The Dialogue

This is how your characters converse with one another, or your characters ‘script’. Many teachers often use the principle “Show don’t tell”. There is no point in having a complex character if you are going to have them talking about their life story for nine pages. To you this may look good, but nine pages of it will bore your readers, and that is definitely not the right foot to get off on.

The great thing about Dialogue is its ability to reveal new things, or points about your Main Character as the story goes on. This gives the story the ability to perform major twists.

The character needs to keep the reader interested by doing things, not just hearing about which county he comes from at great length.

One mistake many novels make is in thinking that their readers are not intelligent, and that they do not have the ability to pick things up and learn along with the character on their journey.

Some key points about dialogue that you may need to take into consideration are as follows:

The Tone of voice they use while conversing with each other

The Words they use

The Sentence structure

The Character’s accent

The level of Volume they use

Their apparent Confidence or lack of confidence

WORKSHOP: Write a conversation between your character and one of their relatives or another close character if no relatives are applicable. Treat it like a script, so just dialogue without and descriptive words or “He said, she said”. If you need help in writing your script, look at this blog post here