Latest / Show, don't Tell Writing with Suzy Vadori / 26. 9 Tips to Write Sparkling Dialogue
Transcript
- 0:07Welcome to Show, don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction, non fiction that are going to wow your readers broken down, step by step.
- 0:18We're going to explore.
- 0:19I'm going to explore writing techniques, I'm going to show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers careers that you wouldn't have access to otherwise, and I'm also going to coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling.
- 0:33Whether you're just starting out, you're drafting your first book, you're editing, or you're currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your 10th book, this show is going to help you unlock the writing skills that you didn't even know you needed, but you definitely do.
- 0:48I'm I'm so looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers, so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams.
- 1:00And you're going to also have some fun doing it.
- 1:02Let's dive in.
- 1:04Every writer wants to write riveting dialogue, and many think they do.
- 1:08Yet, it's hands down the place where I see the most mistakes when reviewing writers drafts of books.
- 1:16Table stakes.
- 1:17Punctuation?
- 1:18Yes.
- 1:19Also, not using this tool to its full potential.
- 1:23The tool being dialogue.
- 1:24I see dialogue that's too sparse.
- 1:27Dialogue that's boring.
- 1:28Dialogue that's flat.
- 1:30Dialogue that's full of info dumps.
- 1:31And Dialogue that has me scratching my head and skimming ahead a couple pages until the book gets going again.
- 1:38If you don't want your dialogue to bore your readers, this episode is for you, because I'm going to dive into my best tips and give you some never before publicly shared guidelines to drag your readers into your dialogue and make them feel like they're really there, which is what this podcast is all about.
- 1:55This show don't tell, right?
- 1:57You're gonna learn more about dialogue in this episode than you even knew existed, so grab a paper and a pen, take some notes, because you're gonna want to look at all your scenes where you've got dialogue, and start tweaking them as soon as you're done listening.
- 2:12Ready to get excited about sparkling dialogue?
- 2:14Let's do this.
- 2:16Okay, tip number one.
- 2:18I want to address dialogue punctuation really briefly, though it's not the focus of this podcast.
- 2:24I want to share so much more because even for seasoned writers, the punctuation that we use in books for dialogue is kind of strange and seems to defy all logic.
- 2:35That's right.
- 2:36I said it.
- 2:37It's weird.
- 2:38So if you get corrections back from an editor and you're pulling out your hair, thinking, Oh my gosh, I thought I was really good at grammar and how am I not getting this?
- 2:46And thinking it all seems random and arbitrary, you're not alone.
- 2:50That happened to me, too, when I first started writing books, and it really, really annoyed me.
- 2:55Most writers get dialogue punctuation wrong, at least some of the time.
- 3:00Why?
- 3:01The rules are kind of tricky.
- 3:03And they require you to understand some things that you've probably never even thought about before, but you're gonna learn them today.
- 3:10I promise you, the rules are not actually arbitrary, and once you see the pattern, you'll be fine.
- 3:17The best way that I've found to teach this is to make sure that you understand the difference between a dialogue tag, which is he said, she said, they said, he asked, they asked, she replied.
- 3:29Difference between that and an action beat.
- 3:31Now that sounds kind of boring.
- 3:33There's a cheat sheet.
- 3:34You can download it.
- 3:35It's in the show notes.
- 3:36And so download that cheat sheet.
- 3:38I'm just going to go through it briefly, and then we're going to talk about all the other ways that you can make your dialogue slowly sparkle.
- 3:43For the complete grammar rules and acceptable punctuation formats for this dialogue, download the free cheat sheet from the show notes.
- 3:50There was a time when I was first writing books when I couldn't figure this out.
- 3:54And then I noticed that there was one way I was doing it that was consistently not being corrected by my editor and so I started doing it that way.
- 4:03And then I had this really gracious editor that came along and was like, Why is every single snippet of dialogue in your entire manuscript identical?
- 4:11And I was like, well, because that's the only way I knew how to do it.
- 4:14So I had to figure out all the ways, they're all there, take a look there and make sure that it's all cleared out.
- 4:19Here's the gist of it.
- 4:21Dialogue tags are used to indicate who's speaking.
- 4:23So dialogue, you know, I'm going to say this one.
- 4:26Quotation mark.
- 4:27Open quotation mark.
- 4:28Dialogue punctuation is the worst, Susie.
- 4:31I am pulling out my hair.
- 4:33Close quotation mark.
- 4:34The listener said.
- 4:35So notice in this sentence that there's a dialogue tag.
