Living Dialog: Bring Your Characters' Words to Life, Part One: The Basics

Truly living dialog is brilliantly crafted, perfectly vivid, exactly appropriate, layered and nuanced. . .and it just sounds right. In this two-part, 57-minute tutorial we'll start with the basics, including the subtleties of punctuation, the varied of verbs of speaking, the options for attribution, and all-important non-verbal communication that brings a character to life.

Editor and author Philip Athans has worked with best selling veteran authors, young writers just starting to explore their talents, and everyone in between and one sticking point that comes up over and over is dialog. But take heart, this is a skill that can be learned!

In this 57-minute tutorial video we'll get past the standard advice like "read it aloud" and narrow down to the nuts and bolts covering:

• Dialog attribution (who said it?)
• Verbs of speaking (how was it said?)
• Beats and pacing (where is the natural pause point?)
• Where do the commas, periods, exclamation marks, and question marks go?
• The crucial difference between the em-dash and ellipsis

You have to know the rules before you can start to bend or even break them for your own purposes.