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48 Part II: Realising That Character Is Everything
sound and the rhythm of speech; writing good dialogue is more like writing
poetry or music than ordinary prose, in that it needs to be concise, sound
good when read aloud, and provoke an emotional response in the reader.
The best way to get your dialogue right is to write lots of it. One great
approach to creating lively, realistic dialogue is to practise writing dialogue
with another person. If you have a friend who’s also a writer or just willing to
help and have some fun, arrange to sit down and write dialogues together in
which you each control one person in a conversation. Not only is this great
fun, but it also helps show you how real dialogue works – one person can’t
control what the other character says!
While you’re writing with a partner, you can develop this exercise a little
further with the three following ideas:
✓ Write a dialogue in which one of the characters is trying to draw out the
other one, asking questions.
✓ Write a dialogue in which one of the characters isn’t listening to the
other.
✓ Write a dialogue in which the second character keeps changing the topic
of conversation to his own agenda.
Drafting and Developing Dialogue
Most dialogue takes a while to write well, which is why many writers write
far more dialogue than they finally use, discarding much when revising their
work. Writing the dialogue without worrying about it too much in the first
draft is still important, though, because the more dialogue you have to play
with, the more chance you have of coming up with that telling phrase that
really conveys what you want to say.
In this section I describe some fundamentals and cover the particular skills
of creating face-to-face dialogue and phone dialogue, when your characters
can’t see each other.
Talking about dialogue basics
Here are some basics to be aware of when creating your masterpieces of
conversation: