(Originally published May 23, 2022)

Hey, storyteller!

Have you ever heard a robot in a movie or a talking gadget with a voice that never changed? Maybe its voice didn’t rise or lower at the ends of sentences, so you had no idea whether it was asking a question or stating a fact. It never paused where we would put commas so all its words ran together like this sentence is right now. We do not want our characters to sound this way.

Over-the-top or melodramatic dialogue is just as bad as boring or stilted conversations, so how can we make sure our characters' discussions, arguments, and shared secrets sound natural?

Dialogue attributions do more than identify the speaker. If we we position them well, they can help us create a natural flow to characters’ conversations. Watch this week's writer coaching session to find out how to make the conversations in your story sound realistic and keep readers turning pages.

Watch the video to discover: