And to think that all those short exchanges in modern (pulp, scuse me) fiction of he said, she said, he replied, she interjected, he suggested, she retorted, he cried, she wailed etc, is all one big monologue really! (Bad fiction is poor projection).

DELIVERING a soliloquy as the ones described above in a play is to our ears very artificial, I agree, but watching those Yanthimos films I spoke of a few blogs back I discovered the art of "speaking one's lines" in the theatre has some magic to it other (more naturalistic) deliverances can't reach when it comes to uncovering underlying meanings of life. But you have to have heard a lot of talking and endured an equal amount of painful silence to reach that point, I found.

Novelists have the creative license to manipulate for effect, even to the point of irriation or confusion, and since I have (very recently) started reading up on the classics (anything pre WW2!) I notice it takes a while to accept the more long-winded writing as a necessary slog: in the end I found it swept the mind clean and therefor was very rewarding. Can't say I've read much Dickens yet....Nor Tolkien! (The Silmarillion is on a pile somewhere). Do adore:

As you point out, sometimes it just feels too much like a device to get the story told, but without many speech-acts it also gets quite weird: try Proust!

Dearest, on the side, by the by, I hope you don't need to call me a goddamn bloody fucking bluestocking, and far be it from me to criticise your preferred style, but I am beginning to wonder why you reach for profanities and the adverbal use of your favorite expletive so frequently, in a writing that is otherwise powerful, varied, rich and vibrant as it is. I am not sure if you are going for some urban vibe, or mean to alienate a certain type of reader, but I am only concerned about the ineffective emphatic repetition of it. Then again, you may well argue, in a piece about speaking as you speak, it may well have been a choice going for a specific provocative effect....