6 quick tips for better dialogue

Good dialogue brings your characters to life. With the right tone, the right set of words defines their personality and can make the reader love, hate, sympathize, or even loathe them.

Dialogue makes all the difference in your story, so here you have some tips on how to write it right.

1. One character, one voice

Each person has a distinct way of talking, and so does your character. Try to listen to them in your head before you start writing.

To help you define their voice, ask, “How old are they?”, “Where are they from?”, “What’s their cultural inheritance?”, “What level of education do they have?”

You need to also think about the person they are talking to. You don’t speak to your friends and boss the same way, do you? These details make your dialogue more realistic and relatable for your readers.

2. Not everything must be said

A written story is not a movie script. Sometimes, there is information that doesn’t need to be a dialogue. Summarize it instead by saying what they talked about and for how long. Don’t bore your readers with technical explanations and repetitive arguments in a discussion.

Often, you can start the conversation with dialogue to inform your readers and make them more engaged. Then, summarize the rest of the conversation if it is boring or irrelevant to the evolution of the story.

3. Keep it real

Would you say that out loud? Would you say it that way? Sure, your character is not you, but it makes sense for them to say it?

Sometimes, there are topics that you avoid. Your character can have those too. Be careful to be consistent. If your character avoids a topic but suddenly talks about it with someone, your reader should understand why this change happened.

4. Shhhh

The silence is part of the music. It is also part of a dialogue.

Unless you’re writing a script, dozens of dialogue lines can become monotone. You need variety to make your story interesting, so use silence in your favor. How? Make pauses to describe body language. Introduce some action like “He exhaled and sat on the couch.”. You can also describe what is happening around them while they have that conversation. These “subtleties” help your readers to connect.

5. Be subtle

In real life, not everything is said directly. Usually, you don’t approach a person and say something like “I think you’re hot.” out of the blue. Conversations need to make sense with your character’s personality type.

Besides, dialogue has two levels that you shouldn’t ignore. One is what your character says, and the other is what they mean. How many times in your life have you said something, trying to imply a completely different thing? These details make your dialogue and your characters real to the readers.

6. Who said what?

Your readers need to know who said what. This being said, avoid too many dialogue tags like “she said” or “he asked”. It makes the writing boring. Every time it is evident, just don’t put any. Other times, mix it a little and use different ways to tell your reader who is saying what.

If your character has a distinctive tone, it will significantly help.

Dialogue: what does it tell about your characters?

Writing good dialogue is essential for bringing characters to life in a story. To help you write effective dialogue, consider the tips above. By implementing them, you can create compelling dialogue that informs and reveals essential insights into the characters.

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How to present ancient backstory to your readers?

 

Sometimes, when writing a story, you have plenty of little details and occurrences in the backstory, relevant information to give your readers. The past has plenty of answers and questions you want to share with them but you face some difficulties in placing this information into or throughout the middle of the story.

There aren’t many rules about how to go about achieving this, but here are some helpful tips:

Dateline

Simple and clear, a line with a date and the occurrence that took place, short and simple, and that’s it. You start writing your marvelous scene. One of the benefits of employing this method is that it immediately carries your reader to the point you wanted to take them to.

This might be especially important, and come in handy, in situations when the facts you’re about to recount, took place way before your characters were even born.

Prologue

Quite common in many books, you’ve probably encountered this little method before. The book starts with a prologue that tells the reader what happened before the timeline in which the main story will be taking place. It might have a dateline anyway, but it often doesn’t provide one.

Flashbacks

A little controversial among some groups of writers, flashbacks are a powerful technique, which may be essential to ‘showcasing’ backstory, rather than merely recounting it, especially when strewn into opportune moments within the main story.

The most common way of doing it is exactly in such manner, where somewhere along the storyline, something triggers a memory in a character from some earlier period in their lives.

You write a couple of sentences to transition you in and then you start the flashback. In the end, you’ll need to provide some realistic measure of transition back out into your storyline and it’s over, done. Simple, but not at all easy.

Another way of transitioning at the end of the character’s flashback is by ending the chapter your story finds itself in. You then need the beginning of the next chapter to already in the present time. This usually provides less confusion that could come with the transition, being very effective there, but could prompt question in your reader about how the transition out of that flashback might’ve taken place. You might need to make a reference to it later if you want to clear it up, but it’s not always required.

Narrative Summary

Well, this one I left for last due to three small reasons: boring, boring and boring. However, it’s important too. Let’s see.

Showing a scene in real-time is exciting, yet, not a very effective way of giving information to your reader. So, there are some questions you must ask yourself about your own story.

How important is the information you want to give out? How does it interact with the present story? Is it more important for the story that such information be delivered as effectively as possible and clearly understood, or would you rather it be entertaining?

None of the techniques are perfect, nor are they totally avoidable. It depends on your book, your story, and your goal of delivering this information. Therefore, if you have doubts, try to get some more information about each technique so you can choose which one best fits your work.

Dialogue: bringing characters to fruition in 5 tips

The dialogue between characters is one of the most important parts of a novel or short-story and it’s important to get it feeling just right.

When someone is reading a story, the ways in which characters express themselves and what they’re saying is very important for the reader to feel like they’re getting to know them and to build some empathy with the characters. When writing, you should always remember how you’d feel as a reader as well.

Feeling natural

For the dialogue to feel natural, it can’t just be comprised of a couple sentences that someone said. You must create a sort of movie in readers head, helping them understand the character and feel what they might be facing. However, you should be very careful not to use language that might be too polished or poetic, as those tend not to feel natural at all.

Voice

Each character should have a different voice and it must show through what they say. Different people use different kinds of sentences and vocabulary, and so should the characters.

It’s important to give them a unique voice, but it’s also important to remember that a conversation might have a lot of repetition and that it could prove boring to read, so you can add some summary into your dialogue, shortening the parts of it that your readers might not need to read in a tremendous level of detail. The reality is that most people would not go to such depths while elaborating or explaining themselves, at least not at first glance. This will also make the character appear more realistic and grounded.

Importance

As I said before, some parts of the conversation might become boring to read. You must decide what’s really important for the story and things that are just normal, boring chatter. If your character is a mechanic, it might be important for the story to know what’s going on with the car he is fixing, but you probably wouldn’t place him describing meticulously what he is doing with all the steps, for each of his tools, right? Good dialogue works vaguely in the same way.

What you say and what you think

In real life, you don’t always say everything you’re thinking (as many times, that wouldn’t be correct, or polite, at all). Your character shouldn’t neither.

To feel natural, your dialogue must contain hints of what your character is really thinking or what he or she would like to say, but sadly can’t or somehow struggles to. Give your readers something to think about.

Silence

What can you say about silence? Well, it can say as much as words, for starters, right? So, in order to enrich your scene, interrupt the dialogue sometimes, describe a character’s body language and you’ll have a richer picture and a greater scene to present your audience with. This might actually paint a fuller picture than some additional lines of dialogue ever would.