All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John FowlesRead
On the whole, dialogue is the most difficult thing, without any doubt. It's very difficult, unfortunately. You have to detach yourself from the notion of a lifelike quality. You see, actually lifelike, tape-recorded dialogue like this has very little to do with good novel dialogue. It's a matter of getting that awful tyranny of mimesis out of your mind, which is difficult.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Effective dialogue in novels transcends realistic speech to convey deeper meaning and emotion.
John Fowles emphasizes that writing compelling dialogue in novels is a complex task. It requires the writer to move beyond merely replicating real-life conversations and instead focus on the essence of communication, capturing the nuances and subtext that often lie beneath surface-level exchanges.
Themes
DialogueNovelWritingCommunicationAuthenticity
In practice
Example use cases
In a writing workshop discussing the challenges of creating authentic dialogue, one might reference this quote to illustrate the complexities involved.
More from John Fowles
All quotes →There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
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I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
John FowlesRead
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
John FowlesRead
The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.
John FowlesRead
It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.
John FowlesRead
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