Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for Writing Authentic Dialogue, via Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources
Blurb
Do you lack confidence when writing dialogue for your fictional characters? Do you want to learn how to make each person have a distinctive voice?
Real conversations wander. Fictional dialogue can’t afford to.
A Wordsmith’s Guide to Writing Authentic Dialogue is a practical, encouraging craft book for fiction writers who want dialogue that does more than fill the page. You’ll learn how to make every exchange purposeful, character-specific, and charged with subtext—without gimmicks, melodrama, or the dreaded “As you know…” exposition.
You will learn how to:
- build distinct voices through rhythm, worldview, and verbal habits (not quirky spelling);
- show status and power through questions, interruptions, silence, and topic control;
- handle tags, beats, and action cleanly so dialogue moves instead of clogs;
- write conflict that escalates and changes shape (without repeating itself);
- short, generic examples you can learn from immediately;
- focused exercises you can complete in 10–20 minutes;
- diagnose-and-rewrite case studies (where relevant);
If your characters explain too much, sound the same, circle the point, or talk in a void—this guide will give you clear tools to diagnose the problem and rewrite with confidence.
My Review (5 stars out of 5)
Elizabeth M Hurst has written much about the craft of writing, as well as study guides, critical essays and novels, so it’s fair to say she knows what she’s talking about. This book is about dialogue – what it should do, what it shouldn’t do, and how to use it effectively so it won’t sound clunky, boring, flat or repetitive. The author tackles her subject in an intelligent and knowledgeable way, covering topics such as dialogue tags, subtext, tension, action beats, info dumps and a whole lot more. All the stuff, in fact, that most writers of any worth should already know about. In my case I think I’m pretty good at creating realistic dialogue, but I still found a host of useful tips in this book that I’d either forgotten or didn’t know about in the first place, such as making sure a character who says clever things is actually clever, or how to use humour as a deflection tool. Easy to read and set out in a logical, accessible way, this is a book for experienced authors as well as newbies and it’s one I’ll come back to time and again.
A practical guide to writing believable dialogue.
Author Bio
Elizabeth was born and bred in the picturesque harbour town of Whitehaven in the northwest of England, where the long, wet winters moulded her into a voracious reader of fiction to escape the dismal weather.
In 2016, Elizabeth set up her freelance editing and proofreading business, EMH Editorial Services. In 2018, she quit the corporate world and concentrated her energy full-time towards her love of the written word.
Elizabeth has published timeslip novellas (the Lost Souls series) and a stand-alone novel, A Light Shines in Darkness, based on Blessed Angelina of Marsciano. She is also the author of The Wordsmith’s Guides, a series of nonfiction books on the craft of writing.
Elizabeth now lives with her husband in the warm and sunny south of France, where the wine is cheaper than the water, and the cats spend their days hunting lizards and dreaming of the birds that roost on the roof.
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