Howdy,
What's worse than a character or characters spewing huge blocks of dialogue without any intervening action? Pages and pages and pages of it, like battling frigates exchanging broadsides. The solution is to choose a talking head avoidance device for dialogue-heavy scenes.
Elizabeth George writes about and, I believe, coins the term talking head avoidance device or THAD in her fine book on writing Write Away. She discusses the importance of THADs in several points throughout the book. In chapter 19, she offers an excellent list of THADs. This list is handy for beginning writers and worth the price of the book by itself.
What do you think? Let me know in comments.
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