Looking to enthrall your audience with intriguing dialogue? Here are some easy character dialogue tricks to level up your conversational writing and give characters depth in any genre or story.
Descriptive writing can do a lot to paint a scene and help readers to visualize but stakes, emotions, and lessons are often found while characters are conversing in any great story.
Writing dynamic dialogue that can build and release tension is one of the most incredibly challenging aspects of writing any book, movie script, or play. We know all too well from popular media that lazy writing can completely remove someone from what would otherwise be a great story. Making it crucial to carefully consider your approach.
There are a few ways to approach this daunting task but here are some tips that can help you write great character dialogue.
How to write character dialogue for any genre
Understand the characters
A well-known trick, when you’re stuck writing dialogue for any narrative project, is to simply put yourself in the shoes of your character and identify how they’re feeling at a particular moment.
To better understand the characters you have created, a good exercise you can do is to trace back through their past events/backstory and see how it shapes their current motivations. Once you get a good grasp on that, you should have an idea of how motivations will influence their behavior and conversations.
This can often help to get your creative juices flowing and make it easy to extrapolate the following events.
Ask questions like: “Does my character have much patience or empathy? What would cross a line and cause them to snap? Are they witty? Or would they be rigid and formal in conversation?” This should give a better understanding of your character’s personality.
The best thing about these exercises is that the more you try and understand your characters, the easier it will be to revisit their mindset and draw out some great dialogue for them in your story.
Time and place
Any narrative dialogue will be influenced by the time period you choose to set it in. When you choose to base your work is completely up to you, and as there are endless options to use as a canvas for your narrative writing, we’re going to cover some general tips that you can apply to any setting.
When putting together a story in a specific time period, understanding the context of your character’s surroundings is key. With the likes of medieval period pieces, you can take influence from Early English dialects and vocabulary to help distinguish your dialogue from Modern English.
Class systems and origin will also inherently have an effect on your character’s conversations. To stick with a medieval or fantasy example there is usually a distinct difference between peasants and noble folk or royalty in books or modern media. The use of slang is another element to consider and each place will usually have its own variation of slang that might be heard in a particular country or region.
Writing dialogue to fit a place is more straightforward, regardless of the era you are in. Any place you choose to feature should have unique social customs, that are either universally known or that you can help establish beforehand, which guides the way characters will converse with one another. This gives you the option of adhering to the norms or going against them to create anomalies within your story.
A library is one example of a place where visitors speak lowly. Knowing this, you can shape your dialogue to only feature practical and necessary communication between characters while they are there. Whereas, if the same characters met later in a park, they might be more inclined to speak openly, sharing more gossip and rehashing old memories.
Sentence length
To keep your writing fun and fresh, sentence length is something we all have to keep in mind. Readers of narrative writing can lose interest if you are not switching up the length of each sentence.
This trick is mostly used in the descriptive element of narrative writing, but it still works well when changing the dynamic with your character’s dialogue. The length of your sentences can do a lot to dictate the level of tension.
Short rapid communication is used in high-pace action sequences. Whereas, longer passages are usually found in drawn-out speeches, when someone is telling a story told, or in other relaxed environments.
There is no perfect rule to follow to suit this guideline. However, it’s worth remembering the importance of keeping readers engaged while adding well-crafted dialogue to your work.
Understand the genre
What genre are you writing in? The genres you align your story with can play a massive role in guiding your dialogue.
A Western or Samurai story with high life-or-death stakes will feature more dramatic and intense dialogue than a comedy. A recent example of this is in The Mandalorian episode “The Jedi”, where Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) has an honorable duel with the Magistrate (Diana Lee Inosanto) in a walled garden. The battle is preceded by a strong back-and-forth between the pair, each sizing the other up in a verbal exchange. They also negotiate the potential consequences of the fight in a clever way, before ultimately settling the fate of the village with their combat skills.
On the opposite end of the scale, the likes of coming-of-age comedies will feature plenty of clap-back insults/lowbrow humor from the characters involved. While they, typically, won’t include life-or-death standoffs, there can still be very real stakes. Even in a scenario where a group of nerdy high school friends are on a short clock to get laid before university. Strong writing can help readers to see through the lens of your characters and what the stakes mean to them under such societal pressure.
This can make even the most ridiculous of stories carry tons of emotional weight when things ultimately go one way or the other for these characters. Capturing the underlying needs of your characters through dialogue ties back in with our first tip but it is often portrayed in a manner that suits the genre.
Obviously, each genre has different traits and they can each be quite broad at times. But, doing your best to set consistent tones in your narrative writing can make your story much more coherent and impactful for the audience.
Research your character’s knowledge
If you are writing from the point of view of any kind of specialist, it would do you well to understand any slang, expertise, or other details that they would know in that position.
For example, if you were writing about a story revolving around a movie production. Terms such as “last looks,” “call sheet,” “B-Roll,” and “turnover” are all things that would be heard on-set and could provide authenticity to any dialogue.
You will need to do your research to fully understand any terms and environmental traits. Attempting to write scenes without research risks taking the viewer out of the story, particularly when your piece is set in the modern era.
On the flip side, when you have a good understanding of a specific setting or industry, this research can also be purposely used to highlight characters who are out of their element or making classic mistakes in a particular industry.
It might not be the most enjoyable element of writing for everyone, but learning all there is to know about your character’s field of interest is a trick that many of the top writers still swear by.
While you do not need to follow all of these exact guidelines, you should now have a strong baseline to write more convincing dialogue for your characters.