unholyGhostwriter
Dreamer
I come from a family of book-lovers and artists, so I've pretty much been reading my entire life, and I've been writing for almost just as long. I've had a lot of people tell me that how I write characters interacting is really good, and not to toot my own horn here but I'm pretty proud of some of the dialogue I've written, too. But I've also reread a lot of my old works, as well as other books that I've loved at different stages in my life, and for a long time I've wondered this: is the quality of written dialogue weighed objectively or subjectively?
If I wrote a dialogue scene now and showed it to two different people, and one person liked and the other person hated it, how would I know if their criticisms were based off of how objectively good (believable, understandable, etc.) it is, or based off of their own personal like/dislike for the dialogue itself? If I showed a written conversation between two Gen Z characters to a 50-year-old and a 17-year-old, or vice versa, would their opinions be towards by the structure of the dialogue or the dialogue itself? The reason this confuses me is because both opinions are valid and even sometimes crucial when trying to see if dialogue is good, but there are some books where the dialogue structure is "unconventional", for lack of a better word (e.g. characters talking in disjointed, uncomplete sentences) that obviously still work, and the same applies for "conventional" dialogue that is mind-numbingly unengaging.
So how do you guys think dialogue quality is gauged? Do you prefer judging it according to how it makes you feel versus how well it puts for the message? Does it entirely depend on context? How do you find the balance? Is this all just an incoherent train of thought? I'd like to know what anyone else thinks.
If I wrote a dialogue scene now and showed it to two different people, and one person liked and the other person hated it, how would I know if their criticisms were based off of how objectively good (believable, understandable, etc.) it is, or based off of their own personal like/dislike for the dialogue itself? If I showed a written conversation between two Gen Z characters to a 50-year-old and a 17-year-old, or vice versa, would their opinions be towards by the structure of the dialogue or the dialogue itself? The reason this confuses me is because both opinions are valid and even sometimes crucial when trying to see if dialogue is good, but there are some books where the dialogue structure is "unconventional", for lack of a better word (e.g. characters talking in disjointed, uncomplete sentences) that obviously still work, and the same applies for "conventional" dialogue that is mind-numbingly unengaging.
So how do you guys think dialogue quality is gauged? Do you prefer judging it according to how it makes you feel versus how well it puts for the message? Does it entirely depend on context? How do you find the balance? Is this all just an incoherent train of thought? I'd like to know what anyone else thinks.