- 4:38The listener said.
- 4:40This is all part of the same sentence.
- 4:42Dialogue punctuation is the worst, Susie.
- 4:44I'm pulling out my hair, the listener said.
- 4:46All the same sentence.
- 4:47Therefore, you can use a comma between the sentence and the dialogue tag, so after the word hair.
- 4:53Dialogue tags are so boring, and they're meant to be.
- 4:57So, stick to the basics is the current standard in publishing.
- 5:02Said, replied, and asked for great.
- 5:04Maybe the occasional, she whispered, if you must.
- 5:08Don't get creative.
- 5:09Don't let other people tell you to get creative because it isn't what is done in the industry.
- 5:14Leave the, she shouts, he inquires, they exclaimed on the cutting room floor because they're, make your writing sound amateur.
- 5:22Adult readers actually skip over these quickly as they read, and the creative ones will only trip them up.
- 5:28In fact, you don't need dialogue tags at all.
- 5:31Now, a word of caution as I give this advice.
- 5:33Please don't go and delete every dialogue tag in your manuscript because you're going to end up with a mess where you can't tell who's talking and it's not going to work.
- 5:43Instead, see if you can replace each of your dialogue tags with an action beat where you can show what the speaker is up to.
- 5:50See the cheat sheet for how to do this successfully, but I highly recommend taking the time to eliminate as many dialogue tags as you can, replacing them with action beats, because not only does it keep your reading level higher, but it also eliminates unnecessary words, leaving more space in your book for, you guessed it, beautiful showing details that will help your readers connect with your characters and your world.
- 6:12And who doesn't want that?
- 6:14Note, there is an exception to this advice that I'm giving about deleting or replacing your dialogue tags.
- 6:21If you are writing for a lower reading level, such as middle grade books or lower YA, you're going to want to leave the dialogue tags in, even those creative ones.
- 6:32Newer readers read more slowly, and they don't skip those dialogue tags the way that adults do.
- 6:36In fact, they need these tags to show them who's speaking and help them interpret your scene.
- 6:41If you're writing for upper YA, sort of that 14 plus category, or adult, you're good to go.
- 6:47Okay, so that cheat sheet will clear up any confusion you have about punctuation.
- 6:51Learn it and apply it, because although a strong editor can clean this up for you if you do it wrong, it's super tedious work.
- 6:59And if your characters are written well, your readers, even your editors, gonna hear their voices in their heads as they read, making it really hard for them to pay attention to the punctuation and correct it all for you.
- 7:10I do this in my own manuscripts, it's really hard to find those mistakes later because I can hear the characters voices.
- 7:16So you'll also pay too much to have someone else Do that work that you're capable of doing yourself, so correct all your dialogue if you can.
- 7:24One more quick note about dialogue tags before I share with you the next eight amazing tips to make sparkling dialogue.
- 7:32The dialogue tags themselves, the he said, she said, they sound really redundant when narrated on an audiobook, which is supposed to be an identical copy of your print version, or they're not considered the same edition.
- 7:44Of course, there's a few exceptions to this rule.
- 7:46If you've got visuals in your book, but audio books are really fastly growing category and super profitable.
- 7:53So limiting your dialogue tags in books for teens and adults will help your readers experience when they listen to an audio book as well.
- 8:00Ugh, enough about grammar Susie already, right?
- 8:03So that's the basics on the grammar of the punctuation for dialogue and you need to master it.
- 8:10That's not the only issue I see with dialogue.
- 8:13How do you learn to make it sparkle?
- 8:15That's what we're going to talk about today.
- 8:17The worst advice that I hear out there, and I hear it all the time, passed from writing teachers to writers, and on to other writers, they talk about it in Facebook groups, or verbally, ugh, this advice, I just want to rip out my hair.
- 8:31Okay, the advice is, write your dialogue as closely to how people talk as possible.
- 8:38If you wanna learn how to do that, they advise to go to a coffee shop, an eavesdrop, writing down everything that people say so that it sounds realistic.
- 8:47Whew.
- 8:48Please, please, please, dear Writer, do not do this and expect your scenes to interest your readers.
- 8:54In fact, great dialogue in books rarely represents a whole conversation between characters.
- 9:00If you're writing your dialogue like this, your conversations are likely really long and drawn out.
- 9:05And we'll put your readers to sleep.
- 9:09So, before you smugly read back your transcript that you wrote down in a coffee shop, thinking, it's like I'm sitting right beside them, put your editing hat on and take another look.
