The Use of Narrative and Exposition (Part 3)

Good Dialogue is essential to your story. Dialogue moves the action along better than any other medium. Dialogue can be used effectively in fictional stories, personal experience stories, devotionals, and anecdotes within articles and nonfiction books. Here are some tips for using authentic dialogue in your manuscripts.

Multiple Characters: When possible, have two people in your story, so they can talk to each other. If this is not possible and only one person is involved in a happening, perhaps you could relay that incident after it occurred through a telephone conversation or a chat over coffee. Staying in someone’s mind and listening to their thoughts is a boring place for the reader to be.

Tags: Be careful of the tags you use for dialogue. “He said” is better than “he articulated” or “he uttered.” After all, what is important is the information between the quotation marks, not the word used for “said.” An exception would be if you needed to show strong emotion or a certain voice tone that the words by themselves didn’t express. Examples: He shouted, he whispered.

A word of warning: you can’t smile, sigh, or laugh words. Instead of writing, “You’re cute,” he smiled, use:  “You’re cute,” he said with a boyish grin.