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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThirdWizard" data-source="post: 3123838" data-attributes="member: 12037">Two things: I mostly come at this subject from a poetry point of view, and I'm also looking at the subject from a small scale. I'm talking about things like word usage, sentence length, well written dialogue, adjective and adverb use. Little things. So when I say you have to look toward your contemporaries I'm talking about things like this. I'm not even discussing plots. Before you can learn to write well, thus, you have to read and assimilate these things.I'll give an example. When writing dialogue, it is considered better to use he said/she said instead of words like "exlaimed" and "threatened." The reason for this is that dialogue which can infer these things itself, without having to explicitly explain to the reader is superior. Why? It's stronger, stands on its own, and the reader understands what is expressed as it is read. Is it okay to break away from this from time to time? Yes. Does that mean its a bad guideline? No. Dialogue that can accomplish this will thus be better than dialogue that can't.Now, you can say that you love dialogue that explains in minute detail what it means. That's fine. But, that has nothing to do with whether something is written well. I'm talking about the written word and the craft of writing. Is it subjective? Well it obviously isn't objective, but so what? There's a gray area in between. If a critic says a text has weak dialogue, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say, whether you enjoy reading it or not.Take B Movies. B Movies are pretty bad. Just because people can enjoy them doesn't make them good. People enjoy them because they're bad. So people can enjoy bad things, and bad things can be enjoyed. That's okay. I enjoy some pretty bad things.</blockquote>

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