Writing Dialogue - Book 4 (PDF eBook)
Writing Dialogue is a practical guide to creating natural, believable conversations that reveal character, build tension and move the story forward.
Good dialogue is more than putting words inside quotation marks. Characters speak differently, avoid saying what they really mean, interrupt one another, change the subject, use slang, switch languages and sometimes say far more through silence than through words.
This guide shows writers how to make dialogue sound natural without turning it into a transcript of everyday speech. It covers character voice, contractions, subtext, dialogue tags, action beats, punctuation, interruptions, long speeches, group conversations and the balance between dialogue, action and description.
It also looks at practical situations that are often overlooked, including:
- writing characters who speak more than one language
- using dialect, patois and community speech accurately and respectfully
- portraying characters who stutter without turning the speech pattern into a caricature
- handling two characters who speak at the same time
- formatting WhatsApp, text and email messages in fiction
- using ellipses, hyphens and other alternatives to the em dash
- punctuating dialogue that continues across several paragraphs
Using clear explanations and practical examples, Writing Dialogue helps independent authors recognise what makes a conversation work and how to revise dialogue that feels flat, forced or unnatural.
Your purchase includes:
- the complete PDF guide
- a separate editable Microsoft Word workbook
- 17 practical dialogue exercises
- a final dialogue checklist
- a complete dialogue revision exercise to apply the lessons to your own manuscript
Ideal for first-time novelists and independent authors who want their characters to sound like real people rather than characters reading from a script.
MyNovel Author Series — Book 4
Written by Mike Grobler