- Joined
- Oct 9, 2023
There's a lot of things that won't help you with. It might give you a superficial sense of the way people speak and behave, but you wouldn't be able to create a deeper psychological profile of a character by listening to strangers. You need to actually form relationships with people.
Also, there's no shame in setting all your stories in the same location--Stephen King and, I believe, the Bronte sisters basically did that--but if you want to get a sense of different modes of life in different types of locations, it might help to travel a bit.
Dialogue is a weird one. I mean, everyone talks to people at least once in a while, or has done at some point. But some writers just have no knack for dialogue at all even if they're married, have friends, etc. Maybe it comes down to not being observant, or just not really understanding the people in their lives well.
As someone else said, it helps to read out loud. Or you can do what I do and imagine someone you know--who is similar personality-wise to the character in question--saying the lines you just wrote.
Is this really true? It sounds like a stereotype, like what non-writers think writers are like.
In terms of deriving inspiration for new stories, consuming a broad variety of media can actually be more helpful than "living life". Speculative genres will require you to invent entirely new rules for your world that don't exist in real life, and reading books that are similar can help you get a feel for how to implement those rules. Your average person's life can only be so interesting, anyhow--in fact, if an author imprints themselves too heavily onto their protagonist, and the events are too directly informed by their own experience, it is very obvious to the reader and I find it irritating because it suggests a lack of creativity. (Or, in a certain way, I guess I consider it dishonest--if you're going to write something autobiographical, write an autobiography, and if you're going to write fiction, write fiction. This isn't an objective truth, but I'm sure there are other readers who share my opinion.)
Rather than "living" yourself, I think the most important element is forming friendships with or at least interacting with a variety of people whose beliefs and lifestyles differ in some way from your own. I've written protagonists before who were much more like relatives of mine or characters from media I've consumed than myself, which I also prefer because my self-perception is often more volatile than my perception of others.
