SEO title: How to Write Dialogue That Moves Your Story Meta description: Write dialogue readers enjoy: give each speaker a different goal, cut the small talk and let subtext do the work, with one scene as the example. Picture: pictures/couch-notebook.webp (alt text: A grey-haired man on a sofa writing in a notebook while a watercolour scene of a woman, a dog and a coast road drifts out of the page) ============================================================ Write Dialogue Readers Enjoy: How to Make Every Conversation Move Your Story Forward This post contains affiliate links. I may earn a commission if you buy through my link, at no extra cost to you. What should a woman say when she walks into her sister's kitchen and finds divorce papers on the table, half hidden under the fruit bowl? If your answer is "Are you getting divorced?", the scene is over in one line. A stronger first line keeps it alive for two more pages, and we will come back to that kitchen once you have the tools to write it. Give the two people in every conversation different goals Dialogue gets dull when both characters want the same thing. They agree with each other and pass information back and forth, and before long the reader starts skimming. Give each person a goal before they open their mouth. In the kitchen, the sister who found the papers wants the truth. The sister who owns them wants to keep it quiet until after their mother's birthday on Sunday. Now every line is a small push or a dodge. Nobody has to explain the situation to the reader, because the tug between the two sisters does it for you. Cut the hellos, the goodbyes and the talk about the weather Real conversations are full of padding. People say hello and ask how the drive was before they get anywhere near the point. On the page, that padding drains the life out of a scene. Start as late as you can, ideally partway into the argument, and leave as soon as the important thing has been said. Readers fill in the greetings on their own. Let characters talk around the thing that matters People rarely say exactly what they feel, especially when it hurts. They change the subject or pick a fight about something smaller. Writers call this subtext, and it is where dialogue gets its power. Back in the kitchen, the first sister picks up the papers and says, "You never told me Daniel was moving to Denver." Her sister turns to the stove and says, "Did you eat? There's soup." Neither of them has said the word divorce. The reader understands everything anyway, and leans in because the two sisters won't say it straight. Small habits that make dialogue easy to read - Use "said" for most dialogue tags. Readers' eyes slide right over it, while words like "exclaimed" and "retorted" pull attention away from what was said. - Swap some tags for small actions, so the reader sees who is talking and what they are doing at the same time: She turned the fruit bowl a quarter turn. "There's soup." - Give each character their own way of talking. One speaks in short bursts, another never finishes a thought, and a third gets formal when nervous. Cover the names and you should still know who is speaking. - Read the scene out loud. Anything you stumble over, or that no real person would say, gets rewritten. - Keep speeches short. When a character talks for a whole paragraph, have someone interrupt. Lindsay Lake's Seesaw Dialog Technique Lindsay Lake teaches dialogue in her novel-writing program, The Hurricane Method (https://hop.clickbank.net/?affiliate=YOURIDHERE&vendor=hurricanem&tid=YOURTRACKINGHERE&type=written), under the name the Seesaw Dialog Technique. Her sales page says the technique "shows you how to relate emotions, story and conflict throughout the dialogue you choose for each of your characters, so that they vividly come to life." She adds that your characters build a depth readers love, whatever kind of novel you are writing. Emotion, story and conflict are exactly what the kitchen scene runs on. When a line carries feeling and conflict at the same time, the story moves forward with it, and Lindsay has built a whole technique around writing lines like that. Lindsay came to her method the hard way: her husband left her to raise their three children alone, and it was then that she began studying how successful novelists work. Her first novel, she says, took 14 days, though she points out that a 'Harry Potter' style novel takes a lot longer than a romance, and that your own goals change the timeline too. She wrote Private Seduction, part of her spicy Hideaway of Desires series, and she says that after her first novel took off, readers began writing to her blog asking for tips and mentoring. The Hurricane Method is $47 for the whole program, paid once, with a 60-day money-back guarantee, and the Seesaw Dialog Technique is one of the parts she lists in her letter about the program (https://hop.clickbank.net/?affiliate=YOURIDHERE&vendor=hurricanem&tid=YOURTRACKINGHERE&type=written). Meanwhile, try this on a scene you have already written: check whether the two people talking want different things, and if they don't, change one goal and rewrite the scene.