Four exercises to improve your dialogue
Storytelling is a dance between dialogue and description. Let's dive into dialogue.
I’ve been going deep into dialogue this week, and it’s so interesting to me how much it defines your story’s pacing. I always find that dialogue speeds up pace of the story, and description slows it down. Since I tend to gravitate towards a plot that moves forward at a rapid clip, I lean on dialogue to move the story forward.
But, that also means I need to get dialogue right.
Here are four exercises that I’ve used to work on my dialogue writing skills:
Four dialogue writing exercises
Use dialogue as a tool for fast drafting
Put your characters in a scene together, give them a problem to solve, and let them have at it.
Ignore dialogue tags and description and let the decision-making, conflict resolution, character development, and worldbuilding happen as the characters interact with one another.
Train your ear on a dialogue style you love
Dialogue is meant to be spoken, so TV or movie dialogue can be a really useful tool for training your ear.
Watch an episode of a show you admire the dialogue in, and pay attention to how the dialogue is executed. Then, try to write an interaction between two of your characters inspired by that style.
I love the style of dialogue in Gilmore Girls, The West Wing, and Season 1 of Grey’s Anatomy — It’s clever, quippy, and it’s really character driven. Each of these shows are very strongly based on relationships between people, so the dialogue is very relational.
Remove dialogue tags to develop stronger character voice
This exercise comes courtesy of Brandon Sanderson: Put three or more characters in a scene (the more the better, actually). Omit all dialogue tags, and see if you can tell who’s talking based on the personality that comes through in the dialogue.
This helps you develop strong voices for your characters, and also means that when you add the tags back you can consider how necessary each one is and use them more intentionally (including thinking about body language).
Worldbuilding through dialogue
Use dialogue (rather than descriptive text) as a tool for worldbuilding, but try to avoid having characters share information that other characters already know, purely to bring your reader up to speed.
Sometimes it’s helpful to have one character that’s new to your world in some way, so that other characters can explain world mechanics (like your system of magic) to them. But there are other interesting ways to manage this: I love how stories are used for worldbuilding in ‘The Kingkiller Chronicles’.
The stories are just dialogue in a different form, and there’s a lot of discussion and interjection from other characters as a story is told. They provide a really useful way to repeat facts that some characters might already be aware of, because the nature of oft-repeated stories is that a character may have heard it before (and that’s okay).
What are your dialogue tips and tricks? I’d love to hear them (and try them out).