Dialogue carries character, tension, and subtext faster than any other tool a writer has. These posts cover writing conversations that sound real, using slang without losing the reader, and letting what is unsaid do the heavy lifting.
DialogueZora Neale Hurston was born January 7, 1891, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the town she turned into fiction. She wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks, died broke in Fort Pierce, and waited thirteen years for…
Crime FictionRaymond Chandler was an oil company vice president until he was fired for drinking at forty-four. He taught himself to write for the pulps, published The Big Sleep at fifty, and gave American crime fiction the voice it still borrows.
Crime FictionElmore Leonard wrote westerns before his ad agency shift, got turned down eighty-four times on his first crime novel, and then spent forty years proving dialogue could carry a book. His ten rules all do one job: keep the author…
DialogueElmore Leonard's 10 rules of writing all keep the writer out of sight so the reader stays in the story. I follow most of them and break a few on purpose, from short teaser prologues to long descriptions of places…
DialogueReaders skim right past dialogue tags, so use the plain ones and don't bury anything important in them. My simple rules for said, tag variety, adverbs and action beats.
DialogueHis father said you will never amount to anything. Or did he? Memory reconstructs dialogue, it does not record it, and the quotation marks are what turn a memory into a claim.
AmericaTwain invented an American voice for prose by writing the way people spoke, went bankrupt backing a typesetting machine, outlived most of his family, and produced late work so bleak his estate suppressed parts of it. The cheerful figure on…
DialogueHemingway built a prose style out of omission and spent thirty years being imitated badly by people who copied the short sentences and missed the method. The technique is learnable. The imitations fail because they reproduce the surface and skip…
DialogueWrite dialogue that carries what people cannot say. Real speech works on layers, because the brain runs three jobs at once and the oldest one is always
DialogueTwenty films whose dialogue does more than convey information — from Glengarry Glen Ross's desperation as verbal music to Margin Call's technical language as human revelation. Four tests every line of dialogue must pass, with craft lessons fiction writers can…
DialogueStrip the dialogue tags and nobody can tell who's talking. Fix flat dialogue with psychology-driven voice, subtext, and the POV choice that shapes your entire novel.
Character DevelopmentNew writers have characters say precisely what they mean, and the result reads like an instruction manual, not a conversation. Real people almost never state their true intentions, least of all when emotions run high. Subtext is the charged layer…
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