For Christians new to writing novels for kids and teens. Creative writing tips, encouragement and inspiration from Janet Wilson, writer, speaker, and publisher of Christian fiction for young people. Get ready to take your writing to the next level! You can do it - all you need is a bit of help. Don't miss out!
Some writers are great at dialogue - others find it more challenging. Here are some tips to help you write dialogue that will move your story forward, help your readers to get to know your characters better, and bring in lots of emotion.
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Hello and welcome to the Write for a Reason podcast. My name is Janet Wilson. I'm a publisher of Christian fiction with Dernia Publishing. If you are new to writing stories for kids and teens, stay tuned for lots of writing tips, this time about dialogue. So there is so much to say about dialogue, I'm not going to be able to fit it all into one podcast, but here are some things that I think would be really interesting. I hope you enjoy it and find it useful. So some writers take to writing dialogue immediately, wonder what all the fuss is about. And if this is you, that's great, but other people find it more challenging. And if you do, don't worry, read lots of dialogue in books you love, practice as much as you can, and I hope that this will be useful, particularly for you. You'll soon get the hang of it. If you've been through the Right for a Reason Academy, you'll find this good revision. And if you haven't done the course and feel after doing this session that you'd like to go deeper with other aspects of writing, you're welcome to join us. You can find the Right for a Reason Academy information on the RightForareason.com website. Okay, let's make a start on Great Dialogue. The three biggest keys to writing Great Dialogue are to number one, make it sound realistic. Two, make it easy for your readers to read and understand. And three, keep it going at a suitable pace. So we're going to look at these three things in turn. Firstly, making your dialogue sound realistic. If your readers can picture your characters having a conversation, you will have done a great job. However, dialogue between characters in a novel is completely different from conversation between people in real life. The art is in making dialogue sound like real conversation. As you know, normal conversation is full of stops and starts, interruptions, ums and ahs, trailing sentences. If you taped a conversation between people chatting in a cafe, you'd have a terrible job transcribing it in a way that readers will understand. And also, in all probability, it would be terribly long-winded. So writing dialogue that sounds like a conversation is an art, and there are some guidelines you can follow to help you. The first is to make sure your readers are right there with you. So, in an effort to make your writing atmospheric, you can fall into the trap of making dialogue difficult to follow. It's great to have lots of atmosphere, but you need to avoid making your readers having to kind of work too hard. Do they know who's speaking and who they're talking to? Do they know where this dialogue is taking place? These things sound obvious, but some writers do find it hard to keep their dialogue simple enough for readers to understand exactly what's going on at this point and why. So keeping it simple, especially for younger readers, is great advice. So, what about keeping dialogue going at a suitable pace? In my experience, new writers tend to write too much rather than too little. They include individual speeches that are too long and spend too long on dull scenes, like a family chatting over a meal. Often such dialogues can be cut down considerably, or the scene may be cut out altogether. So you need to make sure that every word of your dialogue is needed, that it flows beautifully at a good pace and achieves its purpose. And that leads me on to the purpose of dialogue. As with every other part of your novel, dialogue is there to move the plot forward, reveal character both by what your characters say and how they're saying it, and it is there also often to invoke an emotional response from your readers. It also breaks up the text, makes the story more interesting, and remember the younger your readers, the simpler the dialogue needs to be, and the more you need to mix it up with action, description, and narrative. You need that kind of lovely flow between all three of those. Gear's a useful check when you come to read ever dialogue you've written. If you cut it, would it matter? Is it moving the plot forward, revealing something about the characters, or perhaps building tension or emotion? Pages of dialogue on its own can be dull, as can descriptions and action. A good mixture of all three can move, kind of like the waves of the sea, you know, in and out, changing the pace of your story and giving it a lovely flow. So ring the changes and keep your readers interested. Okay, here's another little point. You need to develop a different voice for each of your characters. Now I have done a podcast previously on this, so do check back on that one if you haven't already listened to that one. But here's just a quick little tip. You need each character to express their personality through their words, their way of speaking, their tone, and their expressions. There's nothing worse than trying to read dialogue where all the characters sound the same. Here are three different ways friends might respond to a disaster. Oh no, that must have been so embarrassing. Ha ha, that's so funny, I wish I'd seen your dad's face. Hmm, serves you right. What did you expect? So you see each of the quick speeches there reveals something of the personality of the person speaking, as well as his her relationship with the person who had the disaster. Just by reading these single lines, you get some idea about the person speaking. So if the people who said these lines were characters in your novel, readers would know who said them almost before you say so, because of their different voice. Here's a quick tip: why not read through speeches of each of your characters in your current work in progress one by one? And make sure that they do sound like the same person, that it's all working beautifully together. And as I've already mentioned, there's nothing more annoying for readers than having to go back and check who said what. They may put the book down at that point. So there we go. There's a few little thoughts on dialogue. I hope you found that really helpful. And if you want lots more free writing tips, hop on over to writeforreason.com. Do subscribe to the podcast. There are loads more episodes now that you can listen to on any podcast app. So have a great time writing your dialogue. And don't forget, if you've been called to write, someone is waiting for your story.
