Talking about dialogue...

[John Dean]

I tutor quite a few writers and so often the discussions come back to dialogue. Dialogue is crucial to any novel. Good dialogue lifts a story, bad dialogue wrecks it.

Writing dialogue isn’t about replicating a real-life conversation, though. It’s about giving an impression of it. If fiction is like real life with the dull bits taken out, the same thing is true of fictional conversations. The role of the writer is to select what’s important.

There are some things to bear in mind in order to get dialogue right:

In real life we repeat ourselves. Not so is fictional dialogue. Yes, it must sound like real people speaking but without the elements of conversation that slow it down. The difference between dialogue in life and dialogue in stories is that in stories, you need to cut day-to-day conversation that is extraneous or irrelevant.

We tend to talk in short, sharp snaps of dialogue.

Aim to get rid of most of the chit-chat and social niceties. Don’t remove these things completely, because you still want conversations to sound natural but remember that dialogue needs to cut to the chase a lot quicker than real-life dialogue.

We assume a lot. If you are talking about a relative, we tend not to say ‘How’s your sister, Barbara?’, which comes over as clumsy. We tend to say instead ‘How’s your sister?’ If there’s more than one sister, we tend to say ‘How’s Barbara?’

Good writers do not cram detail into dialogue. We say ‘I’ll meet you by the bus stop’. Not ‘I’ll meet you by the bus stop on Green Road, the blue one, by the corner shop, opposite the park’.

Show characters’ surrounds while they talk. Make them do things, make the tea, hang up the washing etc, all of which gives the conversation context and injects energy.

Dialogue should drive the story forward. Each line must do a job. If it doesn’t, then it must go.

Dialogue can add to a reader’s understanding of a character's personality.

Dialogue can provide information – eg ‘Looks like a storm is brewing,’ he said.

Don’t have characters all sounding the same – give them distinct voices

Get all that little lot right and you’re onto a winner!