Writing Dialogue

Creative Writing / Barbara Daniels

1. Try to hear your characters speaking into your ear. Freewriting may help you capture a particular voice.

2. Choose direct dialogue, using quotation marks, when an interchange is crucial and dramatic. Readers want to be in on important conversations.

3. If dialogue isn’t crucial, summarize it (i.e. Alicia told Bernel what had happened at the interview). This condensed dialogue can use the rhythms and word choice of speech so that it’s close to actual dialogue. (Had Alicia gotten the job? Gosh, she hoped so, she really hoped and prayed that she had, she told Bernel.)

4. Make dialogue central to fully realized scenes, adding description, action, and a character’s inner thoughts to most exchanges.

5. Be selective. Dialogue in fiction isn’t like dialogue in real life. In fiction it’s more shapely and purposeful.

6. Dialogue should do several things at once, such as establish a setting, set a mood, characterize, heighten conflict, allude to the story’s theme, and reveal conflicting emotions.

7. Characters can talk about the past, but beware of using dialogue merely to convey information.

8. It’s fine to use “said.” Look at published stories to see how often it appears.

9. Avoid speech tags, such as “he sneered” and “he whimpered” that call too much attention to themselves.

10. Write for the ear so readers feel that they’re hearing the dialogue. Try reading your story aloud to see if your dialogue sounds natural.

11. Put a ruler about an inch into your dialogue. Then check what’s to the left of it. Is there anything that can be cut? (“Hi, Alicia. What’s up?”}

12. When dialect is essential to your story, indicate it by using only a few regional phrases, respellings, or changes in word order. Do this early in a story and you’ll probably find you don’t need to do it as much later on..

13. Dialect can seem condescending. Everyone says “gonna” and “sez,” so consider whether you are respelling such words only to indicate that a character is from a particular class or is less educated than other characters in a story. Normally you’ll want to empathize with a character rather than suggest that you are superior to her or him.

Some of the ideas on this sheet came from Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, New York:

HarperCollins, 1994.