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Nov 13, 2015 · #1: Every line of dialogue must serve a purpose. Dialogue shouldn’t exist solely to give your characters something to say. Rather, effective literary conversations serve many powerful purposes; they can explore characters, advance the plot, ramp up tension, reveal context, establish mood, and so on.
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- How to Define Your Character's Unique Voice
- Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
- Naomi Alderman, The Power
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
- J R R Tolkien, The Hobbit
- F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- Arthur Conan Doyle,A Study in Scarlet
- Brandon Taylor, Real Life
- Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants
- Madeline Miller, Circe
In the opening of Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered,we meet Willa Knox, a middle-aged and newly unemployed writer who has just inherited a ramshackle house. Alfred Hitchcock once described drama as "life with the boring bits cut out." In this passage, Kingsolver cuts out the boring parts of Willa's conversation with her contractor and brings us righ...
In the first piece of dialogue in Pride and Prejudice, we meet Mr and Mrs Bennet, as Mrs Bennet attempts to draw her husband into a conversation about neighborhood gossip. Austen’s dialogue is always witty, subtle, and packed with character. This extract from Pride and Prejudice is a great example of dialogue being used to develop character relatio...
In The Power, young women around the world suddenly find themselves capable of generating and controlling electricity. In this passage, between two boys and a girl who just used those powers to light her cigarette. Alderman here uses a show, don’t tell approach to expositional dialogue. Within this short exchange, we discover a lot about Allie, her...
Here, friends Tommy and Kathy have a conversation after Tommy has had a meltdown. After being bullied by a group of boys, he has been stomping around in the mud, the precise reaction they were hoping to evoke from him. This episode from Never Let Me Go highlights the power of interspersing action beats within dialogue. These action beats work in se...
The eponymous hobbit Bilbo is engaged in a game of riddles with the strange creature Gollum. Tolkein’s dialogue for Gollum is a masterclass in creating distinct character voices. By using a repeated catchphrase (“my precious”) and unconventional spelling and grammar to reflect his unusual speech pattern, Tolkien creates an idiosyncratic, unique (an...
The narrator, Nick has just done his new neighbour Gatsby a favor by inviting his beloved Daisy over to tea. Perhaps in return, Gatsby then attempts to make a shady business proposition. This dialogue from The Great Gatsby is a great example of how to make dialogue sound natural. Gatsby tripping over his own words (even interrupting himself, as mar...
In this first meeting between the two heroes of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmesstories, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, John is introduced to Sherlock while the latter is hard at work in the lab. This passage uses a number of the key techniques for writing naturalistic and exciting dialogue, including characters speaking over one another and the int...
Here, our protagonist Wallace is questioned by Ramon, a friend-of-a-friend, over the fact that he is considering leaving his PhD program. Brandon Taylor’s Real Life is drawn from the author’s own experiences as a queer Black man, attempting to navigate the unwelcoming world of academia, navigating the world of academia, and so it’s no surprise that...
In this short story, an unnamed man and a young woman discuss whether or not they should terminate a pregnancy while sitting on a train platform. This example of dialogue from Hemingway’s short story Hills Like White Elephants moves at quite a clip. The conversation quickly bounces back and forthbetween the speakers, and the call-and-response forma...
In Madeline Miller’s retelling of Greek myth, we witness a conversation between the mythical enchantress Circe and Telemachus (son of Odysseus). This short and punchy exchange hits on a lot of the stylistic points we’ve covered so far. The conversation is a taut tennis match between the two speakers as they volley back and forth with short but impa...
Sep 3, 2021 · Get started with these comprehensive good dialogue writing tips. Writing dynamic, believable, and lively dialogue is an important skill for any storyteller. But what is great dialogue?
Jun 24, 2022 · Dialogue also makes your writing feel more immersive. It breaks up long prose passages and gives your reader something to “hear” other than your narrator’s voice. Often, writers use dialogue to also show how characters relate to each other, their setting, and the plot they’re moving through.
Jan 14, 2021 · Good dialogue isn’t about quippy lines and dramatic pauses. Good dialogue is about propelling the story forward, pulling the reader along, and fleshing out characters and their dynamics in front of readers. Well-written dialogue can take your story to a new level — you just have to unlock it.
- Tom Bromley
Great stories contain great dialogue. But writing good dialogue isn't easy, so we're going to cover what makes for good dialogue, why it's important, and cover examples of good dialogue in pop culture.
Infusing your conversations with conflict and tension is a highly effective technique for writing good dialogue. By incorporating opposing viewpoints or conflicting goals, you create a dynamic exchange that grabs readers’ attention and keeps them invested.
