Thread by @melisscaru

I got a whole bunch of great suggestions for a craft thread! I may use some of the others later, but right now I'm going to try to tackle engaging dialogue.

So...dialogue craft thread ahoy!

Dialogue is a huge topic.There are so many different ways to write it well, and so many different factors that go into it. I'm just going to spew out a bunch of tips. This isn't going to be any kind of all-inclusive How To Do Dialogue manual (if there could even be such a thing).

Some important factors:

Voice! Every character should have their own unique voice. Ideally, I should be able to guess who's speaking without tags.

Word choice, sentence length, cadence, exclamations & expletives, worldview, how they describe things, etc all factor in.

I usually wind up buffing up the individual character voices in a later editing pass. Early drafts never have enough voice in my dialogue.

For instance, Amalia uses complex sentence structures, big vocabulary, likes to explain or analyze things in detail, swears mildly, etc.

While Zaira is always blunt, gets directly to the point, swears a lot, etc. I have to crude up her language in revision! She also doesn't call people by their names unless she respects them, but instead makes up mocking nicknames (which are different each time WHYYYY PAST ME).

Cadence! I touch on this above, but dialogue has its own flow and cadence which is SO IMPORTANT. Kind of like poetry.

This is something you have to listen for. Reading it aloud can help. A lot of it is developing an ear for it, but I know a few tricks.

Really impactful statements want to be short and stand alone. Or they can come at the beginning or the end if they want, but never in the middle.

If you're dropping a bomb in dialogue, give it white space around it so it really explodes in the reader's face.

I often like to use beats ("He took a sip of wine" or "She raised an eyebrow") instead of tags ("he said" or "she asked") to break up longer dialogue passages and show who's speaking.

Just watch out, because WOW is it easy to overuse the same beats all the time.

This is how you wind up with your characters shrugging, nodding, smiling, smirking, frowning, shaking their heads, etc. 400 times in your draft.

This is also how 99% of the wine in my books gets consumed, I'm not gonna lie.

As with line breaks in general, you also want to mix up the length of your dialogue pieces. If everyone says exactly two lines of text before it's the next person's turn, it's going to sound weird. When you scan the page, you should see some variation.

Layers!

Dialogue is often at its most amazing when there's more than one layer to it. What the character is actually saying, and then all the other stuff.

What they're holding back. Subtext, whether the character they're speaking to gets it or not. Irony or innuendo. Etc.

In edits, I often have to watch out for dialogue that's too on the nose.

This can be especially tricky in FEELINGS dialogue. I get tempted to have characters tell each other exactly how they're feeling, but let's face it, most people are terrible at expressing their feelings.

Sometimes feelings are more powerful in dialogue if they're implied or suppressed, or if the characters dance around them, or if they come out in other ways, or if they stumble over expressing them. That can feel much more human in dialogue than perfect flowery prose.

Stakes!

As with basically everything else in fiction, dialogue is more compelling if there's something at stake, or some kind of push and pull happening in the conversation.

In dialogue, the stakes are often personal—which is great, because dialogue is an expression of the relationship of the people talking to each other. So whatever stakes exist in their relationship can play out in the dialogue.

Consider stuff like power dynamics, too.

Ideally you want to get stakes even into dialogue that's fundamentally exposition. This can be hard, but helps keep the exposition from being boring.

Like, if the Fearless Leader is describing the coming mission, maybe the tension is over whether or hero will get picked to go.

Other stakes might be things like trying to impress the other character, trying not to piss them off, trying to cover up a secret, romantic tension, being polite to someone you hate (I, uh, may love this one), needing to convince them of something, social dominance banter, etc.

It can be really helpful to go into dialogue knowing what each participant wants from the conversation. Make sure you don't fall into the trap of thinking of the other speakers only in terms of how they're affecting the main character rather than what THEY want from this talk.

Pacing! This is another one where reading aloud can be very helpful. I often will realize when I read a dialogue scene aloud that I've gotten too rambly and need to hone my focus and make it sharper.

Avoid repeating essentially the same exchange. Either in the same scene, or in different scenes. (This always prove harder than I think it will, especially when I'm moving stuff around in edits.)

Don't feel like you have to bring the conversation to a tidy conclusion after you hit all the points you need to. You can leave it dangling on your best/most impactful moment rather than wrapping it up with "Well, it was lovely seeing you, tea again next Tuesday?" or whatever.

And speaking of rambly, I think that's probably enough points for now. (I have to get writing, after all!)

Just remember to listen, let the characters speak rather than putting words in their mouths, and let stuff (sometimes the most powerful stuff) go unsaid.