Ten Things to Help Writers with Dialogue
Freeware Caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.
Mary Emma Allen's Writing Captivating Dialogue for Children's Stories has tips that also hold true for other genres.
Janis Cramer's workshop Collaborating to Write Dialogue has some great tips for those of you who are working with a co-author.
Holly Lisle's Dialogue Workshop offers some valuable exercises to help improve your composition and delivery of dialogue.
Dramatist 1.5 freeware is "a playwriting dialog editor for writing drama screenplays" (OS: Mac OS X 10.2 or later)
How Not to Bore Your Readers: Write Better Dialogue by Helen Vance sees dialogue as the voice of the story, and offers some ideas on how to better analyze your own.
If you're not sure what makes an interesting argument, or how an argument is structured, check outHow to Recognize an Argument by Jonathan Dolhenty, Ph.D.
MagneticPoetry.com has an online Pickup Lines game that features such tried and true phrases as at first sight nice shirt and astronaut pants.
Writing Compelling Dialogue in Fiction by Nicholas Morine looks at the overuse of one particular/popular dialogue tag and offers some ways to combat it.
Writing Effective Dialogue by Michael Daniels is geared toward screenwriters but the tips are great for fiction writers as well.
Screenwriter Stephen J. Cannell has a good article and examples of Writing Exercises to help you with your dialogue.
Just for fun:
To see a master of dialogue at work, play with Jonathan Aquino's Jane Austen Pride & Prejudice Random Dialogue Line Generator (the link will give you three random lines from the novel; for more or less just change the number at the end of the URL.)
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It is spooky how you do topics that are on my mind. :-O
ReplyDeleteVery spooky! But thanks so much for the links.
ReplyDeleteMagnetic poetry is fun! I could spend hours playing with that.
ReplyDeleteThanks for finding my article on Captivating Dialogue. I'd almost forgotten I'd written it. Think I shall include it in a book of writing tips I'm publishing.
ReplyDeleteMary Emma Allen (http://bookbagblog.blogspot.com )
Thanks for your link to my article regarding Writing Dialogue in Fiction. I enjoyed poking through your blog and am honoured that you like my work.
ReplyDeleteNicholas Morine