When the dialogue is carrying exposition and trying to tell the reader too much, characters end up saying a lot of very unnatural and unwieldy things. Good dialogue is not weighed down by exposition Weave cleverness into dialogue that otherwise has a point, don’t just show chit chat for chit chat’s sake.Ĭharacters in a novel never just talk. If things stay even and neutral, and it mainly just feels like everyone has all the time in the world to chit chat aimlessly, the dialogue just feels empty. The dialogue is about something and builds toward something. Unless it’s just so insanely unbelievably clever that the writer somehow makes it work, usually this aimless banter feels hollow and far less interesting than the author thinks it is.Ī good conversation is an escalation. Sometimes you’ll see characters in novels bantering back and forth in a way that is meant to be witty unto itself, reveal character, or just fill space. Even characters who are nominally aligned might have different ideas about how to achieve a goal. No character should be forced to set aside their motivations for the author’s convenience.Ĭharacters need to be utilizing their words to try to get what they want. So, for instance, when characters are reduced to asking a bunch of leading questions that don’t make any intrinsic sense just so the author can smush in a bunch of information, it won’t feel remotely real. The second they put their interests on hold to serve some other separate narrative function is the second they stop feeling human. Good dialogue is an escalating joust between characters with competing interestsĪbove all, characters in a novel must want something and be actively going after that thing. Here are some tips for utilizing dialogue effectively. Even novels that appear at first blush to be almost entirely dialogue are clever in the way they weave in other crucial storytelling elements, particularly motivations, physical description, inner thought processes, and context and exposition. I constantly see authors contorting their novels to shoehorn everything into dialogue because they haven’t yet mastered other storytelling techniques.ĭialogue cannot be everything, and, in fact, it’s almost always best when it’s used judiciously. Over-use of dialogue has become really rampant in the manuscripts I see. Writing good dialogue is a crucial way of letting characters speak for themselves outside of the narrative voice, and it’s one of the best ways of conveying personality and flavor.Īnd, as with any powerful device, it can be abused. Few storytelling elements in a novel are as powerful as dialogue.
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