How to Write Killer Dialogue

Hello hello hello, my brother and sister writers.  It’s the Old Soldier with some more insights into writing, especially writing dialogue for characters in your fiction.

I have found out as a writer, teaching assistant and now as an editor that for many writers writing dialogue is difficult to do.

Image by PinkMoose via Flickr

I really don’t know why this is true but it is true.

Is it because writers have a hard time putting themselves in the shoes of their characters?  Or maybe the writer is uncomfortable pretending to know how someone else would talk?

Like I said, I really don’t know.  When I first started writing fiction, my favorite authors were those writers who used plenty of dialogue in their work.  I could actually “hear” the characters.  I noticed that my favorite authors were able to make a reader realize what a character was thinking about just through dialogue.  The feelings of the characters came through the dialogue.

To me, this was almost like magic.  How did my favorite authors do this?

Well, here are a couple of things about dialogue that I learned from Hemingway, Raymond Carver and John O’Hara.

• Make sure each of your characters has a different agenda
• Be aware that how a person speaks will reveal their personality

If you can keep these two things in mind as you write dialogue, you will be well on your way to writing dialogue that will keep your reader interested.  After all, that’s what it’s all about.  You will find some good examples of this kind of dialogue in 15 Great Erotic Short Stories.

My eBook is The Pittsburgh Stories.