Natural dialogue or conversation between your characters can be hard. Does it come easily to you? How can you tell?
The best way to perfect the dialogue in your novel is to read it out loud. Does it flow smoothly from your mouth? Is it something you would actually overhear in a conversation? I love to sit in doctor's offices, playgrounds, and restaurants by myself so I can listen to the conversations around me. That is a great way to get the natural flow of dialogue in your head.
Once you get the words flowing between the quotation marks, you have to look at your tags. There is a fine balance between tags that are clear enough to keep the reader from getting lost and tags that are simple enough that they don't interrupt the flow of conversation.
Let's have a look at some of your dialogue.
Submissions are now open for a dialogue heavy section of your WIP.
Send up to 400 words to: charity.bradford@gmail.com with Unicorn Bell Dialogue in the subject line.
5 comments:
Another suggestion: Get a your kids to read a crucial scene outloud like it is a script or a play. That can help with the tricky spots.
One caveat: don't ask the spouse. Mine rolls his eyes and won't play along, the worm.
I hate reading aloud but it works.
Oooh. I've been writing a lot of dialogue in my WIP lately (which probably isn't the best, too much of a good thing and all) so this is perfect.
Yes, it is hard to get a good mix of dialogue and tags. I think voice is important to success.
Thanks for the submission opportunity :)
......dhole
Reading out loud really works. If it's garbled there, it'll definitely read garbled.
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