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Writing about writing good dialogue


Learning to write good dialogue

Writing fiction has many aspects, and the importance of dialog writing cannot be over-estimated. Realistic dialog pulls you right in to a story or dialog, whereas stilted stuff gets rejected after a few lines.

You listen to people talk all the time, right? So it should be easy to write dialog, right?

Unfortunately, the answer is NO!

I am not sure how good my own dialog writing is, and so I have been looking up some resources. The best I found so far was this book: Writing Dialogue, by Tom Chiarella. This guy gives you some really neat tips.

You can also read some excellent tips on dialog writing (as I did), here, here, and here.

Damyanti Biswas

Damyanti Biswas is the author of You Beneath Your Skin and numerous short stories that have been published in magazines and anthologies in the US, the UK, and Asia. She has been shortlisted for Best Small Fictions and Bath Novel Awards and is co-editor of the Forge Literary Magazine. Her literary crime thriller series, the Blue Mumbai, is represented by Lucienne Diver from The Knight Agency. Both The Blue Bar and The Blue Monsoon were published in 2023.

I appreciate comments, and I always visit back. If you're having trouble commenting, let me know via the contact form, or tweet me up @damyantig !

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2 Comments

  • Anonymous says:

    Thanks for the resources… will look them up 🙂 …

    ~Mental Mist

  • Joe says:

    Dialog is by far my favorite part of writing, because that’s where all the characterization and conflict collide. It can be very challenging to do well. My technique is to over-develop my characters so I know them far better than needed for the story. I also always pick out an actor or a tv/film character to model my character’s voice on, so I can hear it in my head. Then, it’s almost easy. Almost.