Write Dialogues

A dialogue is a conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or film.

Write Good Dialogue

  1. Keep it tight and avoid unnecessary words
  2. Hitting beats and driving momentum
  3. Keep it oblique, where characters never quite answer each other directly
  4. Reveal character dynamics and emotion
  5. Keep your dialogue tags simple (A dialogue tag is the part that helps us know who is saying what – the he said/she said part of dialogue that helps the reader follow the conversation)
  6. Get the punctuation right, see #Punctuation
  7. Be careful with accents
Tip

Some tips for dialogues:

  • Keep speeches short. If a speech runs for more than three sentences or so, it (usually) risks being too long. Break it up with some action or someone else talking.
  • Ensure characters speak in their own voice. And make sure your characters don’t sound the same as each other. Remember mannerisms, speech patterns, and how age and background influences speech.
  • Add intrigue. Add slang and banter. Lace character chats with foreshadowing. You needn’t be writing a thriller to do this.
  • Get in late and out early. Don’t bother with small talk. Decide the point of each interaction, begin with it as late as possible, ending as soon as your point is made.
  • Interruption is good. So are characters pursuing their own thought processes and not quite engaging with the other.

Punctuation

8 rules to know before your character starts to speak [1]:

  1. Each new line of dialogue (i.e: each new speaker) needs a new paragraph – even if the dialogue is very short.
  2. Action sentences within dialogue get their own paragraphs too. The first paragraph of a chapter or section starts on the far left, and the next paragraph (whether it starts with dialogue or not) is indented.
  3. The only exception to this rule is if the sentence interrupts an otherwise continuous piece of dialogue. for example: “Yes,” she said. She brushed away a fly that had landed on her cheek. “I do think hippos are the best animals.”
  4. When you are ending a line of dialogue with he said / she said, the sentence beforehand ends with a comma not a full stop (or period), as in this for example: “Yes,” she said.
  5. If the line of dialogue ends with a question mark or exclamation mark, you still don’t have a capital letter for he said / she said.  For example: “You like hippos?” he said.
  6. If the he said / she said lives in the middle of one continuous sentence of dialogue, you need to deploy those commas like a comma-deploying ninja. Like this for example: “If you like hippos,” he said, “then you deserve to be sat on by one.”
  7. And use quotation marks, dummy. You know to do that, without me telling you, right? (Yes, yes, some serious writers of literary fiction have written entire novels without one speech mark – but they are the exception to the rule.)
  8. Use the exclamation point sparingly. Otherwise! Your! Book! Is! Going! To! Sound! Very! Hysterical!

  1. according toWriting Dialogue in Fiction by Harry Bingham ↩︎