My 8th grade English teacher said one thing that changed how I write dialogue

I was at a coffee shop in Nashville last Tuesday and ran into my old teacher Ms. Patterson. She said 'real people don't answer questions directly, they answer what they think you asked.' I've been thinking about that line every time I write a conversation between characters now. Has anyone else had a teacher drop a random bit of writing advice that stuck with them for years?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_brian14d ago

Man, my high school drama teacher once told me "if you can hear your character delivering the line, you probably wrote it wrong." That stuck with me because my first drafts always read like a bad soap opera (you know, people saying exactly how they feel). Now I write dialogue and immediately think "would a real person actually say this or are they just talking because I need to move the plot along?" Most of the time the answer is no, which is embarrassing but also kind of freeing.

charlies3714d ago

Heard that same kind of advice before and it's funny how it bleeds into everything... even just talking to people at the shop all day I notice how often folks say exactly what they think they're supposed to say instead of what they actually feel. It's like we all have this script running in our heads for every situation. Makes me wonder how much of real life is just bad dialogue we're too polite to call out.