Writing Tips and Reviews

How to Write Dialogue

Dialogue can be the easiest or hardest part of writing. Depending on if you know what you're doing or not.

Set up:

Making dialogue isn't too hard, especially if it's a back a forth between two people. You state who's talking once and it writes itself. You can add more when the dialogue gets too long, a character does something, or someone else enters. When it's more than two people, it should be stated who's talking else the automatic process will take over and whoever spoke last will be thought to be talking again.

"Let's go to the mall!" She said.

"I really don't want to," he said.

"Oh come on, it'll be fun."

"No way, you know I hate crowds."

As you can see, it's obvious who is talking because there's only two people, it becomes redundant to say "he said" in every line he has because the reader automatically knows it's his line.

What you should avoid with set up:

Confusing the reader on who's talking is a bad idea, it takes them out of the story if they're questioning who's speaking.

"Do you want to go to the mall?" She asked.

He picked up a bag.

"That's fine by me."

The reader will automatically think "that's fine by me," belongs to him because his action was stated last. The sentence turns into:

He picked up a bag, "that's fine by me."

It's like inheritance in coding, if you do it wrong the computer will read it wrong.

Making that one line where someone doesn't speak and the next line isn't given who it belongs to confuses the reader. Inheritance would dictate that both lines belong to the same person. You should avoid this at all costs because if you have more than two characters and inheritance mixes up what line belongs to which character, the entire scene can fall apart.

Here's another example:

"You need to get changed." She said, pointing at the dressing room.

He stood there.

"I'm telling you right now."

He didn't move.

"You're unbelievable."

He stared at her.

"What?"

This is just a longer version of the last example. As you can see, this is even more confusing, it makes the reader think both lines of dialogue belong to him because his actions were stated before. It's not a simple back and forth like you would think, you would need to specify that it's her who's speaking each time. Which becomes repetitive.

Avoid this too:

"Let's go," she said.

"Okay I'm ready."

Would you think these two lines belonged to the same person? Of course not, logic dictates that a new line means it's a new person speaking.

Please don't put a conversation into a paragraph:

I've only seen two dipshits do this, but I'd like to avoid more people doing it because of them.

"Hey, let's go to the mall," Stacy said. Alice thought for a bit. "Okay, we can do that." Stacy smiled, "let's get going then."

This right here, is the dumbest thing to ever do when writing dialogue. If you can see, I did exactly what "When the Stars Align" did, which is rely on commas to show who's talking. Except for the line "okay, we can do that". Because the writer didn't care who was talking so neither did I. "Stones to Abigale" at least says "and then he said", but it's still dumb.