Creative Writing Exercises For Dummies

Chapter 6

Developing Your Dialogue-Writing Skills

In This Chapter

Using accents, dialects and speech quirks

Handling group dialogue

Speaking in sparkling monologues

As you build up your characters, you need to pay attention to how they speak. Developing an individual voice and vocabulary for characters is an important way of revealing information about them, sometimes even conveying personal aspects that the characters themselves aren’t consciously aware of. Characters can give themselves away through the words they use, slips of the tongue, how they respond to what’s said to them and the tone in which they reply.

Dialogue is the voice of your character speaking directly, and so it’s also a great tool for showing concrete details about where your character comes from, how old he is, whether he’s outgoing or shy, and whether this tendency changes in different contexts. You can also reveal information about characters’ education, jobs and social status through any specialised vocabulary or jargon they use. Plus, your writing improves noticeably if you can develop the ability to convey foreign accents, dialect and slang for appropriate characters and so render the sound of their speech ...