• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Cam cleared his throat. "So ... how was Colombia?"

Note that the entire buildup to the real conversation is finished in a single paragraph, just sixteen words in all.

• Don't substitute dialogue for action. It's usually better to show an important event than to have two characters talk about it later. If a bomb's going off in your story, show us what the blast looks like, feels like, sounds like, smells like, tastes like. Don't skip to the next day and have your heroine tell her best friend how scared she was by the explosion.

• Don't repeat dialogue. If Harry and Fred have an important conversation, report it—but then don't show Harry telling Sue word for word what Fred told him. Summarize, or leave it out altogether.

• Don't crowd the conversation. Whenever possible, limit the number of characters involved in a conversation. Dialogue means, literally, an exchange between two people. While some discussions can involve groups, dialogue is easiest to handle and most effective when it involves only two. Isolate your characters. If necessary, take them off to a quiet corner of a crowded room. Sometimes the most effective arguments are those conducted in very low voices to keep from drawing the attention of others.

• Don't convey data to your readers by showing characters exchanging information they have known for some time. Showing an established member of a group explaining the rules to a new member makes sense, but two longtime members aren't likely to sit around the clubhouse talking over the regulations. The mother of one teenager isn't going to say to the mother of another teenager, "Your son John, who is seventeen, is coming to visit our son Stanley, who is almost

eighteen, for dinner tonight after football practice, which ends at seven p.m." Presumably, John's mother already knows her son's practice schedule, to say nothing of his name and age.

If you must give your readers information your characters already know, and you want to do it in dialogue, look for a natural way to express the facts. One woman might say to her friend, "I know you loved him, honey, but the man's been dead for six years!" She would not say, "The man you loved died six years ago." You've shared exactly the same information, but you've put an entirely different spin on the conversation.

In Marion Lennox's medical romance The Doctor's Rescue Mission, the author gives the readers important information about a medical condition by having her doctor-hero explain it to a young patient:

"I was the one who assessed your mother before she left," Grady was telling her. "... There didn't seem to be any intracranial swelling."

"Intracranial swelling?"

"Sometimes when people hit their heads they bleed into their brains," Grady told the girl. "... You open people's eyes and check their pupils. ... I shone a light into your mother's eyes and her pupils reacted just as they should. Also, her pupils stayed exactly the same as each other. That's a really good sign."

If Lennox's hero had explained the symptoms of a concussion to the heroine, who's also a doctor, the conversation would have been illogical and a waste of both professionals' time.

HANDLING DIALOGUE

Here are some basic guidelines for crafting solid dialogue between your characters—rules and techniques that will help keep your readers on track and in tune with your story:

• Pace your dialogue to relate to the action—long sentences for a slow and thoughtful scene, short and abrupt sentences at a time of action, tension, or suspense.

• Always tell the readers there's a new character in the scene before that person speaks. Remember that your readers can only see as much of the scene as you've painted for them. If they don't know a new character has come into the scene—if that person just starts speaking out of nowhere—the readers will be confused.

• When writing a child's speech, do your research. Listen to a child of the appropriate age until you can mimic his unusual speech patterns. A child moves