People get less articulate, not more, when they’re emotionally moved. Want to write an emotional moment? Increase your quotient of stumbles and restarts.  Jane Espenson

Writing good dialogue takes practice and patience.  Here are ten tips for you to improve how you write your dialogue so your conversations crackle on the page.

1- Read dialogue aloud.  It’s meant to be heard, after all.  This will help you to listen to the voices of your characters, noticing the flow and movement of their words.

2- Don’t use dialogue to convey large chunks of information (exposition).  People don’t sound like this: “Since we arrived here at four, to watch for Martin Goodfellow, the murderer, I’ve felt hunrgy.”  It’s okay if readers don’t know exactly what’s happening at all times – trust them to understand the story because they are intrigued by the voices of your characters.

3- Dialogue should sound real, but that doesn’t mean dialogue on the page is exactly like snippets of dialogue you overhear.  You don’t need all the Hellos, Goodbyes and boring small talk of daily life.  Cut it out.

4- Good dialogue should move the story forward, convey character and feel full of life.  The best place to see great dialogue is by attending (or reading) plays, watching movies or even just switching on the TV.

5- If you want your character to say, “I need you,” think about the words they would actually use.  Perhaps they’d say, “I can’t- Do you have to catch the early bus?”  

Jane Espenson writes, “Want to write an emotional moment?  Increase your quotient of stumbles and restarts.”  She writes scripts for TV (shows like Buffy and The Gilmore Girls) and her insight into writing dialogue is helpful to think about here. 

6- Learn how to write the correct punctuation for speech.  It’ll be a useful tool for you as a writer, making it easier for you to write the dialogue you want, and it’ll help your work look professional when publishers read it.

7- Another technical dialogue tip: he said and she said read just fine.  Don’t worry about repetition, most readers glide over he said/she said as if those words were punctuation.  Too many of these: exclaimed, gasped, screeched, postulated, reasoned, argued, pondered, mouthed, etc… and your dialogue will be overwhelmed by the words around it.

8- Have people argue with people, or have people saying surprising, contrary things.  If everyone is agreeing with each other, your story will feel flat.

9- Think about how each of your characters sounds.  Make each voice distinct – this can be subtle or dramatic.  Perhaps one character likes to use a certain word or short phrase, so make sure the other characters don’t use that same word or phrase.  It’s a small distinction, but useful.  More dramatic distinctions are up to you!

10- People don’t have to answer each other directly.  Sometimes what’s not said has huge meaning.

Here’s something written by Jennifer Crusie that has given me something to think about:

“Publication, like marriage, is indeed a fine institution, but anyone who says, “My goal in writing is to be published” is making the same mistake as the woman who said, “My goal in living is to be married.” Writing and living are about us, about who we are and what we want, about satisfying our needs as individuals, about listening to our hearts. . Please note, I am not saying give up publication (or marriage) entirely; I’m saying give it up as a goal.”

Here’s the link to her website:

http://www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays/a-writer-without-a-publisher-is-like-a-fish-without-a-bicycle-writers-liberation-and-you/

Adair Lara’s new book, Naked, Drunk and Writing is full of advice on how to write a personal essay or memoir. Two paragraphs in the opening of her essay What’s Your Angle? give a taste of her writing style and make me want to stop what I’m doing and craft an essay of my own:

Adair Lara: You can’t just come out and say what you have to say. That’s what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New York, spills peanuts all over the place (back when the cheapskate airlines at least gave you peanuts), and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That’s because of the way he’s telling his story. You need a good way to tell your story.

An angle is a way to tell a story. It is to the essay what a premise is to a book, or a handle is to advertising, or a high concept is to a movie (dinosaurs brought back to life for a theme park!). It’s a gimmick or twist or conceit that grabs the reader’s attention long enough for you to say what you want to say. Think of the angle as the Christmas tree. Once you have that six-foot pine standing up next to the piano, it’s pretty easy to see where the decorations go. Without the tree, what have you got? A lot of pretty balls on the floor.

You can read the rest here.