The dialogue with your counselor is priceless. There is so much wisdom in her words. How did you go about writing that?
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Hi Dotsie, thanks for noticing the dialogue. In my first draft, I had no dialogue at all. I had no idea as to how to write dialogue. The draft read as a life-less news account, not a story about a life! Boring. The first draft also had 167,000 words. I hired an editor who suggested dialogue. (I paid him $1,000; his editing was priceless!) Gosh, I was scared; dialogue was stretching me as a writer. I also had to constantly reference editing manuals to see where the commas are placed, when to use colons, when to let a part of a conversation stand alone as one sentence. Some of the conversations are word-for-word based on memory. I’d ask myself, “What did Karen say? What did I say?” The wisdom comes from the composite character of Karen. She is more than one counselor combined. Some of the wisdom was actually my own insights, but to keep continuity of the dialogue, I attributed the knowledge to Karen, as if she were imparting it to me. ALL of the wisdom was new to me!