I’ve only ever taken one fiction writing workshop in my life. Everything I’ve learned about writing has been through reading and experimenting. And though my reading has turned a bit non-traditional (from books to games and online fiction), I still consume at least 10 articles every week. This is in large part why I decided to start the ND Roundup posts on Wednesdays.

Yesterday I mentioned that many writers find difficulty in writing dialogue. If you aspire to be a narrative designer, it’s a hurdle you need to not only overcome, but conquer. Here are a few good tips to bolster your toolset and help you practice better dialogue. There’s only one link this week, but I think you’ll get your time’s worth out of it.

Top 10 Tips For Writing Dialogue

This essentially sums up my thoughts and any tips I would give. But I did want to add a bit of a spin on them for narrative design in games:

1. Listen to how people talk to each other. Notice the nuances of conversation. Dissect how people talk in public, in private, to themselves, in varying degrees of relationship.

2. Take out the um’s and uh’s unless you feel it will make a character more endearing and identifiable, or if using them for a very specific purpose. Even still, don’t overuse them!

3. Keep it short and succinct. Even with the wonders of voice acting, your dialogue needs to stay as short as possible. Practice getting your point across with fewer words.

4. Your characters are not living books. Don’t you dare saddle them with heaps of information to lavish upon the player! Even tutorial characters need to integrate the information into the situation. Bloodlines does a good job of this.

5. Break up dialogue with action. Body language makes up most of our communication, and it should be no different in a game. Script in animations and waypoints where you can, and emotes if your engine doesn’t allow for it.

6. Don’t rely on punctuation to relay emotion. Exclamation points and question marks should certainly be used when applicable, but laying on !!! and ?!?! as a means of expressing emotion is a cop-out.

7. Stop insulting Southerners. Seriously. Learn how to use y’all properly. But really, if you’re putting dialect into your dialogue add only enough to make it read in a certain voice within the player’s mind. This is of course assuming you don’t have voice over at your disposal.

8. Mature doesn’t mean peppering every other sentence with profanity. Notice in games with an M rating, just how few obscenities there really are? It’s distracting; it makes the player focus on how many times that four letter is being used rather than focusing on the game. And no, players creating their own drinking game based off of your profanity does not count.

9. Play games in every genre. Take notes on good and bad dialogue. Turn subtitles on if there’s voice acting so you can use Print Screen to capture the best examples of good or bad dialogue. To get you started, there’s a freeware game called A Blurred Line that employs excellent storytelling techniques and has the most identifiable characters I’ve ever seen in a game, commercial or otherwise.

10. Punctuate dialogue correctly. Not much more needs to be said here. Know the rules; few people do these days.