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.
Thanks for the resources… will look them up 🙂 …
~Mental Mist
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.