How to Write a Novel. Part 5: Dialogue, Style, and Tone
Summary
- Craft functional dialogue that advances plot, reveals character, and generates conflict through authentic expression.
- Develop a prose style that consciously matches your story’s theme and emotional thrust through deliberate linguistic choices and rhythm.
- Control reader experience by intentionally choosing narrative distance, perspective, and managing tone.
Functional Dialogue: Character, Conflict, Information
Dialogue in a novel serves multiple crucial functions beyond mere conversation. Functional dialogue should always advance the plot, reveal character, or provide essential information, often doing all three simultaneously.
A character’s vocabulary, rhythm, and common expressions should reveal their personality, background, and current emotional state. Dialogue also acts as a primary engine for conflict, allowing characters’ differing desires, beliefs, or misunderstandings to clash directly.
Use it to show shifting power dynamics, to convey backstory or world details through natural conversation, or to propel the story forward through direct exchange between characters.
Every line spoken should earn its place on the page.
Prose Style: Matching Language to Story and Theme
Your prose style is the unique fingerprint of your narrative voice, but it should also be a conscious choice that matches your story and theme. This involves deciding on sentence length, complexity, vocabulary, and overall rhythm.
A fast-paced thriller might benefit from short, punchy sentences, while a contemplative literary novel could use more expansive, descriptive prose. If your theme explores loss, your language might lean towards melancholic imagery. A story about defiance might use sharp, direct language.
The goal is to make your language an extension of the narrative itself, reinforcing its core meaning and emotional thrust.
Narrative Distance and Perspective: Who’s Telling This, and How
Understanding narrative distance and perspective is fundamental to how your story is received. Perspective refers to who is telling the story: first-person (I), third-person limited (he/she/they from one character’s view), or third-person omniscient (all-knowing).
Narrative distance concerns how close the reader feels to the character’s thoughts and feelings. A close third-person perspective might dive deep into a character’s immediate sensations and internal monologue, creating intimacy. A more distant omniscient perspective might offer a broader, more detached view.
Your choice impacts how much the reader knows, what they feel, and how objective or subjective their understanding of the events becomes. Consider what information needs to be prioritized: a single character’s deep emotional journey often benefits from close third or first person, while a complex world with many interwoven fates might suit omniscient.
Shifting distance can control reader connection; for example, pulling back from a character’s thoughts during an intense action scene can heighten suspense, while diving deep during an emotional turning point can deepen empathy.
Tone Management: Humor, Tension, Irony, and Sincerity
Tone is the author’s attitude toward the subject matter and the audience, and it’s a critical tool for guiding the reader’s emotional response. Managing tone effectively means making deliberate choices in your language and presentation.
You might employ humor through juxtaposition, unexpected word choices, or a character’s dry wit to lighten heavy moments or highlight absurdities. Tension can be built through foreboding language, ominous descriptions, or the deliberate withholding of information.
Irony offers layers of meaning, suggesting a contrast between appearance and reality, or what is said versus what is meant. Sincerity is achieved by allowing genuine emotion to surface through unadorned, direct prose and honest internal thought, particularly in moments of vulnerability or profound feeling.
Mastering tone ensures your reader experiences the story precisely as you intend, whether it’s suspenseful, tragic, or uplifting.