Good dialogue

Dialogue is crucial to the success of any story. Good dialogue can make a story, bad dialogue can wreck it.

Bear in mind some of these rules of conversation and reflect them in the dialogue that you write.

A lot of the time, we do not speak in correct sentences/we often use short sharp phrases.

Keep your dialogue crisp - we can tell a lot about a person in a short snap of conversation.

Dialogue must take the story on.

Do not pack dialogue with extraneous information. Don’t write like this:

“I saw William, although everyone calls him Bill, my neighbour of ten years in Acacia Avenue, in Darlington, and observed that he was his normal glum self, to which we - that is my wife, Edith, and I - have grown accustomed in the weeks since his wife left him for a younger man and filed for divorce. I assumed that the darkness which seems to have assailed him since then has not lifted.”

If you need to slot in that information, find a way of doing it more subtly: ie “Saw Bill this morning. His usual gloomy self. Not sure he’ll ever recover. The divorce really has knocked him backwards.”

John Dean