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Review title: The whole point is wrong, the book has no method
Product review: Chiarella believes that in order to write good dialogue you have to have a good ear. Sure that helps. His sugestion (actually, his ONLY sugestion): take notes of other people's words. Again: sure that doesn't hurt. But written dialogue is different from everyday dialogue. Like always in art, if you want to make it real, you have to fake it. So his advice is misleading, in my opinion (gathered from my 15 years of experience as a professional writer, screenplay writer and teacher). At best, it could be a useful advice to write "realistic" dialogue; but that's just one of many different kinds of dialogue a writer needs to master. What about comedy dialogue? What about sofisticated, original, artificial dialogue? Not everybody wants to write soap operas (a point that seems missing to many of this "cook-book" authors). Besides, the book is a mess: it repeats itself on and on, without any method or design.
