Holinger, William. Teaching Dialogue. Creative Writing in America.

I pretty much agree with everything Holinger says in this brief chapter, so I'm just going to highlight the main points I think he makes. Everything here is a direct quotation:

...I realized that reading good dialogue was one of the great pleasures I got out of stories and novels. When I turn the page of a work of fiction and come upon a page of dialogue, I'm excited. I especially look forward to reading that page ... (Direct dialogue is) condensed narrative. Direct because it's 'real': There's no narrator between the action and the reader. Because written dialogue on the page represents an exact report ofwhat happened, we take dialogue as fact, so dialogue carries an authority that straight narrative lacks, no matter how convincing the narrator might be ... dialogue in fiction is a form of written language that is meant to represent spoken language (175).

One way to help students conceptualize what dialogue is and to learn how to write it is to send them out to listen to and record real conversation ... Their analysis of a wr itten version of soken conversation will be illuminating ...

A writer I know said that she often just puts paper in the tyewriter and writes down what she hears various voices in her head say ...

Read through your manuscript a number of times, reading the dialogue of only one character at a time. Revise for consistency and distinctiveness of each character's voice. In the process, give each character an idiosyncratic phrase or two in order to achieve more readily identifiable characters, and more characterization too (Remember Jay Gatsby, old sport?) (178-179).