Skillfully written dialogue will grab readers and pull them right into a story. The trick is to make it sound realistic. There are many tips for writing dialogue but everyone will find that they have their own special spin to put on this. After all, everyone has his or her own style of voice when speaking, likewise when in writing. However, there are some basic tips for writing dialogue to keep in mind next time you’re writing a story.
One of the best tips for writing dialogue is to use it as a way of defining your characters. This builds a much more realistic image of your characters in the reader’s minds when they can actually “hear” how they speak. Some people are short and succinct in their speaking while others love to use eloquent and flowery words. Still others may speak with a heavy foreign accent or a very southern drawl. If you can convey this in your dialogue, naturally, then you’ll have the readers hooked. Some of the tips for writing dialogue are to make sure the dialogue is believable. The reader has to actually feel as if these characters could really be speaking. This has to be one of the most important tips for writing dialogue that you’ll need to remember. It needs to imitate what one would normally hear in the speech patterns that are all around us every day.
Think about how much quicker a book will pull you along when you are reading a dialogue between the characters. It creates action and speeds up the storyline. Some of the best tips for writing dialogue include thinking of how best to hook the reader. Use action words in their speech towards each other. Make it exciting so that the reader wants to keep reading. Readers don’t really want to hear the characters saying “Ok, I’m going to the grocery store now.” Dialogue needs to be exciting, action packed or perhaps even funny.
Show the reader what’s happening through dialogue rather than using boring narration. Have the characters talk about where they are going, what they are feeling, seeing or thinking through dialogue. This is one of the best tips for writing dialogue that you can keep in mind. By doing this you’re letting the reader form the pictures in their minds while being entertained. The readers enjoy figuring things out. By reading good dialogue, they can. This is much more entertaining for the reader than having everything described to them in narrative style.
Use dialogue to describe previous events instead of relying on flashbacks or other cliche writing tools. This shows the readers what happened in the past that led the character to this point in the story without getting into boring narrative detail. By doing so, this accomplishes two things; first is that the readers can hear about the past event the way the character sees it and second, one gets a feel of how the character feels about what’s happened in the past.
More good tips for writing dialogue would be being able to use dialogue in such a way to build tension in the plot. By using certain words and inflections, the tempo of the story line can be increased in a dramatic way.
Use these tips for writing dialogue to create a great story that flows and ebbs with emotion and action. The reader needs to be able to completely lose themselves in the dialogue between characters. If one can accomplish this then you’ve grasped the important tips for writing dialogue in such a way that you have what it takes to be a successful writer.