writing diologue

[Aasta Belfrie]

Does anyone have any tips for writing diologue? I really suck at it.  

[Feline Anachronism]

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, practice and read.

Now that the usual tips are out of the way...people watching. Grab a book to hide behind, head down to a coffee shop (or wherever people congregate in your city), and just watch people interact, listen to their conversations. Is it creepy? Kind of. Is it fun and helpful? Absolutely.  

[VenusRain]

Pay attention to differences in how the same person talks in different situations as well; the differences won't be drastic most of the time, but there will be differences.  

[AurinJade]

Read it out loud to yourself. Does it sound like two people talking? I've cleaned up a lot of dialog by reading my stories out loud to siblings/friends.

Also, when you're reading other books, pay attention to how the author uses dialog, and what description goes with it. Basically, study your sources. Take note on what's going on and how it's happening.  

[A-Q-Kabuto]

At some point in ones education an english teacher usually end up making people afraid of using 'he said' and simple dialog tags like that for the fear of the dreaded 'repetitiveness'. Yes it's good to use some variety but there's no reason to go over board on any of it. Conventions are conventions for a reason.

:/ fersher, that was probably one of the worst things I'd ever learned "avoid using 'said' as much as possible" and it took a while to fix too.

Dialog itself, while people to use 'umm' and 'euh' and pause or trail off sometimes, don't do it too much in all the same way. Variety is more important here than in the tag.

ALSO try not to abuse capslock or the ellipsis (the '...' it can be a way to show a pause but it actually does have a different usage too and it can just be annoying to see hundreds upon hundreds of strings of little dots )


I have learned from being told and noticing myself that I almost never write contractions, I doubt too many others have this problem. I used to not often speak with them either and have had to make a conscious effort sometimes to put them in because people do in fact use contractions. Go figure. So on the off chance you have this problem too, balance out the use of contractions with the characters personality and mental state.  

[Demona McRae]

The irony here for me is kind of sad. I have absolutely no problem with dialogue, in fact it's the easiest part of writing for me, although the whole avoiding 'he said' 'she said' is a pain in the biatch, I usually don't have a problem with it. The irony being that, for as easy as it is, I hav almost no advice on the issue. I've never had to think about it. I guess it would be easier if I knew exactly where you got hung up. Is it describing the dialogue? What actions they're doing while they're talking, so it's not a big flood of conversation with no description or action? Or is it the action itself? Or, like previously mentioned, is it the whole 'said' issue?

I know one of the biggest pains is using names repetitively. You want to make sure the audience is clear on who is doing the talking, but you also don't want to end every sentence Bob speaks with 'Bob said.' For this, I usually end up finding an identifier of the character, something that the reader knows is indicitive of him or her, like, when he speaks the first time, I'll have it say 'Bob said, "Words."' Then, the next time he talks, I might reorder the sentence structure, and say: '"More words," the nondescript character mumbled softly.'

Hope that helps. If it's another issue, I'll do what I can.  

[deliciously]

If you want to make it easy and fun to read, try having two characters go back and forth. Adds sort of a momentum, I guess. I always have fun reading sequences like that.

Quote:

"This is a sentence," Character said.
"So is this one," Other character replied.
"And this one."
"This one too."
"And this!"
"Yeah, this too."