- 9:20Anybody can write exactly what they hear.
- 9:22That takes zero skill.
- 9:24The skill that you, as a writer, bring to the table is knowing what to emphasize and how much to share.
- 9:30And that's gonna take practice.
- 9:34When I coach writers who are writing their own stories, for example, if they're writing a memoir or their own stories, I advise that they aren't sharing a journal of their birth to death with each day earning the same weight and emphasis in their book.
- 9:46Nobody would read that.
- 9:48Instead, they get to be the director of their own story.
- 9:52They can choose when to zoom in with their camera, in on a particular moment, when to pull the camera back for a montage, kind of gliding through it.
- 10:00The same advice is true for writing dialogue.
- 10:04In each scene that you have dialogue present, what do you need readers to think?
- 10:09What do you need readers to learn?
- 10:10What do you want readers to feel?
- 10:12To fit into your overall story and the experience that the reader will have, this is going to determine how much of the conversation readers actually need to witness.
- 10:22Put your reader hat on, put your reader lens on, and look at it from their point of view.
- 10:27Because the Mighty Dialogue is really, really, really important in fiction.
- 10:32It can convey so many things.
- 10:35Your dialogue should be doing double, triple duty all the time.
- 10:39It should be building your characters.
- 10:41It should be telling us or showing us about the world that they live in.
- 10:45You should react.
- 10:47Your dialogue is a really important piece of that.
- 10:50Dialogue in books, especially in fiction, isn't like real life.
- 10:54It just isn't.
- 10:56It would be very, very boring.
- 10:57Most conversations that we have with our neighbours and our friends, it's When we're talking about all the things that happen day to day, when we're hanging out with our family, they're pretty mundane.
- 11:09Think of your dialogue instead as a sparkling version of real life.
- 11:13Let each snippet of dialogue that you write do as much work as possible.
- 11:19Does what the characters say, or what they're saying in your scenes, does it reveal something about their personality?
- 11:24Does it tell you their motivation?
- 11:26Does it show their emotion?
- 11:28It should.
- 11:30Your dialogue can be so much better than what you overhear in a coffee shop.
- 11:35We want to write dialogue that is smarter, that is sharper, that is a crunchier version of real life.
- 11:41You don't want your dialogue to just move and plod along, right?
- 11:46Because that's boring.
- 11:47We want your dialogue to do that double, triple, quadruple duty.
- 11:51And if you can show us everything about your world, Making sure that everything relates to what you're trying to say with your book.
- 11:58See where I'm going with this?
- 11:59Don't just have throwaway dialogue to fill your pages.
- 12:03So when you're taking a look and revising your own pages, and you've got like long stretches of dialogue, and you're trying to evaluate, do I need them, or how can I tighten them up, I can promise you it can almost certainly be trimmed so that you don't bore your readers.
- 12:18Look for bits that aren't working hard, that aren't doing that double, triple, quadruple duty, and cut them.
- 12:26Unless your intent of that particular conversation is to show that the conversation is boring.
- 12:33If that's the case, you actually wanted us to witness a boring conversation, please keep it short.
- 12:39Less is more.
- 12:40Make your point, move on, or readers will move on anyway by skimming.
- 12:45And then you've lost them.
- 12:48Here are some specifics that you could look for that can almost always go.
- 12:52So, tip number two, we're gonna get into the tips of dialogue.
- 12:56We talked about punctuation, we just talked about the importance.
- 12:59Tip number two, skip the niceties.
- 13:02What do I mean by that?
- 13:03Well, let's listen to a snippet for a moment.
- 13:05Hi, I'm Susie.
- 13:06I'm Nick.
- 13:07Nice to meet you, Nick.
- 13:08Lovely day, isn't it?
- 13:10Okay, readers are going to assume that people say hello when they meet up.
- 13:14We're also going to assume that they are polite, so skip ahead.
- 13:18The same with goodbyes.
- 13:20When I was growing up, my mom watched soap operas.
- 13:23We watched them from like 12 to 5 or whatever, and usually I only got to see the ones after school, the young and the restless, and they I found it really strange that despite their extensive use of landline phones, right?
- 13:35These black slim line phones that they would answer, that would ring, and they would have these conversations.
- 13:40The characters never said goodbye.
- 13:42They'd say something like, thanks for letting me know.
- 13:45Click.
- 13:45And then hang up.
- 13:46If you haven't noticed this before, I might have wrecked this for you because you're going to see it in shows now.
- 13:51But every time I pointed out this anomaly when I was a kid to other people, I was met with blank stares.
