A QUICK FICTION WRITING DIALOGUE CHECKLIST
I cannot stress how important and necessary good (and hopefully great) dialogue is to your novel. Great dialogue develops not only the characters, but if done right, it advances the plot and provides the reader with things like character motivation, personality, dialect, and it helps distinguish between characters through the words and expressions they use. In addition to that, dialogue breaks up narrative summary, which can be a drag on the reader’s attention span. Remember, dialogue is in scene (unless it’s a character remembering what someone said), and so it goes hand in hand with action, which is showing rather than telling, which we know keeps the reader reading.
Dialogue is the most fun to write. It’s kind of like a tennis match.
– Sally Rooney
HERE'S A QUICK FICTION WRITING DIALOGUE CHECKLIST
Does your Dialogue:
Sound credible?
Reveal character? (is your character a busybody? Indifferent? Uncaring? Evil? Naïve? Too nice?)
Provide insight into the characters via dialect? Word choice?
Avoid sounding exactly like a real-life conversation, with all of the “um’s” and “uh’s” and wordiness? Dialogue should be concise. Cut the extraneous and the mundane.
Provide backstory, but subtly? Dialogue should not be an open firehose of information meant for the reader.
Have any unneeded words – if you can say the same thing in fewer words, you should.
Use subtext to reveal what your characters really mean without them saying it explicitly?
Have characters who change the subject or avoid what the person they’re speaking to is talking about (to not have to touch on sensitive or uncomfortable topics)?
Use silence effectively? In this case, you can use a character’s actions to show their response.
Leave an impression on the reader? (think aphorisms and memorable lines like “To be or not to be, that is the question.” It’s from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and most of us know the line, even if we’re not familiar with the play. It sticks out. It’s memorable.
Use appropriate dialogue tags? (Remember, “he said” and “she said” are probably your best bet, but you’ll learn how to break those rules as you write your novel). Also, people don’t chortle, retort, exclaim, declare, snort, wheeze, or gasp their words. Not in good fiction they don’t—or at least not anymore. Characters say words. They yell them. They whisper them. They may even mumble them. In short, try to stay away from making your characters too dramatic dialogue-wise, and stay away from antiquated dialogue tags.
Sound repetitious? Can you cut your character’s pet words a little? Do they repeat the character’s names they’re speaking to a little too many times? If so, cut it out. Less is more.
Use dialogue tags that use adverbs? For example: “Jim said, aggressively.” If so, cut the adverb. Jim’s actions should show his aggression rather than you including an adverb to do the heavy lifting for that scene.
All the information you need can be given in dialogue.
—Elmore Leonard
When writing dialogue, you should:
Read your dialogue aloud to hear the musicality of it (or to catch where it fails to work). Or even better, have someone read it to you—sometimes you’re too close to the dialogue (and the writing in general) to realize what’s wrong with it, or where you can improve it.
Analyze your dialogue with the scene in which it takes place. Does what your characters say to each other match/work with what’s happening in the scene? Does it add to the scene, or detract from it? If so, you may want to rewrite the dialogue—or the action happening in the scene.
Rewrite your dialogue (and perhaps scene) as many times as you need to until it works and flows as best and naturally as you can get it. Sometimes that’s once. Sometimes it’s more than that.
Read examples of dialogue in novels and short stories you admire to see why you admire it as much as you do. Maybe even copy it (just as an exercise) to see how it feels to actually write it.
Try writing dialogue with as few dialogue tags as you can. That’ll force you to attribute dialogue to your characters through action. You don’t have to do that in your novel, but it’s a good exercise towards improving your scenes.
P.G. Wodehouse in an interview in The Paris Review in 1975 said,
[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.
Don't forget to share a Quick Fiction Writing Dialogue Checklist with your fellow writers.
Cully Perlman is author of a novel, THE LOSSES. He can help you revise your novel. Reach out to him at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
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