by Ruth Belena

Created on: June 13, 2009   Last Updated: June 14, 2009

Writing dialogue is quite different from writing action scenes or descriptions in fiction. How you write dialogue can have a big impact on the way your characters develop and interact within a novel or short story.

By writing effective dialogue, your characters can be made to betray their own desires or to lie and deliberately deceive. A character can narrate a personal back story or recall something only he or she knows about another person. Dialogue allows characters to describe how they feel about events taking place within a novel. Dialogue can be used to refer to another event, historical or fictional, that has happened outside the main plot.

All that is really necessary when writing dialogue in fiction is to be creative and let your characters speak for themselves.

~ Write realistic dialogue

Writing realistic dialogue does not mean writing exactly as most people speak. In everyday conversation people hesitate, repeat words and change the direction of what they are talking about.

Do not write too many "ums" and "ers" in your dialogue, or keep repeating what is said. What you can do is describe a character being hesitant when speaking, or write about how often he stumbles verbally and keeps repeating himself. Show that a character is confused because another person has mumbled something quite incomprehensible, rather than trying to write out the confusing dialogue.

Each character should have an individual style of speaking, and how a character speaks must relate to that character's fictional background.

~ Create convincing characters

Make brief biographical notes of all your characters. Do not attempt to create a character who comes from a particular background if you are not familiar with how such a person would speak.

For a well educated person you can write dialogue in standard English, but if you create a character from a poor background, who has not received a good education, you need to write dialogue using slang terms, local expressions and cliches.

How your fictional characters speak will depend upon where they were born and when. Your characters may have a regional accent, or could speak in an old dialect.

In historical fiction you need to be aware of how people would have spoken at the time in which your novel is set. Do this by reading books and documents written at the time. It will not be possible, in many cases, to reproduce dialogue that is exactly how people used to speak. You can create dialogue that suggests how people spoke

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