To Speak or Not to Speak: Creating Dazzling Dialogue, Part I

Last week, we discussed how to create dynamic characters. Now it's time to give those characters something to say. Since I spend the majority of my time either talking or listening to others talk, I was certain writing dialogue would be really easy. And it is easy. Writing *good* dialogue, however, is a little more difficult. Being able to speak well doesn't necessarily make you good at writing dialogue.

Dialogue should be realistic but not too realistic. If your characters spoke like real people speak, your novel would be filled with useless chatter, pauses, sentence fragments, abrupt subject changes, and dull, redundant conversations. A direct transcript of a real-life phone conversation might take ten pages but you don't have that kind of space in your novel. You have to cut through the fluff and meaningless phrases to make it snappy and more direct. In writing dialogue, every sentence must have a purpose.

So, how do you create dialogue that sounds realistic but is actually better than a real conversation? First, it's helpful to know the types of dialogue and some effective ways to use dialogue in your novel. You must also be able to give each character his or her own unique voice. Since there is a lot of information of dialogue and the space is limited, the remainder of the article will be in next week's column. It will discuss how to use dialect effectively, select appropriate dialogue tags, and use correct punctuation. Finally, I will provide a list of some dos and don'ts of good dialogue.

Types of dialogue

In Writing Dialogue, Tom Chiarella lists four types of Dialogue: Directed, Interpolated, Misdirected, and Modulated. These types are not mutually exclusive and can be combined to create a variety of dialogue techniques.

Directed dialogue begins with a general statement by one character which leads to a description or overview of the other character. For example, the first character might say, "What's up?" prompting the second character to launch into a description of his/her current situation.

While the movement in Directed dialogue shifts from one character to the other, in Interpolated dialogue, the focus is solely on one character. The dialogue is placed within a narrative, breaking it up into smaller blocks with a couple of paragraphs of text between each segment. Interpolated dialogue is primarily used when the character has something important or particularly revealing to say. People do not usually throw out big stuff in the first few minutes of a conversation. This method gives the important issue time to come up without boring the reader with a large block of dialogue.

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