MindProbe

“The world is there for you to listen to, observe, and take in. You have to train your brain to not only listen to the conversations in your life, but to recognize how those conversations sound. You need to listen to the music of the world all around you.
Most importantly, you need to dig through it all and pull out the good stuff. Go to the mall. The park. Go where people are and … listen. Take it all in. And spit out ONLY the good stuff back onto your pages.
Because not everything in the world is a story worth repeating.
The magic comes from finding the stuff that is interesting. The magic comes from discovering that “realistic dialogue” isn’t actually that realistic. Most real-world dialogue is quite annoying. Some people don’t know that their stories aren’t all that interesting to others. Some people don’t know when they have gone on too long.
“You had to be there.” You ever hear someone say that after they told a story that didn’t “land” quite the way the storyteller may have hoped? That is someone who didn’t quite know how to tell a story.
That’s why readers turn to you, the writer. They want you to tell them a story. They want a story far better crafted than the ones surrounding them in real life. People would rather tune out the “realistic dialogue” and listen to yours.”
― Brian Michael Bendis