Writing Dialogue in Novels

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Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

I’m teaching my last session of Write Submit Support (a six-month program at the Writing Barn) and some of the current writers are worried about dialogue, so I thought it might be time to do a deep dive.

Again.

Dialogue is one of those things that really impact your novels. Do it well? And you’ve leveled up a notch in the writing hierarchy.

Do it flatly? Then people might be mocking you a bit like this….

So, let’s get started!

Before COVID-19 we made extra money by staying in a camper for the summer and renting out our house to tourists.

To put this in perspective, we had two dogs, one obese cat, two humans (occasionally three) in this tiny camper from the 1980s. We painted it white so it wasn’t as depressing, but let me tell you, painting things white doesn’t make anything actually bigger.

Anyways, I was trying to quickly make a camper video about dialogue and I failed completely. Here it is below. Don’t judge too harshly.

THE YOUTUBE VIDEO OF EMBARRASSMENT

If you don’t want to die from secondhand embarrassment let me sum it up for you.

The takeaway from this video is meant to be people react to different things in different ways. People speak in different ways. Show this in your dialogue. Think of how your mom talks, your bestie, your avó, the lady at the bar, your rabbi. Not everyone talks the same. Think of how they all react to one simple situation like a rat popping out of the garbage bin in the kitchen. It wouldn’t all be the same, right? Respect and embrace that difference and show it in your story.

The rest of this post is going to focus a bit on getting dialogue down in the first draft and revising it.