- 13:56I guess, looking back, I was always destined to be an editor at that point in my life, but it bugged me.
- 14:03Guess what?
- 14:05Nobody else noticed.
- 14:06Because hellos and goodbyes are implied.
- 14:10I promise you, your readers won't notice either, and you can get rid of them.
- 14:13Get rid of saying their names, and get rid of hello, I'm so and so, and goodbye.
- 14:19If it helps you to tiptoe your way into a scene or out of a scene by having your characters make small talk and say those things, by all means, draft it that way.
- 14:28Don't stop the flow.
- 14:29But on your second draft, be ruthless.
- 14:32Zoom into dialogue as late as you possibly can in a scene.
- 14:36Show us the meat of it, the most interesting part, and then let them hang up without saying goodbye.
- 14:43Tip number three for making sparkling dialogue, skip the marisms.
- 14:49Well, um, uh, I don't know, right?
- 14:53We talk like this in real life, but your characters can't, because you guessed it, it is Boring.
- 15:00If you want to show a mannerism or that a character speaks in a particular way, use the rule of three.
- 15:06That means use the word twice in your character's dialogue, sort of close together near the beginning of the book.
- 15:12It's enough to create a pattern in your smart reader's minds.
- 15:15If they've done it twice, that's how they speak.
- 15:17Then bring it back at a third point in time in the future or later in the book as a punchline or in a critical moment.
- 15:24Your readers will still remember it and it will be really impactful.
- 15:28Anything more than this for these annoying little mannerisms or the ums and ahs for dialect will feel overdone.
- 15:35I'm going to talk about dialect in a minute as well.
- 15:38Tip number four for writing your sparkling dialogue, skip the prompting.
- 15:43What do I mean by this?
- 15:44I see this one all the time.
- 15:47Make sure that your dialogue is always showing something about your character's nature and have them say things that move the story forward and don't stop us in our tracks.
- 15:57I see this problem a lot when I'm editing.
- 15:59Somebody will come up to a character and be like, Are you okay?
- 16:04Yeah, I think I'm okay.
- 16:06Are you sure?
- 16:07Yes, I think I'm sure.
- 16:10That dialogue does absolutely nothing.
- 16:12That is your brain, as you're writing, pausing to think about what you should write next.
- 16:18It doesn't do anything.
- 16:20So have the character run up and say, Did the explosion hit any major arteries?
- 16:25That's way more interesting than, Are you okay?
- 16:29I think so.
- 16:30Are you okay?
- 16:31Yeah, I'm okay.
- 16:32If you've got that sort of back and forth, skip it.
- 16:35Try this one.
- 16:37The explosion hit a major artery.
- 16:39What did you say?
- 16:40My ears are still ringing from the blast.
- 16:42Hear that prompting?
- 16:43It hit a major artery.
- 16:44Now I'm repeating.
- 16:45What does that mean?
- 16:46It means he's gonna lose a lot of blood.
- 16:49Will he live?
- 16:50I don't know.
- 16:51There's somebody here that's prompting a character rather than just letting them get on with it.
- 16:56This is a frustrating back and forth that will slow the pace in a critical scene, especially if there's just been an explosion.
- 17:02It's probably a really cool moment.
- 17:04This exchange that I just read is 41 words.
- 17:08The actual dialogue itself.
- 17:09The explosion hit a major artery.
- 17:11What did you say?
- 17:12My ears are still ringing from the blast.
- 17:13It hit a major artery.
- 17:14What does that mean?
- 17:15It means he'll lose a lot of blood.
- 17:17Will he live?
- 17:17I don't know.
- 17:1941 words.
- 17:21Try this instead.
- 17:23The explosion hit a major artery.
- 17:25Blood gushed through Rob's fingers as he pushed his hand against Matt's leg.
- 17:29Bart shook his head, his ears ringing.
- 17:31If Matt died, the secret would die with him.
- 17:33See how that exchange is way more targeted without the back and forth of the prompting, which is just wasted space?
- 17:40It's now only 35 words and we've learned way more about the scene.
- 17:45It's much more exciting.
- 17:47Besides eliminating the prompting, I did something else to this snippet of dialogue, which brings me to tip number five to make your dialogue sparkle.
- 17:56Mix it in with the other elements of writing.
- 17:59I teach that there are five elements in writing.
- 18:02Dialogue is one.
- 18:03And then you also have actions, reactions, inner thoughts, and setting.
