Judy Blume on How to Write Dialogue

A master at writing compelling dialogue, Judy Blume is a beloved author whose bestselling books for younger readers have maintained relevance and impact for generations. Her best-known works include Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Deenie, and Blubber. Judy has also written four novels for adult readers, each one a New York Times bestseller. Judy Blume has won more than 90 literary awards, including the Library of Congress Living Legends Award, the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E.B. White Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Dialogue is a spoken exchange between multiple characters in a play, film, TV show, or another type of creative writing. Writing dialogue reveals character development, speech patterns, and mannerisms, which can also propel the plot forward. Often, authors employ realistic dialogue that captures how specific people speak. Sometimes they use direct dialogue (showing what a character wants), and other times they are rich in subtext (illuminating depth beneath the surface of the exchange).

Writers use dialogue to express ideas, reveal conflict, and move the plot forward. According to author Judy Blume, effective dialogue is also essential to character development. “Dialogue helps you advance your story,” Judy says. “Here's a scene, and here's dialogue in the scene. It’s advancing not only your story but your characters because you learn a lot about your characters [through dialogue].”

Great dialogue can reveal character backstories and quickly help introduce them the first time they speak. Characters’ dialogue can also show their inner wants, giving readers a clearer sense of how the story will unfold. As Judy says, “Dialogue helps me know who the characters are.”

Dialogue formatting can show verbal exchanges between two characters effectively. Consider these guidelines on how to punctuate dialogue:

• Insert quotation marks. Writers should use double quotation marks to encase a character’s spoken words. Single quotation marks may appear within dialogue when someone is quoting another.
• Place a dialogue tag at the end of a sentence. Writers typically insert a comma at the end of a sentence as a dialogue tag to denote the speaker (such as: “Let’s eat,” Travis said.). The comma should appear comma before the closing set of quotation marks.
• Put closing punctuation after quotation marks. An exclamation point or question mark may also appear before the closing quotation marks.
• Start a new paragraph. When characters talk back and forth to one another, start a new section each time another character speaks a line of dialogue.

Categorically, long speeches are monologues, while a piece of dialogue implies an exchange of two or more voices back and forth

Consider the following writing tips from Judy Blume on how to craft strong dialogue:

1. 1. Dialogue breaks up your text. Writers can use dialogue to enliven long blocks of text. “I'll flip through a book, and if it's dense, dense, dense, dense, no paragraphs, no dialogue, I don't want to read it,” Judy says. “But dialogue lightens up your book on the page. You want white space on the page. Dialogue gives you that: playlets, I often put in little playlets in my book; it's like a little play within a scene.”
2. 2. To write better dialogue, read more of it. Authors write great dialogue by reading great dialogue. “Reading and reading and reading, you will find what's good dialogue, what you think is good dialogue, and what you think is wooden and not very good dialogue,” Judy says. “And you will learn from that just by reading it and reading it and going to the next book and finding it because it's there. It's in every novel. There's dialogue.”
3. 3. Keep your word choice simple. In a few of her earlier works, Judy did not use the word “said” when writing dialogue. “I decided that I would write this whole novel without ever using he word ‘said,’ that said was such a boring word,” she says. “‘He said.’ ‘She said.’ I had my thesaurus by my side, and my characters did everything but say. My characters exclaimed. They beguiled. And they did everything but say. Throw away your thesaurus when you’re writing.”
4. 4. Write realistic voices. Developing a character’s voice requires observing real-life exchanges and using smart word choices. “It’s a question of capturing the way people talk when they're talking to each other on the street, you know, in the workplace, wherever,” Judy says. “Your characters should each speak as themselves, meaning they are believable and recognizable.”

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