One thing that I wanted to write about was dialogue. Some authors are very good at it, while others make the dialogue seem awkward and obvious.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a topic I have paid much attention to independently, so I can’t think of any specific examples of authors who are better at creating dialogue than others. Still, there are some generalizations that authors should keep in mind.
- Variety o f sentence structure is good, but at the end of the day, the author will need to write “He said” and “she said” more often than they want to. The truth is, readers skim over these things. Repeating sentence patterns, at least when it comes to dialogue, is a necessary evil.
- That being said, there is still plenty of room for creativity. If ‘said’ is in every single line of a long conversation, we will notice. Use stronger words that will convey more meaning where appropriate. Just don’t overdo these alternate words. What makes them special and effective is when they’re used sparingly.
- Mix up the sentence pattern. Put the speaker’s name at the beginning, end, middle, or not at all.
- I get annoyed when reading long conversations that don’t give any physical references. Perhaps it’s because I’m a visual person, but I like to be reminded of what the scene looks like. What are the body postures of the characters? Do their faces look intense, pensive, listless? Are they sitting or standing? Shift their positions a bit- no real person stands still that long. There are endless opportunities to add helpful information within a scene of dialogue to give it more life.
- Be REALISTIC! I’m going to write my whole next blog on this topic, because it’s so important. Conversations that sound…like a book… don’t sound like people. And like I said earlier, we want characters that we can relate to. Characters that we feel like we can interact with. If their conversation is strained and obvious, this connection from character to reader is broken.
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