John Baker’s Blog

In casual conversation all speakers slur vowels, drop final consanants and take short-cuts through syntax. Don’t tell me this only occurs with people on the lower rungs of the social scale. If you believe that, you haven’t learned to listen yet.
In the latest post in this series I suggested that speech transferred to the page [...]

There are a few people who can hear the individuation of different speakers. We have all heard mimics, people who can detect and transmit these differences almost immediately. But most of us only pick up the substance of a conversation. Even strongly marked differences between different speakers are rarely heard well enough to be reproduced.
Try [...]

I’ve managed to avoid talking about dialogue in this series up to now, but eventually it has to be dealt with. I don’t think it’s possible to deal with it adequately in one post. So what I have to say will be supplemented later by a couple of additional posts.
It is a complicated subject because [...]

I have spoken before about the drawbacks of long and detailed descriptions. But here I would like to concentrate on how character development is created most satisfactorily, not in description, but in action.
In defining someone by their possessions, you do not do yourself a favour by writing, “She owned a Saab convertible,” nor by showing [...]