The Art of Writing Dialogue

Want to know the most important thing about Writing Dialogue in a novel? If it sounds like a conversation you would hear in the real world, you've gone horribly wrong somewhere.

The next time you are on a train or sitting on a bench in the street, just listen to two people talking...

• They will speak over each other all the time
• They'll say "um" and "er" a lot
• They'll jump from one topic to another and back again with no warning

All of which is fine in the real world - but hopeless for the purposes of novel writing.

Writing dialogue isn't about replicating real speech. It's about giving an impression of it, improving upon it. Put simply, dialogue in a novel must be so much better than real speech.

Writing Dialogue - the Articles

To start with, read The King of Dialogue Rules. This article isn't so much a set of instructions on how to write dialogue as it is a discussion of what dialogue in a novel actually is - and how it differs from a conversation.

Now for three keys to writing dialogue...

• First, you must Write Dialogue with Purpose. If a conversation in a piece of fiction has no reason for existing other than adding to the word count, you must cut it out.

• Next, you must Write Dialogue Concisely. How? By cutting the conversations in a novel to the bone. And when you believe you have cut them as far as you can, cut them some more.

• The third key is to Write Dialogue that Flows. In other words, you must make it sound effortless. Just the way you imagine dialogue in the real world sounds - except now you know better.

Do these three things and you will soon be writing great dialogue for your novel.

But what if all your characters end up sounding the same? You can fix it by reading How to Write Dialogue with Distinction.

Another issue to bear in mind when writing a novel's conversations is that you want the words to sound authentic - like it's two real people speaking, not two characters in a story. Find out how to write dialogue which has the "ring of truth" about it by reading Writing Authentic Dialogue.

Writing Dialogue Indirectly is all about how to handle long speeches in a novel.

And finally: Do you know whether to use single or double quotation marks? Do you know how to punctuate dialogue if a speech in your novel runs to more than one paragraph? You can discover the answers to these, and other, questions by reading Punctuating Dialogue.