Write A Novel
Write A Novel Course tinyurl.com/begin-writing-now The words your characters use - Think about it this way – the words your characters use are the ones your readers receive to base their opinion on. Yes, your character’s actions are equally important – but can you imagine a story where entirely no dialogue was used? (No, that was not a challenge for you to attempt to write a novel without dialogue.) Dialogue can be a way to drive the plot forward, by creating some conflict, by helping express to a broader audience within the story what the character’s intentions are, by prompting some action, and in many more ways. Thus, it becomes essential to understand how you can create a dialogue that is both believable and effective. Dialogue drives things forward Given that dialogue serves as a vocalization of conflict that is present within characters or between characters, it is no surprise that dialogue needs to be written in a way that drives a story forward. We all have meaningless conversations sometimes, but that’s because we have a lifetime’s worth of time to be able to have them. Your characters, however, don’t. They have a very short span of time within which their story needs to be told in a manner that makes your reader want to know more. So, skip out on the unnecessary dialogue and pleasantries – this will add to the word count of your novel, yes, but will not add substance to what you’re looking to convey in actuality. Of course, this is not to say that all dialogue has to create conflict – but as a general rule of thumb, this works! One way to ensure you’re adhering to this rule quite cohesively is to hide the dialogue and check if the story continues the same way without it – if it has no contribution to the overall story whatsoever, you might want to consider removing it. It doesn’t have to contribute to the plot directly – but even through consideration of your character’s motivations, morals, or changing their pattern of thinking, dialogue can be made useful, instead of some filler. Focus on its flow The strange thing about writing dialogue – and indeed, all writing in general, is that the amount of work you put in needs to guide the piece towards sounding more effortless. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, this applies even more specifically to dialogue because you want the conversation to flow naturally. Your characters need to have a conversation that sounds plausible within that realm or universe you’re considering. You might benefit from reading your dialogue out loud, either by yourself or with someone else joining you for some parts, to see if you would engage in conversation similarly. If not, work on making it sound more natural. Dialogue tags are also relevant in this process, with the word ‘said’ being most commonly used. While the use of other verbs is perceived as being distracting by some in that it takes away from the actual dialogue, you need to be careful to ensure you don’t overuse the word said. After a while, it does become obvious that your characters are saying things to each other, and unless there’s a marked difference in tone, your readers don’t need to be actively reminded of that. #writeanovel
