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How to Write a Dialogue for a Talking Plant

In their popular book "A Handbook to Literature," William Harmon and Hugh Holman define personification as "a figure that endows animals, ideas, abstractions, and inanimate objects with human form." While many famous instances of personification, such as the talking beasts of fairy tales, involve animals, cultural history offers us many examples of storytellers personifying plants, from the story of Narcissus and Echo in Greek mythology to Audrey II in the popular musical "Little Shop of Horrors."

Things You'll Need

  • Image of plant
  • Some knowledge of botany
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Instructions

    • 1
      In "O my Luve's like a red, red rose," Robert Burns assumed that his audience had certain ideas about a rose's personality.

      Decide what plant you will be writing dialogue for, and assess its personality. When Robert Burns wrote "my Luve's like a red, red rose," he was envisioning a woman very much like the "nun demure, of lowly port" Wordsworth describes in "To the Daisy." If a rose if talking, it will sound cantankerous and regal, a daisy pleasant and familiar.

    • 2

      Research the anatomy of the plant whose dialogue you will be writing. If you are composing a speech for a hyacinth, you will want to make sure that your other characters are close enough to the ground to hear it talking, while if your plant is a talking jasmine, you will need to set the scene somewhat higher up.

    • 3
      In his "Alice" novels, Lewis Carroll personified many animals and plants.

      Consult famous literary examples of plant personification. In Chapter 2 of Lewis Carroll's "Alice Through the Looking-Glass, and What She Found There," Alice holds a conversation with a tiger-lily, a rose, a violet, a larkspur and several daisies. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings" features a race of ancient tree-shaped giants called "Ents," and C.S. Lewis featured talking trees in many of his Narnia novels.

    • 4
      Perhaps your human character has fallen asleep in front this rhododendron and dreams that she is speaking with it.

      Decide to whom the plant will be talking. If the plant will be speaking with another plant, you will need to repeat the above steps in order to personify it. If instead you are writing a conversation between a plant and a human, you will need to determine how this conversation is taking place. Your story could take place in a fantastic setting, for instance, or your dialogue could simply be part of a dream sequence.

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