The Five Jobs Your Dialogue Needs to Do: Advancing Your Skills
How to make your characters sound real
Scriptwriters are really good at dialogue — they have to be. It’s mostly all they’ve got to work with, apart from stage or camera directions. Fiction writers often forget what jobs the dialogue in their stories has to do. They focus on one or two elements and their dialogue ends up flat or too fast or uses too much explaining.
Have you ever seen dialogue like this in novels that sell well?
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“How are you?”
“I’m good. How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“How’s your mother?”
This is how we speak, but the first thing dialogue has to do is sound normal, while cutting out all the stuff we ramble on about usually. Greetings, repetitions, ums and ahs, jumbled words. Occasionally they work for a particular character, but mostly they don’t serve us. Here are the jobs your dialogue should be doing (if you manage three out of five, good, but four is better).
Characterisation
In my editing work, I often see novels where all the characters sound the same (or sound like the author). A test is to take out all of your…
