Writing Effective Dialogue
Regardless of genre effective dialogue makes or breaks a piece of writing.
It is a truth amongst all writing that dialogue can make or break it. A bad conversation in your novel can have you throwing it in the bin. Poorly recorded conversations in non-fiction can make the book hard to digest or take anything from.
Dialogue is also one of the hardest things to get right within your writing. There is no easy answer or sheet to follow when writing dialogue, but there are things you can do to improve it.
Be Naturally Curious About People
People speak; this is not news to many people. However, I am shocked by how few writers say you must study people to know how language is. We don’t all speak in complete sentences. We change the way we talk depending on who we are talking to.
Which is why I say you have to be curious about people. You have to observe them when they are out. How do they speak? Does this change depending on who they speak to? These are the things to observe and how language is used. These are the factors you have to portray in your writing.
The one thing I would not advise is looking at language on television. This is also designed to be false as television language is not natural, so you must become a people watcher.
Be curious about a range of people in various circumstances, and you can then replicate this in your writing.
Study Language From Books
As well as studying the language around you, pick up a book in the genre you are writing in and study how the writer has constructed the language for the story. Study different genres of books, as the dialogue will change depending on the genre.
Ensure you know the age of the book as language evolves and different phrases come in and out of fashion. If you are writing historical fiction, you must ensure the dialogue you write is appropriate for the time frame you are writing about.
A good exercise is to practice writing a conversation between two people in various situations. Try writing as if the two are romantically interested in each other, then as mortal enemies, then as a parent to a child and so on until you can distinguish between the different words and languages.
Compare your writing with how other writers portray this in their books. You can also look at the dynamics of the writing and how this is formatted in a book.
Psychology of People
Psychology has been a topic I have enjoyed since childhood. I started with introductory psychology and then moved on to criminal psychology. At the time, it was nothing more than interest, but now I realise how much it has helped me write characters, especially their dialogue.
You do not need to read extensively on the subject, but sites such as YouTube are saturated with videos you can watch. Once you get an idea of the psychology behind a character, you can start writing dialogue similar to the person’s personality.
Psychology will help you construct dialogue if a person is vulnerable, scared or arrogant. These minor alterations will help make the dialogue seem more believable and realistic.
Formatting
Once you understand what to write, formatting the dialogue is easier to learn. My first trip would be to use, she said, he said. Unless this moves your story forward, you don’t need to change to whispered, shouted, etc. The reader will not recognise the repeated tags.
Dialogue tags should stay outside the quotation marks and only directly spoken words inside. Use single quotes if someone is quoting someone else within the dialogue. Don’t worry too much about this, as this can be confusing.
Any action before or after the dialogue should be on a separate line. Use a different paragraph to indicate the speaker has changed.
If action comes in the middle of a sentence of dialogue, the first letter of the second fragment should be in lowercase. Example: “At the end of the day,” he bellowed, “there’s always more soup!”
You can look at many other rules, but these are the basics to get you started. As with any aspect of writing, practice will improve this skill. The more you write, the more you progress.