✨ help me stop avoiding dialogue because i feel like i suck at it and no matter what i try i feel like it sounds stupid and if people read my books they’ll laugh at it or roll their eyes and give me a scathing critique in which they call my entire novel pure cringe✨
5 Tips for Getting Better at Dialogue
1) Writing Great Dialogue Takes Practice - Just like every other aspect of writing, writing great dialogue isn’t something you can just instantly do. You can educate yourself on how to do it well, but you still need to put it into practice, which means letting yourself write bad dialogue for a while. And, honestly, go back to the first few books of your favorite authors and you’ll see their early dialogue is a bit clunky compared to their later books.
2) Writing Great Dialogue Takes Education - But in order to practice writing great dialogue, you also have to learn what qualifies as great dialogue. Doing that is easier than it sounds. Look up articles with tips for writing great dialogue. Read books about writing dialogue. Read fiction and pay close attention to the dialogue. Watch movies and TV shows and play close attention to the dialogue. Pay more attention to dialogue in real life.
3) Act It Out/Say It Out Loud - If there’s any way you can, try acting out your dialogue scene as you write it. Sometimes, pretending you’re actually in the moment can help you come up with more natural sounding dialogue. Or, once you’ve written it, try reading it out loud. You can even enlist a willing friend to help out. Saying it out loud and actually hearing the words makes it so much easier to know what’s off and figure out how to fix it.
4) Make Sure You’re Not Over-Tagging - One of the biggest culprits of corny dialogue is the over-use of tags. In other words, “he said” or “said Kara.” Have a look at my post Avoiding Repetition with Dialogue Tags.
5) Avoid Other Dialogue Pitfalls - There are a lot of other things that can make dialogue corny, too: overusing slang, rendering out accents or speech impediments, overusing names (people don’t tend to use each other’s names in dialogue unless trying to get their attention), being overly sarcastic or witty, using dialogue without Working in Action Beats & Movement, and characters not having their own Unique Voice.
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