The Healthy Edit

Chapter 11

Psychiatry of Character Disorders—Part I

Dialog

Well-written dialog evokes a sense of reality, even though it is, in essence, unreal. Where people in everyday life may speak on and on, in movies their dialog usually confines itself to one or two sentences at a time. In a sense, dialog is more about the listener than the speaker, since most of us, most of the time, don’t listen well to anything that doesn’t immediately impact us. Tell someone about how your day went, a dream you had, or what you did on vacation, and his attention drifts in and out. Tell that same person that the tests came back positive and they only have three weeks to live, and you have got his full attention.

With dialog we become distressed when too much information ...