Turco’s Dialogue
Just finished another writing book. This one was “Dialogue” by Lewis Turco, part of Writer’s Digest’s “Elements of Fiction Writing” series. The series is wonderful: this book, however, is its weakest link. (Sorry, Lewis, but someone had to be.) Part of it is just me — I like my how-to books to be really how-to, and Turco even says he dislikes that and didn’t want to write it that way. That’s his choice. I’m just not sure I learned as much from a protracted dialogue about dialogue as I might have in some other format.
On the bright side, it did have a lot of useful definitions with examples. Not that you could find them again if you needed to, because the book’s organization is so poor…. I’ll keep the book, but only because I don’t want to break up the complete WD set — and I’m going to go try someone else’s texts on dialogue in the hopes that I’ll have better luck. Thumbs down on this one! And if you would like to know all the myriad things that are wrong with it, which I’m not taking the time to cover here, read any of the 14 bad reviews it got on amazon.com!
If you’d been paying attention, the dialogue that you
were reading was actually doing what it was telling
you how to do.