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mburnamfink 's review for:
There's a joke going around that I can't find, but it's something like:
How to draw a cat in 3 easy steps:
1) draw a circle for the face
2) draw a larger oval for the body
3) a fully shaded gorgeous drawing of a cat.
Much of which applies to Hough's book. He has a certain kind of writing in mind, muscular American dialog in the tradition of Mark Twain, Hemingway, and Cormac McCarthy. Hough himself writes literary novels about the Civil War and the Old West, and he treats those the most important topics.
Some of Hough's advice is elementary, and quite solid. Avoid words other than "said", and said is itself a pacing mechanism, a way to insert a little pause into a rapid back and forth. Similarly, adverbs can be discarded. Great dialog is poetic, hyperreal, the tense whipcracks that reveal character and emotion without a lot of adornment. But dialog is also impossible to separate from character and plot, and Hough assumes that you're able to produce fully shaded stories on command.
How to draw a cat in 3 easy steps:
1) draw a circle for the face
2) draw a larger oval for the body
3) a fully shaded gorgeous drawing of a cat.
Much of which applies to Hough's book. He has a certain kind of writing in mind, muscular American dialog in the tradition of Mark Twain, Hemingway, and Cormac McCarthy. Hough himself writes literary novels about the Civil War and the Old West, and he treats those the most important topics.
Some of Hough's advice is elementary, and quite solid. Avoid words other than "said", and said is itself a pacing mechanism, a way to insert a little pause into a rapid back and forth. Similarly, adverbs can be discarded. Great dialog is poetic, hyperreal, the tense whipcracks that reveal character and emotion without a lot of adornment. But dialog is also impossible to separate from character and plot, and Hough assumes that you're able to produce fully shaded stories on command.