: Re: How to deal with cliche dialogue? The following is from a story I'm writing: "Goodbye Choco," my mother said, to end the prayer, â€œmay your soul rest in peace,â€ and crossed herself.

1) Lengthen it. You're not going to have rat-a-tat-tat patter graveside.

2) Take each phrase you feel is clichéd, determine the meaning, and rewrite it in different words. "All we want is for our children to grow healthy and happy" becomes "That's my biggest responsibility and my biggest hope — that my children are healthy and happy, and we didn't break them too much on the way to adulthood."

3) Try the exercise I recommended in my answer to this question, where you and a friend ad-lib the scene and record it. Play it back and see how real, unscripted dialogue sounds.

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: No, you can only do that if you're making some sort of break or shift in narrative style. If the story switches to a dream, for instance, or if the characters enter a Fae realm or another

@Debbie451

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: If you can't boil down your novel into a logline (or "elevator pitch," which is how I learned it), then you may actually have a problem with your novel. You've provided the structure of

@Debbie451

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: "Literary criticism" and "editing feedback" are two entirely different beasts. Litcrit is about looking at an existing text and analyzing it. You look at the author's intent, you look at symbolism,

@Debbie451

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: In narration, stay in one tense. "She had green eyes" is fine, because your entire story is in the past tense — the "present-past," if that makes sense. If she had green eyes as a

: Re: How to deal with cliche dialogue? The following is from a story I'm writing: "Goodbye Choco," my mother said, to end the prayer, â€œmay your soul rest in peace,â€ and crossed herself.

More posts by @Debbie451

: No, you can only do that if you're making some sort of break or shift in narrative style. If the story switches to a dream, for instance, or if the characters enter a Fae realm or another

: If you can't boil down your novel into a logline (or "elevator pitch," which is how I learned it), then you may actually have a problem with your novel. You've provided the structure of

: "Literary criticism" and "editing feedback" are two entirely different beasts. Litcrit is about looking at an existing text and analyzing it. You look at the author's intent, you look at symbolism,

: In narration, stay in one tense. "She had green eyes" is fine, because your entire story is in the past tense — the "present-past," if that makes sense. If she had green eyes as a

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: Re: How to deal with cliche dialogue? The following is from a story I'm writing: "Goodbye Choco," my mother said, to end the prayer, â€œmay your soul rest in peace,â€ and crossed herself.

More posts by @Debbie451

: No, you can only do that if you're making some sort of break or shift in narrative style. If the story switches to a dream, for instance, or if the characters enter a Fae realm or another

: If you can't boil down your novel into a logline (or "elevator pitch," which is how I learned it), then you may actually have a problem with your novel. You've provided the structure of

: "Literary criticism" and "editing feedback" are two entirely different beasts. Litcrit is about looking at an existing text and analyzing it. You look at the author's intent, you look at symbolism,

: In narration, stay in one tense. "She had green eyes" is fine, because your entire story is in the past tense — the "present-past," if that makes sense. If she had green eyes as a

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: Re: How to deal with cliche dialogue? The following is from a story I'm writing: "Goodbye Choco," my mother said, to end the prayer, â€œmay your soul rest in peace,â€ and crossed herself.