You can use dialogue to make your stories really pop. When you make dialogue sharp, your readers are going to be very interested in finding out what happens next in your story. Revising your dialogue is one of the most effective ways of making your stories more interesting. It’s well worth the effort.
Dialogue itself is essentially just two people talking, but it’s a whole lot more than that. When people are talking, they’re revealing what they think, how they’re feeling. Jesus said, “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” When you’re writing your stories, this is a way to reveal the innermost parts of a character – what they think, what they feel, what their goals are, what the conflicts are, all of that is going on inside – by using great dialogue.
One of the reasons dialogue is effective is because we’re seeing the conversation. You’re not telling your readers about something or how they feel or something like that. Instead, we’re watching as readers, we’re watching a character talking to another character, and we’re watching that back and forth. That’s interesting.
Conversations are always interesting as long as they are sharp conversation. That’s especially true. when there’s a lot of emotions going on in the dialogue. Whether an emotion expressed is someone is angry, or really unsure. Or maybe they’re forceful.
We write our dialogue to reflect what the character is going through. When we’re talking about someone who’s angry, we’re going to use short sentences. “What, that can’t be right! We’re going to do something about that!” We can tell the character is angry. Now all of a sudden, you as a reader are wondering, “Why is this person so angry?”
“Well, I don’t know, I mean, uh, maybe we should do something about this.” That’s a completely different emotion we see the character going through. When you’re writing that, that’s also interesting. Why is this person so unsure? What’s going on in the background? What’s causing this uncertainty? We are expecting the character to react more strongly, so now we’re intrigued by the evasiveness. The dialogue is telling us something about the character that is completely different from a more emotional response.
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Dialogue can also be effective in conveying the personalities of your characters. You really want to have different types of characters in your stories You don’t want everything to be the same, because in real life, everyone’s different. Let’s take advantage of that.
If you have an intellectual character, you might have the character say something like, “Your approach seems insubstantial and inadequate.
A different character might say something completely differently. “What, you crazy? You gotta be out of your mind!”
Both characters are saying the same thing. But they’re revealing totally different personalities through the way they express themselves in their speaking.
When you’re writing your characters, make those characters distinct. Make them different personalities. We don’t want all be the same. We want to see who these people are, and let them express themselves as they truly are, by the way you make them speak.
One of the ways to do that, probably the best way, is going to sound a little awkward, but you need to try it. Practice saying your dialogue as if you were one of your characters. When you speak out loud, you’ll start to get into your character more and more. This may take several tries. But take a character and take the dialogue that you’ve written. Think about their personality, what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, and start saying their dialogue as if they were saying it.
When you try speaking it aloud, you’ll find when something doesn’t feel exactly right. Try it again, with a bit different words or emphasis. Then try it a third time. At some point, you will really start to understand the creation that you’ve made. You will understand that character even better than what you thought of originally. This will be fun. Take advantage of that. Work it out. When you get something you said that’s exactly what your character would say, write it down.
Then take another character. Go through the whole process again. How would this character respond? What would they say? What are they thinking? What’s their personality? How was their emotional state? How would they say it? It may take several tries, but as you’re speaking it out loud, you’re hearing it and you’ll you’ll start to understand. You’ll think, “Ah, this this is what that character would say.” Write it down. You’re really getting to the heart of great dialogue. It’s really getting interesting.
One thing you also want to do is remember that dialogue isn’t just a person and another person looking at each other and talking. When we have conversations, we do other things at the same time. There’s stuff going on, we want our reader to actually be believing that they’re in something real.
Have your characters react using hand gestures. Some people like to talk with their hands. Well, let’s write those gestures down. Think about what they are doing. Is the character shaking her fists? Is he pointing to something? Is she pointing at the other character?
The actions each character makes doesn’t have to be huge. He could be walking over to looking out the window as he’s trying to figure out how to respond to a question. What is it he’s going to say? That’s an action that’s going on in the middle of the dialogue. Be sure to put those actions into your dialogue. It could be everything from almost violent, like slamming a fist on the table, or it could be something like doodling while talking. A character can checking his phone. She’s looking off in the distance. He’s getting mad and breaks a pencil in half. She kicks the garbage can.
There can be interruptions during the dialogue. Two characters are talking and all of the sudden, a siren goes by and breaks up the tension. You can almost see the characters each wondering, “Is that the police or a fire truck? What about an ambulance?” Someone could walk in on the conversation with a brief message – how does each character react? These interruptions happen all the time and can either highlight the tension or serve as a way to calm things down just a bit.
Make your dialogue real by adding these types of things that are going on at the same time as the conversation. It doesn’t stop the dialogue; it just gives us a bigger context for it.
Another way to improve your dialogue is to cut out all the extra stuff.
When you write your first draft of your story, your dialogue will likely reflect things found in normal conversation. In a normal conversation, if I see you, I’d say, “Hey, how’s it going?” You could respond with, “I’m fine. How are you?” “Oh, I’m doing good too.” And so on.
But in our story, we don’t want any of that extra stuff. It’s the one difference between fiction writing and reality. In reality, we have normal conversations that take a bit to get going. In fiction, though, we want to be sharp and we want to get to the point without messing around with politeness (unless, of course, we are trying to highlight how everyone is extremely polite).
An example may help. Raymond Chandler was an outstanding mystery writer. One of his creations is a private detective named Philip Marlowe. The PI Philip Marlowe knows a detective in the police force. Instead of writing a conversation where they’re talking back and forth and like normal people, the writer Chandler wrote a far better dialogue. I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but it was something like this:
Marlowe calls the detective on the police force, Bernie Ohls. “Bernie, Marlowe. You know that robbery down on 22nd Street? Tell me everything you know about Susan Johnson.”
That’s a quick, concise dialogue. We’re immediately interested because we’re already wondering what robbery? Who is Susan Johnson? What does she have to do with this?
We have all these questions going on. We have to keep reading to find out. We can’t even stop reading. I mean, if you stop the story at that point, you’re thinking, “I can’t stop! I don’t care about dinner. I don’t care about going to school. I don’t care about anything. I have to know what’s Bernie going to say about Susan Johnson and the robbery.”
This is the kind of dialogue that really makes it powerful. You cannot stop reading the story because the dialogue is so sharp and crisp and full, even though there’s nothing extra in it at all. It’s actually even more powerful BECAUSE there’s nothing extra.
Also remember that can use dialogue as a type of conflict itself. You know we’re always talking about stories having conflict. Well, dialogue is a good place for that conflict to exist.
“I’m going to do this.” “No, you’re not.” “Yes, I am.” “I will stop you, I don’t care what it takes.”
That kind of conversation, that going back and forth, you’re really getting a conflict. You start to get to a point where it’s like these people are ready to really get into a fight.
Dialogue can do that. It’s always something when you’re looking at your conflicts and think, “How do I stretch this? How can I make even the dialogue sound like a conflict? By doing so, you reveal some interesting things about your characters and their relationship.
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I don’t expect you to remember all this stuff when you’re writing your first draft. Don’t worry about all these items when you write your first draft because it’s far more important that to get your story down. But after you got the story written, go back and look for any places where there is dialogue. Look for any places where some dialogue be added.
What can you do to revise or add dialogue that reveals personalities. Where can you update your dialogue to reveal character emotions and what they’re thinking.
When you do that, your story is going to be sharper and more interesting and harder to put down. You’ll love writing it, and your readers will love reading it.