dialogue

Guest Post from Debra Johnson: 5 Ways to Improve Your Dialogue

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One of the hardest obstacles a writer comes up against is dialogue writing. Like animators trying to imitate human movement, getting the intonation and words exactly right is hard. We are so familiar with speech that any mistake can be jarring and take a reader right out of the story. Here are five ways that … Read more

Creating Fictional Characters—Part 6: Putting the Right Words in Their Mouths

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I’ve learned about dialogue since the first draft of my first novel. When I’d finished about half the book, a writer friend read it. When she returned the manuscript to me, she said, “Do you realize you don’t have one word of dialogue in this entire story?” My characters talked—there was just no dialogue. I wrote … Read more