This week, we’re discussing how to enhance your writing skills. Today, I want to focus on one of the most crucial aspects: dialogue.
If there’s one thing that distinguishes excellent books from merely good ones, it’s the dialogue. I’ve read books that were objectively terrible in terms of plot and pacing, but the dialogue was so compelling that I couldn’t help but finish them. I’m not the type to finish a book just because I started it. I can drop a book as quickly as you can blink. I have no particular attachment to reading through and if a story loses me, it loses me. So, for me to finish a book that is objectively bad means that there was something extraordinary about it, and dialogue can do that.
What’s fascinating is that dialogue doesn’t merely serve as a vehicle for delivering information about the story. It’s not just a way of building characters, or communicating the conflict, or the resolution of the conflict. In fact, dialogue can be enjoyable action in and of itself. There’s something about witty dialogue that thrills the soul, which is one of the reasons that solo performances are a thing. We, as humans, love hearing people speak, and when we’re reading a story, it’s no different. Hearing witty banter between two characters can be just as thrilling as a massive sword fight on the roof of a cathedral.
So the question is, how do we do that? How do we create scintillating conversation? We start by mimicking the pacing and style of a real conversation, while introducing more wit and energy than normal into it. Because the reality is that unless two people are trained conversationalists, most conversations are boring. That’s one of the reasons that good dialogue in a book is so attractive. It’s because those are the kinds of conversations we wish we had with the people around us, but we very rarely do.
As we practice writing our conversations, we want to mimic the cadence of a real conversation. This is really important. Real conversations are not linear. One of the mistakes that I made as a young author, and that I see a lot of young authors making now, is having a conversation that is just a call and response. It is just one person saying something and the other person responding without any sort of movement, without any sort of emotion behind it.
If you pay attention to any conversation that you have or that somebody else has, one of the things you might notice is that trains of thought don’t run parallel. They branch and deviate and go all over the place. You might be talking about one thing in one moment, but then someone has a thought and they introduce a shift into the conversation that turns it into something else, completely abandoning that first point. And this can be really frustrating if you’re trying to solve a problem, but that’s how conversation works. People’s thoughts don’t run linearly in one direction all the way to the end.
When you’re having two characters have dialogue, it’s important to introduce a little bit of that variation, of that sort of branching logic into the conversation, because it’s going to make it feel very natural. And so when we read that on the page, it’s much more likely to keep us interested.
The second thing you should do is learn to lose dialogue tags. If you have a conversation between two people, then it’s possible to make it very clear who is speaking. You can do that through formatting. You can do that through affectation or the way somebody speaks. You can do that by just leaving the dialogue tags out. If one person speaks first, and then the next person speaks after that, and then the first person speaks again, and then the second person speaks again, you’ve just established a rhythm that your reader is going to expect continuing down.
As long as the third person doesn’t interject themselves into the conversation, after the first or second dialogue tag, there’s honestly no reason to keep putting them in. And so you can just let the conversation flow naturally. It creates a much more natural reading experience because it reminds people of what it feels like to listen to a conversation.
Have you ever sat somewhere with your back to other people and heard a conversation where you couldn’t see the participants? Obviously, when we’re hearing a conversation, we can hear the differences in their voices. But if you listen to a conversation like that, even if you couldn’t hear the differences in their voices, the content of their speech would give away who was on what side of the discussion.
It takes some practice to really get good at dropping dialogue tags, but I would really encourage you to try. It does get harder when you introduce a third person into the conversation. But again, context clues inside the spoken dialogue can replace the need for a dialogue tag.
Finally, introduce movement into your dialogue. The reality is that most of our communication is nonverbal, which makes dialogue in a story really hard because we can’t see the characters. But as the author, you can introduce subtle clues into the narrative that will help bridge that gap.
For instance, if you have a character who is growing frustrated with a conversation, maybe because the other person’s refusing to stick to the topic, you might have them lean back and cross their arms. That’s a defensive posture. That’s something that signals annoyance without expressly signaling annoyance.
When two people are in a dialogue and they’ve been arguing, and then one person steps forward and reaches out to touch the other person’s arm, it can mean any number of things. And the way you write it can make it a comforting gesture. It can make it a gesture of wanting to bridge the gap. It can have a more sinister vibe. The motion and the way you describe it can add a lot to the conversation because it’s giving the reader a better picture of the physicality of the characters as they’re engaged with each other.
By adding motion to your dialogue, you’re going to be giving the reader something else to think about on top of what’s actually being said, which will help keep the dialogue from becoming boring.
But as always, and I’m sure you know what I’m going to say, at the end of the day, writing just requires practice. You want to keep these things in mind. Remember to mimic real-life conversation, learn to lose your dialogue tags, and add motion into your scenes that have heavy dialogue, and then just practice. Keep writing. Keep practicing. And pretty soon, you’ll be writing masterful dialogue too.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/rTenVM1nd-k
Thanks for reading and watching.
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