- 18:08You can check out the article that I've dropped in this show notes, which I recently wrote for Writers Helping Writers, which talks in more detail about these five elements of writing and get a complete rundown of how to integrate these well for well rounded scenes.
- 18:22But the gist of it is, if you're leaning too heavily on one or two techniques or elements on a page of your book, your reader's brain isn't going to be stimulated, and they're going to get bored.
- 18:32So mix together three or more of these on a page.
- 18:36So in the above example about the explosion and the gushing artery, rather than trying to stuff everything into dialogue, The second example actually uses setting details, which is the hand and the gushing blood, reactions, Bart shaking his head, and Bart's inner thoughts about what will happen if Matt dies, which is way more engaging.
- 18:55So we've actually used four different elements there instead of just one.
- 18:59Technique or tip number six for writing sparkling dialogue, no info dumps.
- 19:06Okay, this is the Show Don't Tell Writing Podcast, and you've heard me talk about info dumps in the past.
- 19:11Info dumps are basically when you have like these huge amounts of information that are just spoon fed to your reader and they're super boring and they're hard to digest because it's like, here's a fact, and here's another fact, and here's another fact, and here's another fact, and it's not engaging, right?
- 19:27If you have big, important info being shared in large dialogue blocks, you still need to break it up.
- 19:34It's a huge misconception.
- 19:36That dialogue is always showing.
- 19:38So I hear writing teachers even giving this information all the time.
- 19:43Oh, if you want to break up a faux dum.
- 19:45Use dialogue instead.
- 19:46And so I get these manuscripts in or these books to edit and people have just put that information and had somebody talk for like a whole page or a whole paragraph or something.
- 19:55That doesn't help.
- 19:56It's still an info dump if, if somebody is delivering that information, even if it's dialogue.
- 20:01So.
- 20:02Use above point number five, which is to mix it up with the five elements of writing, or find a way to show the information instead of having a character relate it.
- 20:11Better even yet, bring us to that scene and show us what happened, rather than have somebody tell us about it after the fact, okay?
- 20:18If you're using dialogue to infodump, it's still telling great way to find that in your drafts is if somebody's got like more than four or five lines in a snippet of dialogue, it's probably too much.
- 20:30So break it out.
- 20:31Okay.
- 20:32All right, tip number seven for writing your sparkling dialogue is kind of related.
- 20:38Skip the recaps.
- 20:40What's a recap?
- 20:41Well, a recap would be like somebody telling us something after the fact, right?
- 20:45So that's going to be boring.
- 20:46It's probably going to be an info dump.
- 20:48Bring us to that moment instead, or find a way to show us what happened.
- 20:52Do a flashback, even.
- 20:54But also, it would also be when we've already witnessed something in a book, and then you have, you have to let another character know.
- 21:03And so you have this whole other scene.
- 21:05Where another character is telling, or where the character that just witnessed this or just experienced something is telling somebody else about it.
- 21:12So, the other character, the new character that's learning this information for the first time is like oohing and aahing and like surprised by this information and all these things, but guess what?
- 21:23That's not new information for your reader! They were there! They already witnessed this whole thing happening, and so what you've done is you've created a completely redundant scene.
- 21:33You're also creating the identical emotional rollercoaster that you were doing in the first time.
- 21:39We're just going to go through it the second time.
- 21:41Just because your other character needs to have that information, we cap it.
- 21:47Instead of bringing us to that moment and having all this dialogue.
- 21:51Which explains what happened in the other scene.
- 21:54Skip it! Joe filled Bob in on what happened in the battle.
- 21:59Bob was devastated.
- 22:00Like, if the reaction is all you want, then that's not a good showing one.
- 22:04Bob sparked ache from all the people lost, right?
- 22:07So, so we can actually just skip over that.
- 22:10That is one time when I do not suggest that you zoom in and use dialogue if you have scenes like that.
- 22:16You can, like, eliminate whole scenes.
- 22:17I see this all the time, especially, for whatever reason, a lot of times I see it in science fiction books, where we have this, because it's important to track.
- 22:26The writer is tracking who knows what, and they write whole scenes this way, but we don't need them.
- 22:30Skip them.
- 22:32Tip number eight to write sparkling dialogue, let characters voices be unique, right?
- 22:38What if each have their own voice?
- 22:40You don't want everybody in your book to sound the same, even if they're the same age, the same gender, same culture.
- 22:48They would also have lots of different life experiences, and make sure that you're reflecting that with how they speak.
- 22:54When your characters have goals, which they should have in your book.
