[Discussion] Crafting Dialogue

I'm someone who tries to be a minimalist with dialogue and write less dialogue than most, I'd say. But, for a lot of people, writing dialogue fleshes out a story.

So, when crafting your dialogue, how do you usually go about it? Do you try to make the speakers distinct, or do you struggle with that?

For me, I try to have distinct speech for all my characters, but I always use dialogue tags and body language/tone of voice descriptors since I'm writing a story about a character who barely talks. So, dialogue descriptors and tone of voice are 100% necessary.

But, even though I have these descriptors, I still try to have dialogue feel distinct and not the same for everyone. Some of my characters speak with words my others don't, ie: one of my characters says "honey" and none of the others do, while I have one that says, "oh, hey!" when my others don't. But, I guess for me, that's pretty easy. When I create my characters, I can just "feel" how they talk inside my head. Even though I'm very much so a minimalist with my dialogue and 90% of my stories are description vs talking.

Also I'm going be honest, in almost all of my works, I never do dialogue without some sort of descriptor because I like descriptive dialogue. For me, especially, specify how the person says their words is extremely important to me. The only time I do not use descriptive dialogue is when it's a letter or a poem (because a poem is basically, for me, a character talking, just poetically). But not all my dialogue is descriptive, something I just do "Words," he <said> "next set of dialogue" without vocal tone indicated, but only if it's not an important thing.

But, yeah, for a lot of writers, I'm sure you craft your dialogue differently, so I wanted to have a thread for it.

I also try to have my characters with distinct voices. Sometimes it'll be through nicknames, other times certain speech mannerisms. With canon characters I do a bit research on that but sometimes I don't always get that right the first time.

When it comes to dialogue tags and description, most of the time I feel the dialogue "said" gets the job done, though I also mix things up with the character's actions/emotions/thoughts. I think the exception is if I'm writing a more romantic scene where the characters are in the moment and well...lmao.

I nearly always stick with the basic "said" or simple tags along those lines, because it's a filler word in our minds and we smoothly go over it, compared to more elaborate tags of course. I used to think "said" was too boring when I began writing (at 12 haha) and would jump to the thesaurus to avoid using it!

On that note, I'm not keen on line after line of "he said", "she said" like a script, so I break it up with actions or little mannerisms, or write the change of inflection in their voice etc. I'm still practicing distinct voices. It's hard unless I immerse myself in a certain accent/dialect/slang words without going overboard. Otherwise my characters can easily fall into the same generic voice - dialogue is a weak point of mine!

That said, I find reading actual scripts super helpful!

I tend to pair dialogue with an action of some kind as it can be used to tell a little about what a character is like or feels in the moment through their body-language and tone of voice, something kind of important when you have characters who rarely say what they actually mean and where a lot of their body-language betrays their true feelings.

It makes a dialogue-scene feel more interesting to read and less like the characters are just standing around and doing nothing while they talk and can get across subtle nuance much better than just using 'said' over and over again, even emphasizing certain words or phrases. But then again, I tend to get very strong visuals of how I want scenes to look like when I write so it is more likely a by-product of that.