Recently, I was thinking about dialogue; how easy it is for us to speak to each other. How we can convey emotion when we are angry or in love just by our words. So why then is writing dialogue so challenging? While working on my last manuscript, I reread the dialogue between two characters who were physically attracted to each other and decided it was too flat. I kept revising and rewriting the dialogue but each time I examined it, I noticed that something was missing. I couldn’t really pinpoint what it was so I decided to take a break and get back to it later. Good fortune was with me that day for I flipped on the ‘tellie’ and lo and behold, one of my favourite movies was playing, Fatal Attraction. As I watched that movie (a movie I have seen many times in the past), I learned a lot about dialogue. For one, building tension in dialogue heightens the authenticity of the characters and piques the reader’s interest. There are numerous examples in Fatal Attraction where the characters speak to each other and each word is carefully chosen to relay tension, fear, and anticipation of what will happen next.

Everyday dialogue is passé. We all know that people, like characters, tend to speak about the weather. This kind of elementary dialogue just adds words to the manuscript and does not enhance the story line. Dialogue should relay some information about the character. Instead of one character making observations on the weather like, ‘It is freezing outside.’ How about ‘When it is cold like this, it reminds me of the time when my mother used to make us hot chocolate, while she took a shot of liquor from the cupboard.” Here we learn a little more about the character and we are even a little curious about her mother and want to read on. Flirt with dialogue… Dialogue should be sexy and engaging. Instead of a flat phrase like ‘
What would you like to do tonight?’ How about ‘Up for a game of strip poker Professor Bailey?’

Of course there are some writers who use as little dialogue as possible. But what is life if we couldn’t speak; or if all of the world happens inside our consciousness and not expressed—yes, drab, very drab indeed. So is writing without dialogue. Let’s here it for dialogue that dances and takes the reader on a journey that they would not like to end…