In this issue:

"Let's talk dialogue," Lisa said.

I love writing dialogue. As is the case with many writers (I think we're all a little bit schizophrenic), characters tend to be born in my head fully-formed, and I just listen to them chatter to write their dialogue.

Okay, yeah - there's more to it than that. What goes into writing great dialogue?

First off, I'm going to offer up my personal definition of "great dialogue". I am not a fan of certain much-adored screenwriters who cram their dialogue full of cleverness and pop culture references; when I hear that, I just think, "Nobody really talks that way." Sure, that style can work - I think it did in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But let me suggest that it worked there because the entire show created a unified fantasy world that was just a few degrees off from being completely realistic. When other writers put that kind of writing into something like an action movie, I'm just pulled out of it immediately.

For me, characters are the single most important part of any story - plot, for example, should exist to test the characters, to put them under stresses and see how they react - and dialogue is a large part of what reveals a character. So how do you keep the dialogue true to your character without falling into traps like the dreaded "exposition dump"?

I know writers who test their dialogue by reading it out loud. That seems pretty practical, although I don't do that.

One of the reasons I love my day job as a bookseller is that I spend a lot of time listening to all kinds of people chattering away. I listen to them; I try to mentally record as much as I can. I believe it's a mistake to think that you can acquire a knack for good dialogue by watching how other writers do it, because other writers may just be copying other writers. You need to actually listen to REAL LIVE PEOPLE.

Here are five more things I see done in dialogue that drive me nuts, and that I try to avoid  doing when I write dialogue:

1. No use of contractions - I don't care what your fourth-grade English teacher told you; people say things like "don't," not "do not."
2. Keep the technobabble to a minimum - if your character is a scientist or mechanic or lawyer or whatever, obviously you'll need some technobabble just to make the character sound authentic...but don't start writing dialogue just to show off how much YOU know.
3. Be aware of anachronisms - If your story is set in 1821, is a character really going to say something like, "I'm so stoked"?
4. Don't overuse names - this is one of my personal bad habits. When we talk to each other in real life, we don't constantly say things like, "Did you hear what the temperature was today, Jack?"
5. Be cautious about punctuating your dialogue properly (and this is another one I'm guilty of, because I write so often for British companies and British rules can flip things around) - study your Strunk and White to make sure you know just where to put those quotation marks (both double and single), periods, and commas.

Lastly, like any other part of writing (or, for that matter, anything else), your dialogue-writing skills will improve with practice, so don't fret if you're just starting out and feel insecure. "You've got this," I say.