The Healthy Edit, 2nd Edition

12

Psychiatry of Character Disorders—Part I

► Dialogue

Well-written dialogue evokes a sense of reality, even though it is, in essence, unreal. Where people in everyday life may speak on and on, in movies their dialogue usually confines itself to one or two sentences at a time. In a sense, dialogue is more about the listener than the speaker, since most of us, most of the time, don’t listen well to anything that doesn’t immediately impact us. Tell someone about how your day went, a dream you had, or what you did on vacation, and his attention drifts in and out. Tell that same person that the tests came back positive and he only has three weeks to live, and you have got his full attention.

With dialogue we become distressed when too much information ...