Dialogue

One thing I always struggle with is dialogue. I hate using "he said" and "she said" over and over again, so I sprinkle a few other communicative verbs in, like nodded, shrugged, smiled and laughed. Sometimes I'll even use "he told me."

Somewhere, Stephen King is reading dialogue similar to mine and cringing. In "On Writing" he insists that writers should stick with "said," but I respectfully disagree, especially during longer sections of dialogue.

Which leads me to another issue that I struggle with, and that's how much is too much dialogue? Sure, people talk for hours when they're in love or working through a problem or catching up with friends or relatives they haven't seen in years, but it's not often that you see pages and pages of dialogue in novels. Conversations in prose are fairly short. In fact, some books leave me wishing that the characters would interact with each other more.

I suppose it comes down to a matter of the pacing of your story, how your characters carry out their tasks and expose the story through talk versus action. As with people in real life, some characters speak more than others. And as I write, or maybe as I go back and reread what I've written, it should be obvious to me whether more or less dialogue is needed. I hope.