I have always struggled with dialogue.
It’s a skill I was never very good at. I struggled with saying my own words, with the stutter and lack of confidence, never mind someone else’s.
Recently, I have had to do a lot more talking. I got this new job, with a lot more meetings than my previous role. We have weekly meetings, and updates and catch ups, all done over Teams. So I end up talking a lot, participating and sharing thoughts and ideas. I still stutter occasionally. But I have learnt that most people dont mind. And nowadays, I am always talking, even if its just chatting about cake. And I have grown more confident, less afraid of speaking.
So I had a feel for what dialogue is like. I thought I would give it a try. I wrote more dialogue into my stories, gaining practice bit by bit. And slowly, I got better. I realised that like speaking, it wasn’t something to be afraid of. It was actually quite fun, if done right.
Recently, I wrote a story entirely in dialogue, for my writing groups weekly challenge. It was a humourous historical flash fiction, about the death of Tacitus. Everyone loved it, and I even got to read it in a zoom spoken word session. It was really good, one of my best. I tried it again, with an indirect speech written in an email, about St Paul trying to reach the Corinthians. Again, everyone loved it, and it was highly commended by the head of the writing group. I started to see that I wasn’t so bad at dialogue as I thought. So I carried on using it.
I have a main character in the novel who is quite talkative. However, in the previous draft he didn’t actually say any of this, just that he chattered. So I’ve been going back and adding bits of dialogue, just having fun with it. The story sounds a lot better, the characters coming to life as they interact with him a lot more. I’ve been enjoying it, and will continue it for the rest of the novel.
And now, I don’t struggle with dialogue anymore. Its actually quite easy, and I’m enjoying it.
