Be your character’s therapist

An exercise in dialogue and characterisation

Photo by Nik Shuliahin 💛💙 on Unsplash

Hello everyone,

As writers, we need an instinctive understanding of our characters, whether we are writing flash fiction, a short story, a linked story collection, or a novel. We should be able to summon quickly how they would react when facing complications and important decisions (even if that means lots of inner wrangling). We should know what their overriding emotional state tends to be, what secrets they keep, what they want most of all in any given moment. Most of this will never appear directly in the story, but holding that character’s core in your head as you work generally results in better, more rounded characters.

Dialogue comes into play here because it is a really important way for characters to reveal themselves to the reader. Their word choice, their sentence structure, their references and images, the way they react to questions, the emotions they are displaying and, as importantly, the ones they are suppressing.

I uploaded a piece on Writing Talk yesterday, called This is Definitely Not About Dialogue. It contained a Youtube link to a scene from the movie Heat, where the two main characters meet in a diner. Their language, their reactions to each other, their references, their tone through the dialogue is very revealing. Trust me, watch it and you’ll get what I mean.