A white woman in San Francisco calls the police on an 8 year old black girl selling water bottles outside her apartment building. She does this because the girl has ‘no permit’.
“Now known virally as #PermitPatty, Ettel has two master’s degrees, one in urban planning, owns a medical marijuana business, was an equity trader and was a Brookings Institution researcher.”
Could this be more stereotypical? She owns a business that was legitimized only in the past couple of years to the exclusion of every Black person rotting away in prison who made money the same way. I could scream.
Her name is Alison Ettel and I bet she wouldn’t call the police on a little white girl selling lemonade outside on a hot day, but a little black girl selling water bottles?That’s considered inexcusable?
Ridiculous.
She’s a racist adult woman who called the cops on an 8 year old little girl for selling water (much like selling lemonade) on a sweltering hot summers day.
“Please dont make me sound horrible”… no need for Huffington Post to make you sound horrible, Alison. You secured that title the minute you demonized an 8 year old black child and CALLED THE POLICE on an EIGHT YEAR OLD CHILD.
Dialogue: either you’re great at it, or it’s your worse nightmare. Writing dialogue can be difficult, confusing, and frustrating. Here are some tips to clear the air when it comes to dialogue!
From the very beginning, writers are often told not to overuse “said”. While this is sound advice, it can create the false notion that “said” is never to be used. This simply isn’t true!
Stay away from repeating creative dialogue tags one after another, especially if it’s redundant. For example, if there’s an exclamation point after a sentence, you don’t need to say that the character exclaimed or yelled.
Often, a dialogue tag isn’t even needed. Just end the dialogue without a tag.
I’m guilty of this one as well. The urge to not use “said” too often becomes a habit of never using it and replacing it with unnecessary dialogue tags.
Just use said! It will make your writing seem far more mature than if you used something like “growled” or “stated”.
Dialogue should be realistic. If you have a character that is known for going off on tangents, then by all means do so. If you’re going on a tangent to seem “artistic”, you might want to cut it off there.
My biggest pet peeve with modern young adult literature is that writers try to combing their need to prove they can write beautiful prose with dialogue. Don’t. In the end, it’s just unrealistic and a cheap way of trying to show your talent. Leave the long-winded metaphors for your narration, please.
Though accents can be a great way to create colorful dialogue, phonetically spelling every word according to the character’s accent can get annoying fast. Stick to spelling out the most important words. After a while, the reader should be able to read that character’s dialogue with their accent in mind anyway.
Every writer has received this advice at one point or another, but with good reason. Dialogue is the best way to put “show, don’t tell” into practice. However, writers often think that dialogue itself counts as showing. Though dialogue is a better tool than description in these instances, it doesn’t completely serve as a way to show on its own.
Telling: “Hey, calm down. You look nervous.”
Showing: “Hey, calm down. You haven’t stopped tapping your foot since we got here.”
I too fall into the trap of constantly clarifying who is speaking. When you’re writing, it feels natural to say things like “’How are you doing, Jim?’ ‘I’m doing well, Pam.’”, but the reality is that no one speaks like that, especially to people they’re close to.
Most of the time, you should use names in dialogue tags and greetings. Otherwise, use names sparingly.
