Before writing a conversation, take the time to ask yourself what key purpose(s) the conversation will serve.
With an established purpose in mind, you can begin writing dialogue with the confidence that you’re adding value to your story rather than setting readers up for boredom.
Most often, conversations work to resolve or create tension, establish context, or reveal new information that moves the story forward.
3- details aren’t always important.
Readers don’t need to see the mundane details of every conversation play out on the page.
Greetings, exchanges of basic information, and other boring but occasionally necessarily details can just as easily be stated in the text as they can be spoken — and oftentimes to better reception. So rather than slow the pace of your scene by writing mundanities into the conversation, state that she gave him her phone number and move along.
4- forget the tags, unless the dialogue is followed by an action.
Dialogue tags are used to attribute lines of dialogue to characters, the most common tag being “said”.
Used occasionally, dialogue tags can help clarify who is speaking without slowing the story’s pace. Many authors, however, make the mistake of overusing tags in an effort to maintain clarity and expound upon how the dialogue is being said (e.g. she shouted, he whispered, it hissed…).
If you’ve crafted strong voices for your characters, however, and if you make good use of action tags —which we’ll discuss in a moment — you’ll find there is little need to include much more than an occasional “he said, she said” in your story. Speaking of which…
If you do find that you need to employ a dialogue tag for the sake of clarity, “said” is most often your best choice. Why? Because “said” is so ubiquitous that it’s often, in a sense, silent. Readers will graze right over the word while still catching the identity of the speaker, ensuring your tag doesn’t disrupt the flow of the story.
Action tags are the small attributive actions that precede or follow a line of dialogue, such as the following:
Amanda fiddled with the hem of her shirt. “I don’t know if that’s the best idea.”
“Are you sure that’s what you really want?” Brad raised a questioning brow.
Making use of action tags is a great way to indicate speakers during dialogue while also keeping readers engaged and adding motion to the scene.
Article: http://www.well-storied.com/blog/write-better-dialogue .
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