Talk is tricky. Stephen King says dialogue is the one thing a writer is either good at naturally or they aren’t. Author and editor Trevor Byrne agrees – but really that’s just the starting point, and every writer can improve their dialogue.
In this masterclass, we’ll look at examples of excellent dialogue from film, TV, stories, and novels, with a view to understanding why some talk just seems to work; why it sounds right. We’ll also look at bad talk in good books – partly to make ourselves feel better, but mostly so we can avoid the mistakes even acclaimed writers sometimes make.
We’ll explore the function of dialogue in fiction, and how we can make sure we’re using it to best effect. Dialogue develops plot by releasing new information, and helps build the storyworld. Dialogue is characterisation; dialogue reveals the speaker even if they don’t mean it to. Dialogue makes the reader laugh or gasp or cringe. Yet dialogue, crucially, is also action – talk, in fiction, is tension. Talk is conflict.
No matter the function, the clever work that your dialogue does shouldn’t draw attention to itself. Everything a character says should ‘sound’ like real talk, for its time and place: we’ll look at accent and idiom (should you use it?), at the rhythms and cadences of real talk.
Sometimes great dialogue in fiction is the sly, loaded, impossibly tense verbal sparring between Cromwell and More in Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, and sometimes it’s Vincent and Jules in Pulp Fiction chatting with delighted, faintly disdainful disbelief about what Parisians call various McDonald’s menu items.
By the end of this workshop, you’ll have the tools and tricks you need to create vibrant, authentic, muscular, effective dialogue.
