- Dialogue is artificial: it looks like a conversation but isn’t. In real life, people stumble through sentences, don’t directly answer questions and heavily rely on tone and mutually understood phrases to get a point across, all things that are difficult to replicate on the page.
- A common problem is that characters end up all sounding the same, usually because the writer is so focused on what the character is saying and hasn’t thought about how they say it.
- Vocabulary: how would your character naturally speak? An academic is likely to use precision towards students but might speak differently to a customer services clerk. A customer services clerk has to use scripted phrases to customers but speaks differently to friends. A character might use unfamiliar language to create a good impression or be unusually blunt towards someone they see as a villain.
- Rhythm: an anxious/nervous character might speak in short vowelled words, e.g. ‘Then it hit me. I didn’t get it’, but a relaxed character would speak with longer, languid words, ‘Eventually I began to realise. I failed to comprehend.’
- Tone cannot be captured on a page through words so add facial expressions, body language, actions to convey what tone your character is using. Someone angry might stand up or sit stiffly, someone upset might stutter out words between sobs.
- Don’t stick to full sentences unless the character really does rehearse everything they say in their heads before speaking.
- Add action beats to break up dialogue. A character might buy some time to think by sipping coffee or serving food.
- Dialogue is a good way of one character giving information to another, but don’t make it feel like an information dump. Fragment the information and let one of the characters the information giver is speaking to either ask questions or try to guess what the information giver is about to say.
- Think about how characters pass information to each other and focus on specifics. No one says “remember when we were at school together”, but one person might say “remember when Mrs Jones spilt the paint over Thomas.”
- Do not let characters tell someone something they would already know, any dialogue that could start “you know that I’m the professor” can be cut.
- For dialogue tags “said” is absolutely fine. Occasionally a character may shout or another whisper. But if it looks as if you’ve reached for the thesaurus to avoid using “said” it becomes distracting and you’ve taken the reader out of the story.
- Read your dialogue aloud – does it sound like the character speaking?
- If you took the dialogue tags/attributions away, would you still know which character was talking?
Contributed by Emma Lee
leicesterwritersclub.com 