3 Tips Towards Better Dialogue.

Good quality dialogue can bring a character to life, it can convey their true feelings and help develop the story. Writing good dialogue is a skill that must be practiced but also an art that will require your own passions, thoughts and flare to truly flourish. Below are three tips that will improve your writing simply by making you aware of your own writing habits. 

#3 The Overuse or Underuse of Dialogue Tags.

Dialogue tags are like signposts, attributing written dialogue to characters. Their primary purpose is to show which characters speak and when. The frequency and positioning of dialogue tags become more important as the number of characters involved in a scene increases. Some examples are of dialogue tags are:

• She said.
• He asked.
• They answered together.
• Carl yelled.
• Susan joked.

The simplest tags are often most appropriate – readers scarcely notice the use of said and except to register who’s speaking. It is important to use an appropriate tag; for example, using the tag “Susan joked” after the character just told an amusing witticism is redundant – “Susan jokes” would be more appropriately used after the character had playfully mocked a friend. The rule of thumb is to stick with said or basic dialogue tags like asked, answered and depending on your genre an occasional screamed or whispered.

#2 Writing too Formal.

You may be fine spoken member of the grammar society; however, your characters will not always be like you. It is important to know when you can break the rules of English in your writing and the easiest place to do so is in between speech marks.

If your character is from South America, a lowly street urchin or a pirate they will likely speak very differently to your own internal voice. They say things like:

• “Me and Jack went to the movies,” said the young boy.
• “I an’t never seen no ‘gator dat big in me life,” said Guss.
• “Run’na shot’across the bow before we sink, ye scurvy dogs!” called the Captain.

There may be times when you want a character to speak in a precise, correct manner – that will give readers cleat insight into the type of character in your book

#1 Having Every Character Sound the Same.

This can be a similar problem as being too formal. Writings often listen to their internal voice and if you write all of your characters like your internal voice they will all end up sounding the same. It helps to listen to how other people speak; grandparents speak very differently than their grandchildren.

For each of your characters, you should think about any habitual phrases they may use. You won’t want to overuse these, but they can be a useful way to cue the reader that a particular character is speaking. What words they don’t use? This again relates back to formal writing. Perhaps a particular character never swears, maybe they tend to avoid long or complicated words, how expressive they are – or how outspoken they are. Some characters have a way with words; others don’t say much, or say it awkwardly when they do. See if you can identify a little quirk or habit in your friends or family’s speech.