Here is another good panel from Life, the universe and everything symposium.

–          Characters will speak uniquely and have the own opinions.

–          Interview a character before they speak uniquely.

–          List of the people around you, and learn the different dialogue patterns. Document your observations in a dialogue book.

–          Give your character’s personality test

–          Give your characters are history and determine what happened in the past that put them in your book.

–          Do people watching and listening.

–          People rarely speak in complete sentences in real life. Different people use different word choices.

–          Reading your dialogue out loud can catch and fix the natural flow dialogue.

–          When you’re writing dialect keep it light. Excessive dialect is hard to read out loud.

–          Always keep a notebook nearby and write down dialogue as you think of it throughout the day.

–          Right natural sounding dialogue, not dialogue is verbatim.

–          Give enough of conversation to display the change of character.

–          You want to paint the image of technical speak.

–          Some dialects have certain patterns of speaking such as adjective before noun, etc.

–          Words use is different in different areas of the country such as mashed the button for turn off the light.

–          Any dialect that is familiar to the protagonist needs to be expressed in normal language because it is familiar to them.

–          Sometimes dialogue and narration can sound like the same person. Give characters variety word choices and speech mannerisms, plus by language.

–          Info dump: scattered information throughout the chapter and not into one concentrated area. Information can be presented in the variation or even action and not just exposition.

–          The more you learn, understand your character the more their unique voices will come out.

–          Dialogue needs to happen when characters are doing something.

–          Its okay to hold back information of the character as it can add mystery or tension.

–          When having long conversations. It is important to have the characters doing something that may move the plot forward in conjunction with the dialogue.

Have something to add to the list? Please share it in the comment section of this blog.