- 22:58When they have agency, which means they have, they're going after their goals, and they're taking steps towards them.
- 23:04When you give them skills or a vocation, this technique or this tip is much easier to make them sound unique.
- 23:12So you might have to go and do a creative couple of pages for yourself.
- 23:17Please don't put this in your book.
- 23:19It's a, it's a creative exercise that you can do where you answer a bunch of questions about your character and give them a little bit of depth so that when they speak, it's Everything is sort of colored with their point of view.
- 23:32They can have little quirks and speech patterns and things that we all have in real life.
- 23:37Again, don't overdo the mannerisms.
- 23:39Revisit tip number three to see how to apply the rule of three to these.
- 23:43But let your characters be different, read them out loud if you're not sure, you'll be able to hear, is the cadence different, are the words that they use different, that is going to make it really interesting.
- 23:54So give them their own flair or way of speaking, follow everything they say with their point of view, their experiences, their background, their vocation, their skills, their agency, all of that.
- 24:05Like, what are they trying to do?
- 24:07Have them focus on different things.
- 24:10What I notice when I walk into a room is very different from what my teenagers might notice, right?
- 24:16And if there's somebody who reads a lot, maybe they can use bigger words.
- 24:19If there's somebody who gets excited really easily, maybe they laugh a lot.
- 24:23They could tell jokes.
- 24:24They could be funny or sarcastic.
- 24:27Get these personality traits into your dialogue as well.
- 24:31Again, you don't want your dialogue to be flat.
- 24:34Avoid overusing cliches or overusing their speech patterns.
- 24:39So yes, give them each a speech pattern, but don't repeat it so often that it starts to feel tired.
- 24:44Check out the rule of three that I outlined in tip number three.
- 24:47Because anything more than that and your reader will notice it and it'll start to sound really repetitive.
- 24:53So use it to give your reader flavor or an idea.
- 24:56And if you want to show a dialect that they speak in broken English, let's say, for example, Well, And you want to use apostrophes and drop letters and things like that, do it a few times to show it and then don't annoy your reader by continuing to do it all the time because it's really hard for them to read and they'll just skip it.
- 25:12Lots of times writers will come to me with a couple of really, really widely spread examples such as You know, the Jamie character in Outlander, when he speaks in a dialect through the entire books, or Hagrid in Harry Potter, who also speaks in a very broken dialect through the entire books.
- 25:28Those are the exception and not the rule.
- 25:30It's actually not that common.
- 25:32It's not that common to find, and publishers today likely would have changed that.
- 25:38So spending some time tightening up your dialogue is one of the biggest bangs for your buck that you can actually invest your time in when revising your book.
- 25:48Try this the next time you reach for a published book on yourself.
- 25:52Here's a test for you.
- 25:53Flip to a page with lots of dialogue.
- 25:56It should be easy to find it because it's quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, and it should be easy to digest.
- 26:00Yes, there's Lots of white space is just how you're going to notice that there's a lot of dialogue on a page.
- 26:05There's lots of places or lots of space where there's no words.
- 26:08And if you do that, and you read it, and it's easy to digest, and the characters sound super awesome, and the dialogue is strong, you're going to find yourself immersed pretty quickly, and you're going to be flipping to the next page.
- 26:20Even if you've read that book before, you're going to read a few pages before you can pull yourself away.
- 26:25You're giving that book a chance.
- 26:26This is the same chance that you want readers to give your book.
- 26:31If you don't spend the time and your dialogue ends up boring and you've got pages and pages and pages of it, readers are going to get impatient.
- 26:38They're going to put your book down.
- 26:40And I know that's not going to be you though, because you're now armed after listening to this podcast with a whole list of things to make your dialogue sparkle on your next trip.
- 26:49I would love, love, love to hear from you in the comments, which of these tips was the most helpful to your work in progress?
- 27:03Thanks for tuning in to Show Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vidori.
- 27:07I'll be continuing to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing or planning to write.
- 27:11Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you're listening.
- 27:18Also visit SuzyVidori.
- 27:20com forward slash subscribe.
- 27:21newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you'll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training, events, and writing courses that happen in my community.
- 27:33If you're feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page of your writing that isn't quite where you want it to be yet for our Show Don't Tell page review episodes.
- 27:43Remember that book and your writing is going to open doors that you haven't even thought of yet.
- 27:49And I can't wait to help you make it.
- 27:51Absolutely.
- 27:52If you're feeling called to write that book, keep going and I'm going to be right here cheering you on.
- 27:58See you again next week.