Conclusion

Congratulations! You’ve finished the course on Dialogue. Let’s recap.

There are two big issues holding back (amateurish) dialogue:

• Lines that sound unnatural.
• And lines that aren’t interesting (or serve no purpose).

To fix the first part, build an intuition for what sounds like natural, characteristic dialogue. The tips and explanations in this course (hopefully) help a lot. But the real training comes from applying the ideas to the many stories you write, analyzing the stories you read, and going outside to listen how others talk.

To fix the second part, turn dialogue into mini-stories (with attack and defend, conflict, a climax) and design your characters to have reasons to be interesting. (To lie, deceive, talk funny, omit important information, etcetera.)

Good dialogue multitasks. It conveys information and character. To do so, be careful with what your characters say (their favored words, the information they’ll choose to share) and what they don’t say (their forbidden words, their secrets or most painful parts). Find a balance between efficient and sharp dialogue, and “mistakes” (such as clipped sentences or wrong grammar) that make it sound more human.

Most of all, don’t try to memorize all of this or try to get it right the first try. Your first go? Simply write the dialogue as literally and fully as you can. Get it out of your head.

Then, during revisions, apply the tricks and ideas to make it better. Omit what’s unnecessary. Change what sounds unnatural. Add subtext. Add a rhythm or flow to the words. Make the phrasing more unique, so you can leave out most dialogue tags.

Some people say dialogue is a last resort. Some people worship subtext and therefore write very minimal dialogue. Others heavily favor dialogue and are great at conveying everything they need using such scenes. I don’t think such strict rules are worth anything: practice dialogue, build your intuition (writing, reading, living), and you’ll find your balance.

If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend reading the Prose course to learn about all other types of writing.

And I recommend the Storytelling course for a guide that takes you through writing a story from start to finish, with many practical challenges and links to the other courses when needed. It’s a sort of “master course”: start there, branch out into more specific courses as needed.

This course was actually quite hard for me to write. Most writers mark dialogue as something they clearly struggle with—for me it’s by far the easiest part. I’ve barely had to study or practice it. In fact, the very first book I finished and sent to publishers, received the feedback “yeah, it’s nice, but it’s like 90% dialogue and reads more like a screenplay”. The feedback on all my books has, consistently, been that the dialogue is very strong and pushes the plot forward at all times. At the same time, I often forget that description even exists ;)

As such, I might have glossed over important lessons or tips, simply because they feel like second nature to me. Maybe this comes from the fact that I have always “imagined” conversations since I was a child. (When I dream, for example, it’s usually a series of interesting conversations, instead of some vague sequence of events that most people talk about.)

If something in the course was unclear or lacking, feel free to send me a message with your feedback or questions!

Keep learning,

Pandaqi