims, “explores the forms that underlie dialogue but never proposes formulae for writing it.” Nevertheless, exercises and abundant examples provide much guidance in giving voice to characters.
A rich and useful companion for practicing writers.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-9191-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.
Largely autobiographical meditations and wanderings through landscapes external and internal.
National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Solnit (River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, 2003, etc.) roams through a large territory here. The book cries out for an explanatory subtitle: “field guide” shouldn’t be taken as a literal description of these eclectic memories, keen observations and provocative musings. Four of Solnit’s essays have the same title, “The Blue of Distance,” but the first segues from the blue in Renaissance paintings to a turquoise blouse the author wore as a child, then to the blue of distance seen on a walk across the drought-shrunken Great Salt Lake. The second presents Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who wandered for years in the Americas, and then several white children taken captive by Indians; their stories demonstrate that a person can cease to be lost not only by returning, but also by turning into someone else. The third blue essay explores the world of country and western music, full of tales of loss and longing. The fourth introduces the eccentric artist Yves Klein, who patented the formula for his special electric blue paint and claimed to be launching a new Blue Age. How does it all fit in? Don’t ask, just enjoy, for Solnit is a captivating writer. Woven in and out of these four pieces and the five others that alternate with them are Solnit’s immigrant ancestors, lost friends, former lovers, favorite old movies, her own dreams, the house she grew up in, harsh deserts, animals on the edge of extinction and abandoned buildings. All become material for the author’s explorations of loss, losing and being lost.
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03421-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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