Dialogues are a great way for authors to show the personality and distinctive traits of a character. Dialogues also play an important role in making characters believable and memorable. The dialogues you write and the conversations you create give voice to the characters and your audience will judge your characters by these. As long as you understand your characters, you will not have any issues with creating believable conversations, but sometimes authors struggle with it. It is mostly aspiring authors who have an issue with writing dialogues, but if they follow the rules they can create some amazing characters.

Here are the golden rules of writing meaningful dialogues that give life to your characters and your story.

Before you start writing dialogues, you need to perfect your punctuation. You need to mark the conversation with open and closed inverted commas so that they can be distinguished from the narration surrounding it. Always make sure that you add a period “.” or a “,” at the end of the dialogue before closing it.

If you are adding an action between the dialogue of a character, make sure you open and close the dialogue properly. For example: “She thought he was coming home,” she said, passing the bread on, “but he called ahead to let her know he would be late.”

If you are writing a conversation between two characters, make sure to start a new paragraph for each dialogue so that it is easier for readers to distinguish which dialogue belongs to which character.

Make sure that you don’t add filler words in the dialogues to avoid making them too long. Most authors try to make dialogues true to life, but dialogues aren’t like our real conversations. We often repeat ourselves and sometimes we share the same thing again and again, but it will become repetitive in a story. Your dialogues need to be original, concise and comprehensive so that the reader understands what is trying to be conveyed.

Share the progress of the story within your dialogues. Create tension in your story by writing engaging conversations. Make sure that the dialogues reveal the personality of the character, showcase the current situation in the story, and foreshadow the upcoming events that will be vital for the progress of the story.

The tone you set for your story is very important and your dialogues will be incomplete without it. Make sure that you reveal the surroundings of the character, where they are and what they are doing.

Authors should aspire to make their characters as real as possible and dialogues are the best way to do that. Just like you wouldn’t really reveal how you are feeling at the moment, your character should only be open with their emotions with certain characters.

Always make sure you remember the context of the dialogue and the story. There is a reason for the conversation your characters are having, so make sure you keep it in your mind. Make sure you don’t deviate from that and scale back if you have to.