ONLY DIALOGUE COUNTS! Everything else is padding.
Look at The Shipping News. The movie is so brilliant because it sticks to the dialog as written. And the dialog is brilliant. All the lyrical descriptions of weather and the environment can be summed up in three words 'set in Newfoundland'. The movie of Get Shorty is brilliant because there never were any lyrical descriptions of weather, or the environment, no omnipotent author's voice, no showing off that he'd done tons of historic research. Quintin Tarantino follows Elmore Leonard's dialog word for word. Shakespeare ditto. His dialogue works (and has worked) in any environment or historical setting, including the future.
Give your writing to a film director all he'll be interested in is dialogue. All the other stuff just gets in the way, it's just so much useless fluff. Strip out the fluff and there's your book. Can your book survive being seen naked.
ONLY DIALOGUE COUNTS. The rest you might as well not have written.
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