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| "Tell us your name," said the
man. "Quick." From Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Does this mean all books with dialogues are novels? No, because quoted speech is sometimes found in Biographies and History. However, in these books there is usually very little speech, whereas in novels there is usually a great deal. Do all novels use quotation marks? Some writers nowadays are writing conversations without quotation marks. However, most novels still have them. In the past it was considered bad punctuation to omit them. Quotation marks are a useful sign that directly quoted speech is being used. Can there be a novel without dialogue? There are many ways of writing a novel. There is indeed no set form for a novel, because writing is an art and is made up by the writer as he goes along. There have for example been novels which consist almost entirely of letters (imaginary letters of course). Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, one of the earliest modern English novels, consists of letters. Others consist partly of letters and partly of dialogue. Sometimes a novel can take the form of an imaginary Diary. However, the great majority of novels include a lot of conversation. The rest is usually narrative and description. Narrative and Description A writer can tell a story by describing what is going on and the places where it is happening. Narrative tells the reader about events. Description tells about places and conditions. As well as these the writer can tell us about the characters and especially about their thoughts and feelings. Look at your friends. Can you tell what they are thinking about? Are they feeling well or miserable? Look in a bus. There's a man who looks happy. Is he feeling happy inside? From the outside one can't be sure. You can look at people's faces and try to understand what they are thinking and feeling but you can never be sure. You can't know for certain - though an experienced person can learn a great deal from life to help in understanding people. In a novel the author tells you what the characters are thinking and how they feel. He can tell you anything he wants because he is the one who imagined them. In a novel we can see inside the characters in a way we can't in real life. One of the marks of the better novel is that we learn more about the characters than in the less interesting novel. Those novels we want to read more than once are usually those which tell us most about the characters. |
A good novelist can make his characters seem
like real people. But this is not easy to do. That's one of the most useful things about reading novels. From a good novel (but not necessarily from a bad one) we can learn something about other people - even people quite different from ourselves. This is because a good novelist spends quite a large part of his life studying other people by watching the way they behave, talk, walk, and from what he knows about himself, the way they think. He may keep a notebook and write down pieces of conversation he overhears, to help him make up dialogue which sounds like real life. He also comes to know about the reasons for their doing what they do - Motivation. Some people think that films and television can tell stories better than a novel can. But it is very difficult to make a film in which the audience can learn the thoughts of the characters. A film is better at showing us the sort of house a character lives in, the kind of car he drives, or anything else on the outside. Only a printed novel or short story can tell us what is going on inside. Novels written before the invention of film and television may have more description than novels of our time. Graham Greene has said that 19th century novelists wrote like painters, using a great deal of description. Modern readers who are used to seeing moving pictures from an early age find such descriptions tedious. Modern novelists may write more like film makers, using the quick changes from one scene to another common in films. When we read a novel written in the past we need to remember that their readers had different experiences from ours - and more time to read. A play on the stage is a bit like a film. In a play there is no description. The audience must get all the information about the story from what the actors say, their facial expressions and the way they move. A play is more like real life in which we have to observe people from the outside and work out what they are thinking. A writer of plays can only tell us about motives by indirect means. The best writers are able to overcome these difficulties. One of the strengths of Shakespeare is that he can tell us a great deal about the characters in his plays. How does a writer work? Not all writers work in the same way. There is no single necessary way of writing a novel (or of doing anything else). It is the finished product at the end which matters, not the way it is planned and written. Most writers probably start by having in mind an idea of the main events |
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