Speaking of Dialogue

Hello and welcome to you all! Sorry for the off-week there; but now I'm back! And I got a beta-reader's critique back. It was less generous than others I have received, but as with most feedback it did teach me a few things. Now, a couple notes on this beta reader before I get started, because I don't want to paint her in a horrible light (even though you'll never know who she is): first, her reading was required for a class she was taking. Yes, my academic adviser is sometimes awesome like that. So she might not have been reading it with the utmost care; it also might not really have been her genre. Second, I have an 85% accurate guess on who the reader was (my adviser didn't tell me outright, but I'm pretty sure he mentioned who was in the class, she was one of them, and it sounds like a review she would write) and she is a very strong, very opinionated, very confident person. I find her sometimes to be mean, but not malicious. That will be important later.
So, I won't share with you the whole review, but just a few things that seemed important. One of her critiques was that much of my dialogue was interchangeable; that words could be taken from one character's mouth and put into another with no harm done or confusion added. I've actually used this critique myself, before; but that was only when the entire piece read like that.

And I started thinking about it, because that's a critique used quite a bit, actually. And I wondered: who do these critics hang out with that every piece of conversation they have is so infused with idiosyncrasy that they could tell each one of their friends apart without hearing their voices? I mean, there are individual statements that I might say "That sounds like something so-and-so would say." But even then, I usually only say that when someone else says something I think such-and-such other person would say! So of course some of the dialogue could be transposed; because the line needed to be said, and someone had to say it.

So in your own writing, if you're the kind of person who writes, don't be so all-fired concerned about every line your characters deliver sounding like it could come from their mouths and only their mouths. That would be weird.

But I think the biggest thing I learned from it concerns not any part of the content of the book, but who it's audience might be -- who the "ideal reader" is; or, is not. Generally speaking, if you are a confident, goal-oriented, fiercely independent person who knows exactly what you want from life and how to get it, I probably don't have anything for you. Every single one of my characters, whether they admit to it or not, are lost. Some are very lost, some are only a little; but none of them know what they're doing on a grand scale. Each of them are particularly skilled in a certain area: Haydren has mad sword-skills, Geoffrey has some sword-skills too but is also older and wise, Pladt has phenomenal archery skills, Sarah is a strong magic user with an equally-strong will; and none of them know how to get what they want. The point of the book is the working-out of all that.

There. Call that a little sneak-preview. And see you Friday.