As for Masello's latest advice: it's staple playwriting fodder, and I use it in my prose stories, too.
In theater, the story is told through conversation. Tht's all you get, unless someone's breaking the fourth wall, and only a few people can get away with that, and certainly not all the time.
At any rate, that's the dramatic hook. Right there. What you overheard would be a classic first conversation in the first act of a play. What you say about eavesdropping is completely accurate.
Any story involves the eavesdropping of the reader onto the characters. In prose, you get the advantage of a narrator explaining the things you acn't necessarily get by direct observation, but it's the in-media-res--that feelign of being dropped in the middle of something you want to know more about--that's essential.
I find that in my prose, when I get bogged down and stuck in a circle, if I force myself to sit back and watch the scene, and arrive at it in the very middle of something, the whole thing comes alive again and I can move on.
There's no shame in eavesdropping, so long as it's not for...um...future destructive purposes. I eavesdrop all the time. Mabfan's evaluation of the situation--a private conversation continued at normal volume after the arrival of a stranger--is good enough criterion for me.
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Date: 2006-12-04 07:12 pm (UTC)As for Masello's latest advice: it's staple playwriting fodder, and I use it in my prose stories, too.
In theater, the story is told through conversation. Tht's all you get, unless someone's breaking the fourth wall, and only a few people can get away with that, and certainly not all the time.
At any rate, that's the dramatic hook. Right there. What you overheard would be a classic first conversation in the first act of a play. What you say about eavesdropping is completely accurate.
Any story involves the eavesdropping of the reader onto the characters. In prose, you get the advantage of a narrator explaining the things you acn't necessarily get by direct observation, but it's the in-media-res--that feelign of being dropped in the middle of something you want to know more about--that's essential.
I find that in my prose, when I get bogged down and stuck in a circle, if I force myself to sit back and watch the scene, and arrive at it in the very middle of something, the whole thing comes alive again and I can move on.
There's no shame in eavesdropping, so long as it's not for...um...future destructive purposes. I eavesdrop all the time. Mabfan's evaluation of the situation--a private conversation continued at normal volume after the arrival of a stranger--is good enough criterion for me.