Or maybe Skip to content What is dialogue? Speech tags — the words that tell the reader who is speaking and how they are speaking. What should dialogue do? Summarise action that could otherwise be exciting Force-feed information to the reader — tell a character something they would already know, purely to fill in background to the reader Act as padding to achieve a word count Ramble on without the characters learning anything knew or achieving something Sound exactly like real speech, with interruptions, rambling, repetitions and stutters, although these have their place.
What tricks do you use to create effective dialogue? Dialogues are a very useful tool in any story. Not only do they give voice to the characters, but they are also helpful at many other levels. I have selected this example because its dialogues are dynamic, lively, and very funny indeed:. Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. Rather childish really.
In the example, Ford and Arthur have barely escaped the demolition of the Earth, and the conversation they hold puts us into the scene and pushes the plot to the next episode. Characters can also evolve through dialogue. In fact, in every good dialogue, at least one of the characters should undergo a change of mood. In the example, Arthur is at first intrigued, questioning Ford about his past.
He then suddenly remembers what happened a few minutes ago and returns to a state of shock, moving toward panic. How does this impression build over each of the six lines of dialogue? Put direct dialogue inside quotation marks, also known as inverted commas.
If you want to include an attribution after the spoken words, use a comma after the speech and before the second inverted comma:. The full stop goes inside the second inverted comma as it is part of the direct speech. If the last punctuation point in a line of dialogue is a question, set it out with the question mark replacing the comma or full stop. Every line of dialogue does not need to be attributed.
Your dialogue will quickly feel clunky if you do that. It reinforces the presence of a writer directing operations and detracts from the impression that people are talking, which is what you want to achieve with your dialogue. Otherwise, the most effective written dialogue is where what the characters are saying speaks for itself. Imagine two characters, Luke and Jodie. They are having a conversation that starts with this line:. What sort of conflict is the dialogue revealing? And what might happen?
Through characterization and plot development, dialogue is ultimately a source of critical information in helping readers understand the story. The way a character speaks can provide a lot of information. Because the characters each have distinctive voices, realistic, well-written dialogue will introduce readers to them in ways that show their most important attributes.
For example, a character who is an aspiring filmmaker might habitually talk in movie references, while an angry teenager might use short, clipped speech and slang in his interactions with others. Good dialogue gives subtle hints to readers about the characters' personalities, backgrounds and interests that will continue to develop throughout the story.
Dialogue is also critical to plot advancement. Conversations between characters often provide critical moments of conflict or turning points, as what they talk about often affects the decisions they make later on.
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