Hush your mouth!

Editing Night Vision and on the advice of many people who have read my other books, I am really cutting out a lot of conversation. I’ve explained before that when I’m writing, my people are there and I just write down everything they say, including all the ums, ers, what?s OKs etc. Maybe i should write a play, because I certainly always have loads of dialogue!

Anyway, I am working away, trying to cut out all the unnecessary verbiage and go straight to the point of the conversation – the point I am trying to get over to my readers, not the point the characters are making to each other. This is not too difficult in conversations where they are talking to each other  but I’m finding it quite difficult with the phone calls they make, which are an important device in the story for information to be passed… sometimes crucial information which the reader needs to know! I don’t want my readers to be skipping pages because they might miss something vital, but the characters do need to talk, and sometimes they prevaricate and hesitate and deviate before getting to the nitty-gritty, and that is part of the tension I want to create…

Night Vision is about hidden truths, so I can’t have my people blurting it all out to each other… but I must have my readers engaged! A dilemma!