Greetings, writers—
This edition of Good Ideas is coming at you from the Multnomah County Courthouse, where I’m on break from jury duty. This is the third time I’ve been called and the third time I’ve been picked to serve, a fact about which I have very mixed feelings.
“You just have an honest face,” said a woman in my gym class this morning. “You look persuadable,” said the woman next to her, “like I could get you over to my side real easy.” I have mixed feelings about these comments as well.
Anyway, building off of last Wednesday’s dialogue post, I want to offer a few extremely specific tips that’ll help you make the things your characters say to each other more sharper and more artful.
If dialogue’s already your thing, great. It’s definitely one of my things.1 But if it’s not, remember that you’re already practicing good dialogue every day, because how we make our way through the world is by exchanging words with other humans. Go ahead and consider your dinner table conversation writing practice.
I’d also argue that dialogue—because it involves short, editable lines, a limited (if not downright speedy) time frame, and direct expressions of characters’ desires—is the easiest and quickest thing to improve in your manuscript.
Okay, without further ado, here are three quick and dirty ways to spice up dialogue. There are many more, and if I ever get out of this courthouse, I intend to write them down.
By the way, I’m using examples from stories that I can find online; the jury break room has no bookshelf, but it does have excellent internet.2
Write dialogue lines that don’t perfectly follow one another.
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