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One of the things that new writers often find most difficult is writing good dialogue. This is because dialogue is hard! A new writer’s dialogue will often be clunky and mechanical. So here are a few quick tips on how to make your dialogue more alive.

Dialogue is character.

What someone says, what they don’t say, and how they say it will tell you a lot about a character.

The difference between what they say, do, and think will tell you even more.

Suppose your character is afraid of stairs. They may well not come out and just say that. Maybe, when faced with stairs, they will lie. Maybe they will try to distract. Maybe they will suggest an alternate route on a spurious reason. Maybe they will tell the truth after all. Whichever option, that will allow us to understand something about their character, and their relationship with whoever else is in that scene.

Dialogue is conflict.

This doesn’t mean your characters need to be arguing or shouting all the time. It means that they each go into a conversation with a particular purpose in mind, and those purposes will probably be in conflict in some way. Your characters will try to get their particular desired outcome while avoiding the other character’s desired outcome, however minor the difference between them might be.

As a result, they will ignore what the other says, they will answer questions with questions, they will talk at cross-purposes, they will try to push their agenda in the conversation, they will try to hide information that the other character is trying to discover, and so on. Not all of these things at once, of course, but at least some of them most of the time.

Dialogue is not a way of passing information to the reader.

The worst kind of dialogue is where characters discuss something not because they need to find it out or understand it, but because the author wants the reader to learn or understand it. Doing that leads to absolutely horrible dialogue.

That’s not to say that the readers shouldn’t learn anything from the dialogue. But they should only learn it if there is an absolutely solid, irrefutable reason for the characters to be discussing it.

Dialogue is not a way of characters (directly) passing information to each other.

It’s tempting to have a character ask another questions and get direct answers in response. But that will turn your dialogue into at best a police interrogation and at worst a lecture. Straightforward question-answer dialogue in anything other than the most trivial situation is utterly dull. (See “Dialogue is conflict”.)

There are whole books on writing dialogue, but if you keep these simple hints in mind, you’ll find your writing taking on a whole new life. And that’s even before you introduce characteristic speech patterns and stuff like that.

Patrick Samphire is the author of the middle grade adventure Secrets of the Dragon Tomb, to be published in January 2016. The post Writing Great Dialogue first appeared on Patrick Samphire - Thrilling Tales, Astounding Adventures. Content is copyright Patrick Samphire.