Dialogue in your Writing

By Susan Reichert, Editor-in-Chief for Southern Writers Magazine 

Dialogue, is having conversations. Whether it be movies on the big screen or little screen or a novel, there will be conversations, dialogue.

For writers, words are our bread and butter. Choosing our words in writing dialogue is important, it brings our characters conversations to life.

While it is true, we sometimes as writers make our sentences too long, we must remember the sentence must make sense. So, if you are going to shorten it, make sure you are not cutting the heart out of the sentence.

One thing that makes it easy in writing dialogue is when you can write the way the character would talk. If you listen when someone is talking, you will hear how you can write better.

Listening to someone talk you hear how sentences are chopped and words are garbled. You don’t normally hear people talking in formalities, however, if your character is a butler, then yes, he will be speaking with formality.

A writer friend of mine, listens to conversations; when she hears phrases that interest her she writes them in a journal. She catalogs the phrases into formal or casual and has available all sorts of phrases to use for her characters conversations.

For a writer, our dialogue needs to be interesting and attention grabbing when needed. 

Our readers need to be able to distinguish which character is talking. So, it’s important to create personalized dialogue for each character. Perhaps we should read over our dialogues, edit them, making sure the words sound like our character.