Table of Contents
Is dialogue heavy writing bad?
This way the character can say one thing and do another, and the reader knows why. In dialogue-heavy situations, this could be difficult, and the story might be robbed of richness. If you know how to write a good dialogue, there are no disadvantages.
Do novels have too much dialogue?
One easy test to see if you have “too much dialogue” is to zoom out on your page and see if you have a lot of short lines or a nice mix of lines and gray areas. A dialogue-heavy/narrative-sparse page will have a lot of white space and look more like a list than a page from a novel.
What should you not start a story with?
25 Terrible Ways to Start a Novel
- Starting 5 or 10 pages before the beginning of the story.
- Not introducing your main character immediately.
- Introducing a whole boardroom of characters.
- Not creating conflict on the first page.
- Starting with summary rather than a scene.
Is it easy to write dialogue?
Those rules will make writing dialogue easy – turning it from something static, heavy and unlifelike into something that shines off the page. Better still, dialogue should be fun to write, so don’t worry if we talk about ‘rules’. We’re not here to kill the fun. We’re here to increase it. So let’s look at these rules and some dialogue examples.
How do you avoid making your characters sound like they speak?
If you include an unnecessary sentence or two in a passage of description – well, it’s best to avoid that, of course, but, aside from registering a minor and temporary slowing, most readers won’t notice or care. Do the same in a block of dialogue, and your characters will seem to be speechifying rather than speaking.
What is an example of dialogue in a crime novel?
Take this example of dialogue, for instance, from Ian Rankin’s fourteenth Rebus crime novel, A Question of Blood. The detective, John Rebus, is phoned up at night by his colleague:
How do you communicate with your readers?
Allow gaps in the communication and let the readers fill in the blanks. It’s like you’re not even giving the readers 100\% of what they want. You’re giving them 80\% and letting them figure out the rest. Take this example of dialogue, for instance, from Ian Rankin’s fourteenth Rebus crime novel, A Question of Blood.