How To Write Dialogue

Tips and Exercises to Make Your Dialogue Writing Come Alive

For some writers dialogue comes easiest. For others, putting words into the mouths of characters is sheer torture. If you are planning on writing fiction, chances are at some point you will have to write dialogue. If you plan on being a playwright or screenwriter, you better be pretty good at it. If instead you plan on being a novelist or short story writer, you can probably get by with dialogue not being your strongest point. If you're just starting out and aren't sure if you're good at it or not, these tips will hopefully be of great use.

First, you have to know exactly why you're using dialogue in the first place instead of exposition. And, coincidentally, one of the main uses of dialogue is to, well, convey exposition, to tell the reader, through the conversation of characters, what we need to know to make sense of the story. A writer needs to be careful about putting too much exposition into the mouths of a character, however. Dialogue should be interesting and sometimes when a character is telling too much about what is happening or going to happen, the dialogue gets boring. Exposition through dialogue is best done in small amounts, preferably spread throughout the story. And do no underestimate the value of withholding information. That's not the same thing as cheating, not giving the reader everything he's entitled to know. Holding information back means that first you give hints, hold out a carrot, capture their imagination and interest. Don't give away all your cards at once.

Dialogue is also a wonderful, perhaps the best, way to convey character: to show us what kinds of people are in the story. Dialogue can be used to great effect to show how the characters differ from one another. The way people talk is an incredibly effective way to indicate the desires and motives of characters, illustrating what things each character cares about the most.