Identify your characters' goals and mannerisms to make your dialogue move.
Dialogue serves a variety of purposes in a story, from providing exposition and fleshing out characters to escalating conflicts and advancing subplots. However, if you handle them improperly, long stretches of dialogue can be confusing or dull, making it difficult to tell who is speaking and causing the reader to feel as though the story has ground to a halt. To make long stretches of dialogue work, you need to get a solid grasp on your characters' motivations, goals and mannerisms and to intersperse the dialogue with action.
Instructions
1. Determine your characters' goals in the dialogue scene. If they are arguing or hiding information from each other, why are they at odds and how important is it to each character that he come out on top? If they are working toward a shared goal, what is that goal, how does each character feel about that goal and what does she think is the best way to approach it? Determining your characters' goals will help you to keep an already lengthy dialogue scene from being derailed by tangents and side conversations.
2. Plan roughly how you want the dialogue scene to end. Although you may prefer spontaneous writing to outlining, it's still better to have a vague idea of whether you want the scene to end with the characters solving the mystery or discovering they have to track down a new witness. Knowing your own goal as a writer is as important to staying on track as knowing your characters' goals.
3. Determine your characters' speech mannerisms. If both of your characters talk in exactly the same way, the scene will quickly become boring because it will seem more like one person talking to herself. Do the characters use particular slang? Do they have broad or limited vocabularies? Are they polite or do they pepper their sentences with profanities? Are they direct or coy in their speech? Giving each character a distinctive speech pattern will make the scene more lively and realistic.
4. Intersperse the dialogue with action. "Action" doesn't have to be car chases and fight scenes, but the characters have to move around or react non-verbally at times to prevent the dialogue from becoming dull. Describe your characters' facial expressions changing, or mention the way one leans closer to see something more clearly. Have a character react with pointed silence, tears or laughter rather than words. This will help ground your reader in the characters' thoughts and allow them to visualize the scene more easily.
5. Introduce new arguments and complications to move the dialogue scene along more quickly. In his "Scene and Structure," Jack M. Bickham notes that if dialogue scenes involve characters using the same arguments again and again, it reads like a pair of toddlers shouting, "Did not!" "Did so!" for pages. Instead, have both characters try new arguments and techniques. Rather than have your antagonist snarl a hundred variations of "I won't tell you anything!", have him give false clues, plead for freedom or give hints he thinks the protagonist will be too obtuse to discern.
6. Break up the scene into multiple parts if you feel the dialogue is becoming too long. If possible, switch to another character's point of view so the reader can see a different part of the story, then return to the dialogue scene. Alternatively, you can have the characters in the dialogue scene take a break from the conversation to do something else, whether because they choose to take the break or because some outside force or conflict interrupts them.
