Being a Better Writer: Making (and Keeping) Dialogue Unique · 10:46pm Jul 12th, 2021
Hello again, readers! Welcome back to another Monday installment of Being a Better Writer! I hope you all had an enjoyably decent or better weekend. I did. Saturday saw me spending several hours at work on the paperback edition for Shaodow of an Empire, which, as I reported in Saturday’s post, is now in the cover stage! Excitement!
That and I went to a Scottish festival and watched some caber-tossing, which is always fun to see.
Then this morning I heard of “BookTok” for the first time, which is apparently this (for now) grassroots part of TikTok where people review books, often (at least from the article I read) titles that aren’t immediately new or known (which was how one publisher found out about it: they saw massive sales for a book they were no longer promoting and discovered #BookTok had promoted it). Of course, it’s probably about to stop being grassroots, since according to the article I read now that the major publishers are aware they’re looking into how to “use” BookTok to their advantage, but it’s still neat. In the meantime, here’s hoping one of those BookTok reviewers decides to give a copy of Axtara – Banking and Finance a shot!
Anyway, let’s get down to business, shall we? Today, I want to talk about dialogue. That’s right, the stuff characters say and speak.
Specifically, I want to talk about—as the title of today’s post indicates—keeping it unique. Something that, if I’m honest, a lot of writers struggle with. Even published ones.
But … it’s not just the fault of the writers. Comically enough, this weekend I saw a post on a subreddit asking people what they wanted from their books, and the number-one result at the time I looked was “Good dialogue.”
Hmm … Some of you might be thinking close to what I did when I saw that post, which was “So I guess a lot of books fail at this?” And yes, that was certainly part of my thought process. But there was a second part to it as well, something that I’ve only learning in writing and releasing books on my own. But for it to make sense, we’re going to need a little background first.
