Since reading is fundamental to writing, I wanted to ask:

What's the longest you've ever been stuck reading a single page of a book?

I'm currently reading Blood Meridian, and if you've read it, you'll know it can be a little complicated. The other day I was stuck for almost 10 minutes trying to fully understand what was being said.

After all for being a good writer one need to be a good reader to really see how something can be written. So I put an effort on really understanding the prose of the book I'm currently reading

Sometimes I attribute it to a possible level of dyslexia or ADHD, but it can be hard sometimes to really grasp what's written.

I also write. I've published scientific articles and have written some novellas, so I understand what it's like to write something. But it makes me wonder whether writers such as Joyce, whom I've read as well, or Cormac McCarthy or David Foster Wallace, intended to make their books difficult to read.

As I writer, I love writing prologues. But whenever I go on Booktok, there's these comments hating on prologues with such horrific takes on them.

"It's like a DVD feature so it's skipable"

"It's nothing but author yap"

What is your opinion on Prologues? Is this something worth going through if it's only going to bring more hate?

Are prologues actually that bad? (not something I can just search up)

I want to get better at writing dialogue.

Here are some things I've been doing:

• Reading the conversations out loud to hear if they sound natural
• Replacing dialogue tags with action beats
• Cutting greetings and small talk
• Trying to give each character a distinct voice (find this hard though!)

What other tips do you have for writing dialogue? And what are some ways in which you ensure each character has a distinct voice?