How do you make your story’s dialogue more realistic without writing too much dialogue? Or extraneous pass the meat and potatoes dialogue?
How do you avoid having the dialogue sound stiff or cliche? How do you write dialogue that sounds natural and riveting?
Dialogue is one of trickiest things to master. And it does take practice. It requires pruning and drilling down to the heart of the conversation.
In today’s episode, I’m flagging 3 common missteps writers make with dialogue, along with fixes for each.
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Episode at a glance:
[02:19] Expository Dialogue
This is dialogue written for the reader. In other words, the characters aren’t really talking to one another. The dialogue is being used to feed the reader essential information that the writer believes they’ll need in order to understand what’s about to happen, or what happened in the past.
Learn how to craft dialogue for both character and reader.
[08:58] Extraneous Dialogue
This is the “pass the meat and potatoes” kind of dialogue. And this often happens from a genuine attempt to make the dialogue sound real and believable. So how to compress shape dialogue to the needs of your story.
[14:17] No Conflict Dialogue
Conflict is one of those terms that elude many writers, because they think conflict means an argument or confrontation. But conflict just means one character wants one thing and the other character wants something else. It can be contentious. It can also be playful, but there’s friction. The characters clash. It could be a clash in how they view the world. It could be a clash of values, it could be conflicting desires.
Link mentioned in this episode:
Episode 112: 3 Tips For Writing Dynamic Dialogue
Also listen to:
Episode 24: You Already Know How To Write Dialogue
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