It is important to keep conversation natural, relevant and flowing. If it is stilted, unnatural or dull readers will cringe.
Importance of Dialogue
- Dialogue helps build characteristics
- Communicates information to the reader
- Speeds the story along.
Tight Dialogue
Gets the readers attention - An interesting piece of dialogue can start your novel rather than a slower description.
Brings Characters to Life - Dialogue helps to bring characters to life by showing their personality, their background, social status, education, the era they grew up in, mood and motivation through vocabulary, manner of speech as much as content.
To create Mood and Feeling - Dialogue can be charged with high emotion, portray feeling, sets atmosphere and helps the reader to empathize or dislike characters.
Move the Story along - Dialogue can rewind or remind readers of information they may have forgotten, or to inform them of what they need to know without lumps of exposition, lengthy description of an idea or theory.
Add Wit and Humour - Some characters are a delight to listen to, witty, foolish or outrageous. These conversation can be used to liven up a page.
Produce Conflict between Characters - Dialogue can contain a flaming argument or finely nuanced conversation full of bitterness, resentment, or innuendo to add crackle.
Create a sense of Time and Place - People from different eras, locations speak quite differently. A Scot does not speak like a Kiwi (New Zealander). Vocabulary can establish where the story is set.
Pace your Story - Dialogue speeds up pace making it feel less dense and due to the way set out less intimidating.
The amount of dialogue you use depends on personal style some like more, aim for a good balance or narration and dialogue.
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Looking at Speech Tags.
The reader should never be confused about who is saying what. Use he/she said to clarify economically maybe at the beginning of a conversation after that no need to the tags.
You can position speech tags at the beginning, middle or end; mix it up with action and description. The reader needs to know who is talking without thinking about it.
A long paragraph of speech, put the speech tag near the beginning. If you leave it to the end the reader has no idea who is speaking.
Avoid pretentious or over elaborate speech tags; he protested, she exclaimed, gushed as they appear like the writer is trying too hard.
