Hi everyone!
It’s time for another Write On! Roundup. As a paid subscriber, you are cordially invited to ask me questions about creative writing craft and publishing, and I will answer based on my more than 40 years as a published novelist, memoirist, MFA advisor, and bestselling ghostwriter (the last sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s true that I’ve ghosted several NYT bestsellers, even if I can’t divulge their titles!).
This week’s question comes from
:I can see that dialogue can build protagonists or other characters and I can see how dialogue can be more than an addition but a very powerful part of the writing. Any thoughts you have on writing good dialogue would be greatly received.
Thank you, Margaret! Here goes…
We humans tend to talk- to ourselves, to each other, at each other. So, if you’re writing about humans, you probably need to write dialogue. This goes for essayists and memoirists, as well as fiction writers.
A story without dialogue is not likely to do full justice to human interaction, but that’s not to say that dialogue on the page is an exact mirror of human talk. The difference is what makes talk tricky for writers.
You can always paraphrase dialogue that you can’t remember word for word.
I’ve found it handy to remember a few basic principles when crafting character conversation:
The primary purpose of dialogue is to reveal character.
When a character speaks, we should be able to hear their voice, their emotions, their concerns, and especially their relationship to their conversational partner. So make sure you listen closely to them before you write a single line of their dialogue. Hear where they come from, how educated they are, the breadth of their vocabulary, the cadence of their voice, and the sound of their personality — whether slow and controlled, showy, excitable, or fearful. It all comes out in the talk.
* If you’re writing memoir, it is especially important to hear the voice of the person you’re quoting. Capture the phrases they use all the time, their malapropisms, their signature hyperbole, what they say when angry or terrified, how they express affection. No one expects every line of dialogue in a memoir to be as accurate as a recording, but it still needs to be true to the character and situation. This means that you should only quote the people you know well enough to hear before you write.
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