Learn 5 things you can do right now to improve your dialogue:
- Unbury the line.
Generally, it is better if a paragraph begins or ends with a line of dialogue. Dialogue between two pieces of narrative tends to get lost a little bit by the reader:
Furious, Timothy shook his fists in the air and scowled. “You’ll never get away with this!” he said. The motorcycle rumbled beneath him as he shouted. He pulled his weapon out from his shoulder holster and prepared to fire.
Nothing technically/grammatically wrong with that graf, but letting the paragraph end with dialogue is a lot easier to follow:
Furious, Dennis shook his fists in the air and scowled. “You’ll never get away with this!”
The motorcycle rumbled beneath him as he shouted. He pulled his weapon out from his shoulder holster and prepared to fire.
- Delete “said” when it’s perfectly clear who is speaking.
In the second example above, notice I deleted “he said” after Dennis’s line of dialogue. There’s really no need to add “he said” here, because the line of narrative preceding the dialogue indicates that Dennis is the speaker.
- Choose “said” over other attribution tags more often than not.
I sometimes encounter manuscripts that look like this:
“I love you,” Charlie breathed.
“I love you, too,” Susan choked.
“You guys are making me sick,” Tim laughed.
“Yeah, knock it off,” Beverly snarled.
Charlie barked, “Shut up, both of you!”
“Yeah,” Susan growled, “you’re just jealous.”
Personally, I do enjoy using tags like snarled, barked, and growled from time to time, but using them all at once clutters the page and makes the dialogue look pulp fiction-y. For a standard double-spaced page, I’d recommend keeping those non-“said” tags to maybe once or twice per page, or even less.
- Identify the speaker only when necessary.
In a scene with two people speaking, you needn’t identify them at every line:
“I love you,” Charlie said.
“I love you, too,” Susan said.
“But this thing with the kids . . .” Charlie said.
“I know,” Susan said. “But we have to make a decision.”
“Can’t it wait?” Charlie said.
“No,” Susan said.
All that “said” repetition is worse than those overwrought tags in the previous example. If you find this in your manuscript, try a quick fix by deleting some “saids” and adding some physical action:
“I love you,” Charlie said.
“I love you, too,” Susan said.
“But this thing with the kids . . .”
“I know. But we have to make a decision.”
Charlie wiped a bead of condensation off his water glass, where it hung from his finger like a cold tear. “Can’t it wait?”
“No.”
This is a lot easier on the reader and reveals emotion without stating things like “Charlie wept” or “Susan frowned.”
- Let punctuation do the heavy lifting.
A line of dialogue like “Shut up, both of you!” doesn’t need extra help like “Charlie barked/shouted/screamed” because we can guess merely by the word choice and punctuation exactly how the character sounds. See how these lines sound very different in your head without any attribution:
“Shut up! Both of you!”
“Shut. Up. Both of you.”
“Shut up! Both of you!”
All we’ve done here is change punctuation or font style. Changing the words impacts the delivery even more, with added nuance if you want it:
“Hey. Both y’all. Shut up.”
“Would you two shut the fuck up? Jesus!”
“You guys, shhh. C’mon.”
Each line is addressing two people and making a request for them to cease speaking. But they are wildly different in their approach and severity. Are your characters using the right words to get their point across? Are they “in character,” so to speak?
I hope some of these tips help! Good luck, and keep writing!