[Writing Prompts] Realistic Dialogue

I don’t know if you’ve been using little or lots of dialogue in your stories up until now. We’re going to spend the next few days looking at dialogue issues, and play with a few different aspects of it.

The Prompt

Write a story that features realistic dialogue

Tips

When writing dialogue, remember that people don’t talk in speeches, not really. And they certainly don’t listen to each other. We interrupt, talk at cross-purposes and misunderstand each other all the time. Capture some of that.

When writing colloquially don’t go overboard with misspellings and missing letters to convey how people ‘really’ talk. Using ‘gonna’ and dropping the ‘g’ from ‘ing’ is fine if you’re trying to show that someone has a really strong accent, but invented spellings risk just making the reader impatient and irritated. Much better to try to capture the rhythm of a locale’s speech or use one or two tell-tale local words, than to try to transliterate a dialect accurately.

Remember to use sentence length to reflect how someone is feeling: short, choppy sentences for someone who is agitated; long, lugubrious sentences for contented fat cats.

Go!

And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.

[Prompt] May 27 – Dialogue

Today it’s time to work on our dialogue.

Write a story that focuses on writing realistic dialogue

I’m a fan of the podcast Writing Excuses hosted by 3-4 working science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction/comic authors and occasional guests. Even if you don’t write in these forms, don’t let that put you off. It’s 15 minutes long and almost always inspiring.

The reason I mention this is because of their episode with guest Jon Scalzi who gave an excellent, and kind of hilarious theory of why dialogue often comes out sounding less than realistic. I recommend you listen here, but the embarrassingly-accurate gist is that writers spend a lot of time reading. That means that when it comes time to write dialogue we have a tendency to write it as if we are, well, writing it. We don’t tend to write how people really talk, with all the interjections, interruptions and selfishness of people in everyday conversation.

So lets try to capture some of that in our stories today. Let’s write how people really talk and not how we wish they would.

Go!

[Prompt] May 9 – Chatty Cathy

LET YOUR CHARACTER TALK

Tell a story where everything we learn about the character comes from the things they say.
Does what they say match up with what they mean? Iin what ways do they lie about themselves when the speak? How do people react?)

Tell Us About Your Character Through Their Voice

Go!