Let Me Tell You Something – Dialogue, Part Un

One of the most important tools you need in your arsenal as a writer is DIALOGUE. With great dialogue, a story can have depth; with weak dialogue, a story can fall flat.

Dialogue should do more than present TALKING HEADS. Dialogue that is rich and integral to a story does several things…

--It can reveal character and motivation. We don't learn about characters simply by what they do, or the exposition that is written; we can learn about them through what they say, too.

--It can establish the tone or mood. If you're writing a comedic piece, at least one of your characters is probably a wise-ass, joke-cracking person, always with the witty comeback.

--It can foreshadow. Have you ever read a book and after reading a conversation think, "Oh no, something's about to happen?" That's the writer's ability to integrate foreshadowing into dialogue.

--It can provide exposition and backstory...and you want to use this judiciously. Nothing will bore a reader faster than you using dialogue to tell your main character's entire life story. That being said, dialogue is a tool in which you can "quickly" give some additional information, such as backstory so that you won’t end up with long, tedious passages of exposition.

--It can develop a conflict and move a plot forward.

Another thing that dialogue can do is create a great hook, and there are some writers who try to create that hook by starting a novel or starting chapters with dialogue. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but a writer must make sure that that piece of dialogue used is stellar, that it provides enough context to intrigue the reader and make him/her want to continue forward.

I recently edited a manuscript in which the first two pages of the story contained nothing but dialogue with few taglines. As a reader, I had no idea where the characters were, I didn’t know the characters (thus, I couldn’t care for them and their predicament), and I didn’t know what the characters were doing. A reader should always know these things when reading a book.

Keep coming back…a few more parts to this talk on dialogue!