THIS WILL CHANGE HOW YOU WRITE DIALOGUE FOREVER!

10 things great dialogue is NOT:

• Polished or academic

• Self-consciously poetic

• Inert

• Prosaic

• Removed from the character’s immediate experience

• On the nose

• Exposition

• Omniscient 

• Hallmarky

• Mismatched with the character’s voice

Instead, when speaking ace dialogue, your characters are almost always (consciously or unconsciously) doing one of these things:

• Hiding

• Gloating

• Lying

• Pretending

• Avoiding

• Disguising

• Conflating

• Confusing 

• Appeasing

• Flirting

• Minimizing

• Amplifying

• Pacifying

• Alluding to

• Provoking

You and I do all of the above shady stuff in real life too (we do!), despite angelic intentions. So when you choose one of these messier frames for your characters’ dialogue, it immediately grounds your story in reality, sharpens your character’s specificity, reveals deeper motivations, hints at narrative trajectory, complicates or creates tension, births breakthroughs, heightens story stakes, muddles goals, subverts desires…

To find out HOW to do all that good stuff, check out Lauren Veloski’s absolute banger of a dialogue workshop starting right here: