WEEK FOUR
Drabble:
“You care about him.”
It doesn’t sound like a question. She grunts in confirmation.
He doesn’t seem to get that. “A lot, from what I can see.”
She shrugs. “Does it matter?”
“To me, yes.”
“I’ve a duty to him.”
“So do they all.”
“There something special ‘bout me, then?”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“… Following orders.”
“He chose you over the male warriors he had at his disposal.”
“He did.”
He pauses. “You don’t want to be here,” he observes.
She doesn’t want to answer.
“… He cares about you, too.”
And she doesn’t want to answer that either.
Reflection:
Flow of narrative/does it make sense?
For a brief, introductory narrative it does make sense. Just by itself it doesn’t necessarily but the main point here is that it still makes sense in the way that it brings forth questions in the reader. It’s and opening to something else that’s bigger but if I regard it as a stand-alone it doesn’t make a lot of sense. However, I think this is because dialogue tends to be messy at most since it’s rather reliant on a character’s personality and interactions happens naturally based on chance and what’s being said. There’s no real guarantee or where it will go and there’s no real ‘perfect’ conversation, which makes this drabble seem a bit lacklustre since it needs context that doesn’t quite fit to help it make sense.
Visual/emotional impact:
There’s not much description in this drabble which makes it hard for the reader to get any visual impact from this. However, since there’s no description in this, there’s more room for the reader to garner their own interpretations of what’s being done from the dialogue. From this, the visual impact perhaps outweighs the emotional side of things.
Speaking of the emotional impact, I don’t think there was much to be felt in this drabble. The fact that this was meant to be something introducing readers to a larger plot means that there’s nothing for readers to attach themselves to, nothing for them to relate to, which makes this drabble’s empathetic traits quite null and void.
Was the original intent conveyed/changed in any way?
The original intent itself was to draw the reader into wanting to learn more, to invoke questions and promise answers somewhere along the narrative that this drabble suggests exists. I think the original intent was conveyed quite well and presents vague enough information for someone completely new to the narrative to want to read on more.
What was easy?
Writing dialogue tends to be very easy for me. The naturalness of the voice and the way characters interact is vivid in my head, especially when I get an idea of how they will speak based on their personality in the first place. Inserting the little piece of descriptions was also easy for me since I can picture how they’ll act in accordance with what they say as well as what they’ll feel.
What was hard?
The hardest thing for me on this was how to manage, once again, the word count. As I wrote it, I kept in mind what was being said and how useful it was to the conversation at hand and so when I went back to edit it, it was hard to pinpoint what was useful to the dialogue and what wasn’t. It took me a while to figure out what wasn’t necessary to tell the small story I had going so I think concision in dialogue is something I need to work on somehow.
What did I find interesting?
Body language is something I find interesting to write, especially when it conveys half the dialogue and the majority of what the character means in conversation. Small things like clenching your hand or narrowing your eyes the slightest bit has an effect on whatever’s said in the first place. In this one, I didn’t use it as much as I wanted to because, as I said above, the dialogue tends to speak for itself. However, there are some things that can be added to here simply to convey how strong an emotion is behind a sentence. Before I started cutting down to meet the word count, I deleted a few things that related to their body language but the intentions were still carried by the dialogue despite that.
What changes do I want to make on the second draft based on the criteria set for myself?
I want to try to do dialogue with 50/50 action and actual speech. While there’s somewhat of a balance here, I want to nail that while still being concise and also see if I can get body language to speak half the dialogue itself.