Eneh Akpan Writes: 6 Steps to a More Interesting Dialogue

Talk is cheap, they say. Do you believe this to be true of dialogue or do you think there’s more to all that fictional talk?

Let’s take a nice long look at six steps that push towards writing captivating dialogue. See if you think differently at the end of this piece.

1. In This Silence…

If you’ve ever listened in on two people talking over a sensitive issue especially, one punctuated by brief pregnant pauses, you would readily understand the power of injecting silence into the dialogue of your characters.

The sound of silence can work the magic in your dialogue if you stitch them into the right scenes and at appropriate intervals.

2. Color Dialogue with Emotions

You can’t not notice the sarcasm dripping in folk’s speeches when they engage uninvited salespersons; the anger and deep frustration when they cry out in despair if they can’t find the car keys and the utterance tinged with sadness when they relate a painful near-tragic personal story.

The speeches of your fictional characters become more real if it captures the emotions in the scenes. Make the words your characters speak reveal their frustrations, their fears and even their weaknesses without making it seem too obvious (or it may appear to the reader as if you’re using dialogue to pass on information which a good narration should handle effectively).

3. Resist Word-for-Word Recording of Speech

Face it; real people conversations are dry and lifeless. If you gotta write dialogue, don’t record real people’s speeches word-for-word. The reason is obvious: it’s boring! Too many things happen around people when they talk and they may put the main tête-à-tête on hold while they speculate on these. Sometimes, it’s just plain old distraction.

You don’t want to dump these erratic and unnecessary breaks into your story if you want to create dialogue that grabs your reader’s attention.

Courtesy: spinner.com

4. Let the Yarn Flow… It’s Only Natural

One of the best ways to get it right when creating dialogue is to avoid injecting big vocabularies into your people’s speech. It kills the connection. Every time a reader encounters a big word, it jerks ‘em out of the story and gets ‘em scampering for a thesaurus. Never indulge in this destructive exercise. Except of course, your character is a professor of linguistics or a show off whose primary purpose on earth is driving his listener nuts with extravagant words.

Keeping dialogue in your scenes flowing is about not allowing folks in your stories say stuff that isn’t expected of real people at least, under natural circumstances. It’s about writing it so it sounds like real natter.

5. Omit Needless Words

Having given this long lecture on what and what not to do in dialogue, I believe this part is relevant. You’ll find that some words are more meaningful than others and some are totally unnecessary.

If it does not give new information about the scene; if it’s something totally obvious like out there in the open, there’s no point having your character(s) say it. The reader would figure it out for themselves. Avoid having your character(s) repeat something you already stated in the narration in his/her dialogue.

6. Read Author Interviews

Actually, read any interesting interviews you can lay your hands on.

Reading interviews can be a good education in writing dialogue. After all, interviews are nonfiction dialogues.

This is one nice way to recreate dialogue almost word-for-word. Reading author interviews can give you deeper insight because sometimes, authors sound a lot like one of the fictional characters in their books.

And that’s all folks. If you can make your dialogues sound natural, you can get your reader lost in your stories and secure your future in the business of make-believe.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan