How to write better dialogue

One of the topics that usually is skimmed over in writing books is how to construct compelling dialogue. Naturally you have to start with compelling characters—then what they have to say has a much better chance of being the same. However, in an article in Poets & Writers magazine, novelist Benjamin Percy gave some more specific tips:

 “If you must have a protracted verbal exchange, then damn it, give your characters something to do. By that I do not mean give them a cigarette or a beer. I mean make them grill a steak or attend a carnival or splat together a papier-mache volcano or inch their car through a long stretch of construction.”

 He calls these tasks a lower-order goal—in most scenes every character wants something but in this case there is something else, relatively pedestrian, to be achieved as well.

 I’d add that the activity you choose may, of course, have some meaningful relationship to the deeper meaning of the scene.  If they’re making plans for their wedding while washing and drying the dishes, for instance, if he drops a valuable plate, that might act as foreshadowing for an emotional crash coming up somewhere later.

Percy

also writes about how tone relates to voice and to music: “…the foot-tapping rhythm of the page. Typically, dialogue is staccato, while narrative is legato. To linger too long in the choppiness of dialogue disrupts the smoothly connected paragraphs of the narrative…But one’s impassioned plea for forgiveness interrupted by the other’s slow, methodical arrangement of a house of cards has enough rhythmic interruptions to keep us tonally engaged, like any carefully constructed orchestration.”

Percy

cities one of my favourite authors, Graham Greene, as worthy of study in this regard and there are many others, including Anne Tyler, Richard Price, and Elmore Leonard.

(To write good dialogue, you need to create great characters. That's one of the many topics covered in my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)