Using Dialog To Make Your Romance Novel Sparkle
Any story will benefit from dialogue and romance novels are no exception. Does your extroverted heroine and your shy hero really care for each other? Can they overcome obstacles and find true love? Using dialogue will reveal the character and conflict of your romantic heroines and heroes.
Your readers need to hear what a character says because it adds details to a character. Dialogue offers an opportunity to introduce more than just the writer’s opinion of a character. What if your heroine is in love with a rich politician. You want to cast her as someone of lesser status — from the wrong side of the tracks. It is such a convenient tactic to bring in a friend from her past who dialogues with her because such a dialogue can illustrate what other people think of her. Was her mother a single mom? A drug addict? How did her past problems get resolved in her life? Dialogue can make this clear to the reader — adding to their understanding of the character.
Furthering Plot is another important role for dialogue. let’s say your heroine is in love with a Nascar driver, a very dangerous profession, and your heroine considers it an obstacle to happiness in marriage. Frankly, this opinion would be best explored in external dialogue. It gets the conflict out there, creates a complication and raises questions — which is the stuff that keeps readers turning the page. What if the Nascar driver has watched a buddy die in a terrible race car crash and he has misgivings about his current profession? He could dialogue with another character, say his father, creating another complication that furthers the plot.
Have you ever heard someone say of fictional characters — they took on a life of their own? Or that a character just went in a particular direction? Your characters often write themselves. But they must come to life. They must live, breathe and speak. Dialogue will reveal a manner of speaking, a level of education and everything that is of critical importance to a character.