1_million_words | Tuesday Tips: Getting the dialogue flowing... (Reply)

It's Tuesday Tips a little early for some, right on time for others in our planet-sized comm! This week, thoughts on dialogue.

There are times a story flows out of your fingertips so smoothly that it feels more like you’re eavesdropping on your characters than you are making it all up. Yup, that’s when it’s fun to be a fan fic writer- and really fun to write the dialogue. Then, of course, there are the stories that no only don’t flow, they won’t even budge. Get stuck in one of those, and you can probably barely hear your character’s voice at all! Time to dial up an episode or a movie and reconnect.

Along with refreshing your synapses with a re-watch, here are some tips that can help make your dialogue stronger. Credit for said tips goes to

goneahead who was kind enough to forward the link to me.

There’s good, useful advice in there about the use of “…said” and ways to keep dialogue from feeling clunky or convoluted.

While I don’t have a hard and fast rule about it, I try to make sure the characters speak at least every third paragraph. In other words, no more than two chunks of description for every bit of interaction. I find it helps with pacing, and prevents me from getting into a place where I’m telling and not showing.

What are your thoughts? Does it strike you when a story catches a character’s voice really well in the dialogue? Or is it something that’s secondary to the main action of the tale to you? Are there characters you feel like you can’t miss with, and others that are much more of a challenge to capture on electronic paper?

I have to believe fan fiction writers put as much or more emphasis on dialogue as writers in any other genre – because not only do we want to make a story flow, we want to capture the way our characters walk and talk and react. We read it for the fun of imagining them getting into and out of new scrapes - and we want to hear their voices again.

Why else write it... or read it?