BringBackTheDialogue.com

Hm… well, I write in first-person and maybe this is a modest bit too much but as for emotions… well, I’m kind of emotional. It’s sort of embarrassing. But when I want to make sure I describe everything perfectly, I’ll watch a movie, or listen to a song. Or just memories sometimes will trigger an emotion. And sometimes I’ll take a few minutes to stop writing and picture everything the way I want them to be. And I’ll pretend that I’m the person, the main character, and place myself in their position. And then, I’ll write everything I feel down. And I’m a girl, and sometimes girls react differently to things than guys, so I’ll try to write in the girls’ point of view for the most part. And also, it’s excellent to be very descriptive and try to make sure that you describe what you reckon about all the vital thoughts clearly. Like, if the best-friend of the main character got a new boyfriend/girlfriend, you’d want to make sure the reader knew what the main characters feelings were for the guy/girl… if you despised him or thought he was perfect for the friend, that sort of thing. Well, I hope I helped and I’m sorry if some of the stuff I typed is unintelligible; I’m on Eastern coast time and it’s like 1 in the morning and I had a long, long day. GOOD LUCK!

1) Your character can’t say what other characters are feeling. So you can’t write:

– “I despise you!” I screamed. Phil was heartbroken at the words as tears burned out of his eyes. –

Your character can’t know that Phil is heartbroken, she can only know what she feels and what she observes.

– “I despise you!” I screamed. Phil’s expression froze, and tears spilled out of his eyes without him even blinking them out. –

See how all of Phil’s description is external? Your character observes and makes judgments based on the observations. Your character can only guess how Phil feels.

2) Your character can’t talk about things unless she is there to tell about them. You can’t say:

– While I was at the supermarket, Tina came looking for me. Mom and Dad chose not to tell me, so that I wouldn’t get in tears. –

Even if your character eventually finds out that Tina came, she can’t tell the event before she really finds the fact out.

3) You must tell the tale AS your character the whole time. The vocabulary, the attitude, EVERYTHING about the storytelling must adopt his character.

– It made me feel sort of sad when I hung it up. I thought of her going in a store and buying it and nobody in the store knowing she was a prostitute and all. The salesman probably just thought she was a regular girl when she bought it. It made me feel sad as hell – I don’t know why exactly. – Catcher in the Rye –

Even though the character is not speaking dialogue, you can tell how he would talk out loud, because he’s telling the tale with his own voice and character. He wouldn’t ever use vocabulary he didn’t know or didn’t feel comfortable using in his real speech.

4) If you’re telling in first person, you can’t keep many secrets from the reader without REALLY irritating them. If your character knows something, your reader has to know it too. So you can’t go:

– Jim reached out mentally, and I let him read all my thoughts. Well, nearly all of them. I place huge walls around the one thing that would ruin me, the one surprise he could by no means know.

“You’re safe” Jim said. I relaxed. He still didn’t know, or he would by no means call me safe.

“Let’s go eat lunch!” I said.
–

If the surprise isn’t clarified sometime soon, it’s infuriating because I KNOW the character knows, and I KNOW the character is thinking about this surprise, and the only reason she’s not “saying” it is because the writer is putting a block between me and the character, keeping me from an vital thought. That’s obnoxious. Don’t make something a mystery to the reader when it’s not a mystery to the character telling the tale.

Hope that helps! Excellent luck!

writing in 1st person is super simple. I had to do a document for my History class in High School as if I was a soldier writing a letter to my family. And my teacher loved mine so much he read it out loud to the class. It’s simple just pretend your writing in a diary or a journal, your writing YOUR thoughts, from YOUR point of view, YOUR perspective… A excellent example is Twilight, it’s written in Bella’s point of view, she’s telling the tale, or you can reckon of Dinner with a Perfect Weirder, A Day with a Perfect Weirder, or the Next Level, written by the author David Gregory, all written in 1st person. I hope this helps you. GOOD LUCK!!!!!!!