Writing Good Dialogue – Use Subtext
The most important thing for writing good dialogue is to make it sound natural, and reading it aloud is the way to find out if what you’ve written sounds natural or not. But really clever dialogue, dialogue that speaks far more than the words and that deepens the characters, uses subtext. This post follows on from 4 tips for writing dialogue. Subtext in dialogue People don’t actually say everything they think. In dialogue, less is often more, and is usually more realistic. If you want the reader to know what a character is feeling, you can write the character’s thoughts as thoughts, if you’re in their POV—they don’t have to express them to the other character. Of course, if you’re not in the POV of the character whose thoughts you want to communicate, then you don’t have the option of writing out their inner thoughts; but in either situation, you…