Newspaper articles are more descriptive than any other sort of writing.
You have a description of a new invention, of a great fire, of a
prisoner at the bar of justice. It is not quite so spontaneous as
narrative. Children seldom describe, and the newspaper man finds
difficulty in making what seems a very brief tale into a column article
until he can weave description as readily as he breathes.
Dialogue in a story is by no means the same as the dialogue of a play:
it ought rather to be a description of a conversation, and very seldom
is it a full report of what is said on each side.
Description is used in its technical sense to designate the presentation
of a scene without reference to events; narrative is a description of
events as they have happened, a dialogue is a description of
conversation. Fiction is essentially a descriptive art, and quite as
much is it descriptive in dialogue as in any other part.
The best way to master dialogue as an element by itself is to study the
novels of writers like Dickens, Thackeray, or George Eliot.
Dialogue has its full development only in the novel, and it is here and
not in short stories that the student of fiction should study it.
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