Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

Prose notes that when it comes to creating dialogue, new writers are often given debatable pieces of advice. She herself grew up with the maxim that the speech in texts should not sound like real dialogue, because real dialogue is mundane. However, her observations of life have led her to believe that real dialogue is seldom mundane, even when talking of everyday matters. When people talk in real life, they try to impress each other, to present facts in a particular way, or to express and hide their many feelings at the same time. Real dialogue between people is thus filled with fascinating declarations and elisions and should inspire any writer.

A good bit of advice that new writers should largely follow is to not use dialogue as exposition. Middling writing often features exposition masked as conversation, such as a character telling another: “As you know, I’m an insurance investigator. I’m twenty-six years old” (61). Unlike this example, dialogue can be an extremely useful narrative tool. It can inject life in a story and tell the reader unexpected bits of information about characters and their situations. Prose analyzes the work of 20th-century English writer Henry Green as an illustrative example of the great use of dialogue.