I was thinking about how often we refer to good dialogue as ‘sparkling’. For some reason, thirst perhaps, the word sparkling immediately made me think about my favorite beverage’champagne.

Then, probably to keep my mind off drinking in the afternoon, I began to think about how much in common champagne has with good dialogue, and with good writing in general.

Here’s what I came up with.

Fiction is made up of two main structural elements: narrative and dialogue. Narrative is the description of what’s happening--the describing of characters, settings, moods and actions. Dialogue is either spoken or thought.

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