Speak And Spell

Do your characters sound like they’ve been recently concussed?

Do your beta readers think you’ve forgotten the basics of human interaction?

…have you forgotten the basics of human interaction?

Well, dear reader, you, like many people, may be struggling with your dialogue.

It doesn’t seem like it’d be that hard, does it? You know the characters, their individual voice, but they just can’t speak to each other!

So frustrating.

Well, here are four easy steps to get rid of that frustration and improve your dialogue at the same time:

1.       Read it out loud. If you’re embarrassed, then go to your room. No, seriously lock yourself in your room and read your story out loud (the void cares naught for your grammatical sins, my child). Your tongue is going to figure out the choppiness in the dialogue if your brain can’t.

2.       Read To A Stuffed Animal. If it looks stupid, but it works, it ain’t stupid. As weird as it sounds reading to a person or object actually changes how we process words as well as their pacing. I recommend you do this after step one as that way you’ll have caught the “big rocks” and now your teddy bear/pillow creature will only experience a marginal amount of pain (if any).

3.       Be Read To. No you don’t have to suffer the indignity of cajoling another human being to help you trouble-shoot your manuscript. Pretty much every writing app has a “read aloud” feature these days and I highly recommend taking advantage of it. Find one of the voices that doesn’t grate on your nerves and go to town. As an added bonus the more cocky of you can treat it as a special early-access preview to your audio book!

4.       The Golden Rule. If the dialogue still isn’t clicking try examining the words being used. Think “could I say this in a similar situation without it being totally hamfisted?” If the answer is no then you need to switch things up. And that’s not necessarily the disaster it sounds like. It could be as easy as swapping out a word or even switching up the sentence structure a tad. The more you can put yourself into the scene, the more fluid the dialogue will sound, the more enjoyable the book.

So there you have it: four simple things you can do that will inherently aide you in preventing you from dying of embarrassment the next time you have to have a character speak in your work. It may not seem like much but remember: small changes add up to large results and little progress is still progress!