The winning ingredients: dialogue

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 58

As promised (and in no particular order), allow me to explain a bit more about what Brian and I look for when judging contest entries.

Dialogue: such a deceptively simple part of a story. Unless all of your characters have taken vows of silence (now wouldn’t that be a fun read), you’re going to need them to talk to each other.

It seems so easy. You probably talk and listen to people all day long, possibly even chewing gum at the same time. How hard could it be to get some decent dialogue down in black and white?

In a word: very. There are so many pitfalls that can arise when your characters open their mouths and assert their First Amendment rights. Next time, I will go into detail on some of the ways dialogue can go wrong and set off our stinky-writing detectors.

But let’s start off positive. In our opinion, good dialogue is a subtle balancing act. It rings true enough to be believable. It has a quality of invisibility, in which the reader is drawn into imagining the story to the point that he almost forgets he’s reading words on a page. But it’s also more than a transcription of a real conversation. It’s interesting and compelling, and it serves to advance the plot and expose your characters’ fears and desires. A tall order to be sure, but by no means impossible.