Workshops

Dialogue: The Mechanics of

with Tim Wynne-Jones

Saturday, April 21, 2018
9:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon
Algonquin College, Woodroffe Campus, Room J208

Cost, payable by cash, cheque or e-transfer:
$50 for members of the Canadian Authors Association
$65 for non-members

Register by sending a message to NCRadmin@canadianauthors.org

There are, simply stated, two kinds of narrative at work in a novel: scene and summary. It is in scene-work that the reader is closest to the action. The camera can dolly in tight on the characters, close enough to pick up every word and grumble, every shudder and wink. That’s where we come to really know the characters by what they do and, in dialogue, by what they say. But when we use the term dialogue, we can’t really divorce it from the “connective tissue” of a scene. Because we need to see the scene not simply hear it. This is how we account for the time in which a scene takes place. And that is the most important difference between scene and summary: a scene takes place in real time – time the writer must account for.

In this workshop, we will look at what makes a scene tick. And at the heart of that is dialogue. Dialogue’s chief job is to reveal character.