Dialogue and such- Lauren W.

“Lets leave the bitch to die.”
I thoroughly enjoyed today’s discussion on energy in a piece of writing and how to include energy by adding interesting dialogue. I found the most successful dialogues in “A gift of years”. It was useful in contrasting the characters of Mai, Lam, her husband, as well as Lam’s wife. As we said in class what contributed to Lam’s interesting and complicated relationship with Mai had to do with his past and more present memories of his youngest daughter. It is the dialogue, however, that leaves us wondering if his actual good memories of Mai being “innocent” are actually accurate to real life. It is also very clear from the dialogue in this piece that Mai’s life style and priorities were very different from her fathers.
When we used examples of dialogue from the stories we read to an actual class activity I found this effective in how to make dialogue in our own pieces of writing more interesting. I know I did not include any dialogue in the current piece of writing we are working on and hopefully this exercise helped me so I can change that. What made my dialogue with Craig so interesting was that we added humor to what we were saying because our characters were so different. We focused more on what our own character wanted and therefore it created suspense and argument. I think the exercise led us both to realize this is an effective thing to include in a story. The question is can we put it to our own writing?