Novel Building Blocks: Dialogue

Community workshop replay

This session was all about making dialogue do more work — revealing character, carrying subtext, and staying out of its own way.

We started by talking about voice distinction, which isn’t about giving characters catchphrases or writing in dialect. It’s about understanding how each character thinks, because speech is thought made audible. A character who feels unsafe talks differently to one who holds power. A character processing the world through grievance sounds nothing like one processing it through curiosity.

Then we moved into subtext — what a scene is really about underneath the conversation happening on the surface. Not mystery or withholding, but the gap between what characters can’t or won’t say and what the reader feels anyway. In novel-length work you have space to build this over time, but it still needs to be earned moment to moment.

The final section tackled dialogue tags and rhythm. We looked at when to use action beats instead of tags, how to make dialogue scenes feel physically grounded, and why the rhythm of a scene needs to match its emotional register. Too many beats and it becomes exhausting. Too few and the dialogue floats free of the world.

Three writing exercises throughout: a mundane conversation hiding a want, a scene where two characters pretend everything’s fine, and an exchange built entirely using action beats with no tags at all.