Writing Hints and Tips – Dialogue

Does your dialogue feel realistic? Are your characters’ voices distinctive?

If not, you can improve on this. Check out these tips:

• Listen to speech patterns whilst out and about – on the bus, in the shops, on TV.
• When writing, get inside the head of your characters.
• Don’t overdo accents. A touch of dialect is enough. Too much can be irritating to a reader and distract from the story.
• Think about characters’ word choices, formality, sentence structure and length, hesitations, methods of greeting.