Dialogue is easy, said the author

Whenever I write fiction, I find that the words flow best when I’m writing dialogue. I’m not sure why this is exactly, and for all I know it could be a normal feature of storytelling.

Dialogue, after all, is something that all of us are intimately familiar with. Most of us have rarely gone a day without speaking to another person since the day we first spoke. What we don’t do, however, is on a regular basis describe people or places or events in clear and tightly constructed sentences. That’s the hard part of writing for me, and I suspect it always will be.

This is not to sat that the dialogue I write is always good, or that I’m unable to write descriptively. I only mean that I struggle far more with the latter than the former, and that I really have to force myself to plow through long passages of description to get to a point where I can give my characters something to say.

I like hearing what they have to say.