Steven Smith - author
  • Home
  • About
  • Books
    • THE WASTE
    • THIS SACRED ISLE
    • THE MAP OF THE KNOWN WORLD
    • THE ORDEAL OF FIRE
    • THE LAST DAYS
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Home
  • About
  • Books
    • THE WASTE
    • THIS SACRED ISLE
    • THE MAP OF THE KNOWN WORLD
    • THE ORDEAL OF FIRE
    • THE LAST DAYS
  • Blog
  • Contact

A Suffolk Writer's blog

How to create more dynamic dialogue

9/9/2020

1 Comment

 
Stories come alive through the voices of their characters. To capture the natural rhythms and flow of human conversation is not an easy task, but in this blog post, I am going to give some tips on how you can create dynamic dialogue to enhance your storytelling.
There are three key aims your dialogue must achieve:
​
  1. It must help move the story forward
  2. It must reveal relevant information about the character/s – providing insights into their feelings, experiences and motivations
  3. It must help the reader understand the relationship between the characters
Here are a few quick tips to help you:

Keep it real (sort of)

Although you want your dialogue to sound natural and to flow, you don’t want to replicate the structure of real speech, which is often full of unfinished sentences, repetition, pauses and stumbles over words – of course, you might want to add these in occasionally when it fits the moment, but do so very sparingly to avoid your dialogue becoming too ragged for the reader to follow.
Picture
Keep it brief and avoid small talk

Pages and pages of dialogue can be trying for the reader, so try to keep it focused – avoid any conversation that fails to achieve any of the three key aims mentioned above.

Never info dump

You should only dispense exposition through dialogue very sparingly – in particular, don’t state things both characters would clearly already know. Dumping exposition risks making your dialogue stodgy and stilted.

Give each character a recognisable voice

All humans express their thoughts in a unique way. A character’s background should influence the way they speak – their tone, use of language, any slang and dialect phrases.  Once you’ve established a character’s voice, make sure you are consistent throughout the story.

Show not tell

Don’t signpost your characters’ emotions. As people, we’re not always precisely aware of how we feel, let alone be willing or able to express that emotion. Rather than having a character explicitly say ‘I’m angry’ or ‘I’m worried’, try to describe body language as indicators, clues even, for your readers to use.

Dialogue tags

Of course, when reading dialogue, your reader needs to know which character is speaking. The standard way of doing this is to apply dialogue tags such as ‘She said’ or ‘Jo cried’. Sometimes, additional verbs and adverbs are used such ‘she said sadly’ or ‘Jo cried angrily’ – I find these intrusive, especially if over-used; again, these run the risk of telling not showing the reader how a character is feeling or reacting. I tend the use the bare minimum of dialogue tags, basically just enough ‘he / she said’ so the reader can follow and know who is speaking - I feel this helps the dialogue flow and keeps the reader’s focus on what is being said.
​
My final tip is to read your dialogue scenes out loud – this helps to identify any words or phrases that fail to ring true for the characters.
If you’re interested in my writing, you can get the ebook version of my first novel - The Map of the Known World – for FREE. Please see the following Kindle preview:​
1 Comment

    Archives

    October 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    October 2022
    August 2022
    May 2021
    September 2020
    August 2020
    October 2019
    September 2019
    June 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016

    Categories

    All
    2000AD
    Alfred Wallis
    Anglo Saxon
    Art
    Book Review
    Comics
    Cornwall
    Descriptive Writing
    Dialogue
    Doctor Who
    Dystopia
    Editing
    Elisabeth Frink
    Fantasy
    Fantasy Art
    Folk Art
    Ghosts
    Gormenghast
    History
    Hobbit
    Horror
    Ian Miller
    John Christopher
    Landscape
    Lord Of The Rings
    Magic
    Middle Earth
    Middle-earth
    Monsters
    Naive Art
    Osten Ard
    Peter Jackson
    Planning Novels
    Post Apocalyptic
    Post-apocalyptic
    Publication
    Research
    Science Fiction
    Sculpture
    Star Trek
    Stephen King
    St Ives
    Television
    This Sacred Isle
    Tolkien
    Writing

    RSS Feed

KEEP IN TOUCH WITH ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Photos from TKCA photography, WordRidden, Alyssa L. Miller, jason ilagan, SisterPrice, markus spiske, Andreas*D, Ian's Shutter Habit, Andrew Stawarz, Matt From London, Kumpei Shiraishi, Marcin Wichary, chaz jackson, jvoves, Dean Hochman, Jiv.Talking, Tim Green aka atoach, perzonseo, Danny Tax Creative, icathing, librariestaskforce, xiquinhosilva, wwarby, lukas schlagenhauf, Rosmarie Voegtli, Michael Casey, penjelly, Insights Unspoken, jodastephen, publicdomainphotography, torbakhopper, Nouhailler, J McSporran, Sam-H-A, BBM Explorer, KathrynW1, Marianne Bevis, Christoph Scholz