Hi again, gang. Craig with you today, and I want to share a trick I use quite often. I don’t claim to have invented this, but I’ve never seen anyone else talk about it. I will claim the name, because I’ve never seen it referred to before. I call it the Double Conversation.

This is a dialog trick, but it mimics a more normal kind of conversation. We hear a lot about how dialog shouldn’t mimic real conversation. I happen to agree with this, because we need to keep our readers focused upon what’s important. This is why we take all the ums, likes, and you knows out of most dialog. That’s a different issue than we’re going to talk about today.

The Double Conversation involves two characters usually, but it isn’t limited to that. One part of the dialog is to expose plot elements, but the other part is…