i had so many requests for this and so little inspiration!! but finally, the long-awaited dialogue chapter. i hope it's useful.
for starters, i used to hate dialogue. i started writing with only poetry and the thing i found hardest about switching to a novelistic style was character interactions and more specifically their conversations. i'll get out of the way the first mistake i made which was the actual structure of dialogue, which is explained well in this post:
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with the mechanics of dialogue out of the way, we can talk more about style.
one of the most common struggles with dialogue, and one i think writers are often most susceptible to missing in their work, is the dialogue between their characters sounding very uniform (i still find this really hard). if you have this struggle in dialogue, you might also find it in the broader characterization of your cast, but it's especially pervasive in dialogue because you're typically writing with the thought in the back of your head of what a conversation sounds like to you. it's super easy to write those exchanges based on what you know, rather than dig deeper to find what your characters would actually say. in the end, everyone's voice is the same and they're scrubbed of any variance.
a very natural thing that happens in real life is people talking over each other, but you can't write two lines overlapping, so we have to settle for interruptions. personality in dialogue is full of things like that—interruptions, ticks, stutters, rambles, pauses, self-objections, sentences that trail into nothing—but interesting dialogue is also, like any other part of your writing, about finding rhythm. if you're big on prose, like me, but your characters would sound unnatural speaking that way, i find maintaining rhythm can almost act as a substitute to still keep readers engaged. your paragraphs of narration might use lyrical language, so cutting that with dialogue that feels plain and human can actually be more powerful. think of amy march calling laurie "mean." mean, rather than cruel or callous, which would easily fit in the dialect of that era—but the script chooses mean because it shrinks amy to the child she was when the audience was first introduced to her. it's cognizant of her character while also serving as one of the most memorable scenes of the movie, whether or not the audience themselves realize why it hits so hard. dialogue can be the place to let go of all the poetry and just write human beings being human.
