Luciana asked Jennifer E. Smith:

Hello Jennifer: I love your books, ''This is what happy looks like'' is my favorite. One of the things that i love about your books is that the stories always seems to flow naturally, and the dialogues are perfect, and i've read on your website that you don't outline, you just write freely, so i was wondering, what advice can you give me about writing great dialogues and stories that seems to flow naturally?

Jennifer E. Smith Thank you so much! I love writing dialogue, so that's a huge compliment. My characters tend to banter a lot, so I'm always anxious to make it sound as natural as possible. One thing I've found really helps with this is to read the book out loud at various stages. It's so much easier to catch clunky or awkward dialogue when you're actually speaking it instead of just reading it -- I can't tell you how often I've written something that seems pretty good, and then I read it out loud and realize nobody would ever actually say it that way. It's a pretty simple trick, but trust me -- it helps a lot!

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