Hello and welcome to the Storygrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer.

I'm your host Tim Graal and I'm a writer in the Storygrid universe. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He's

the creator of Story Grid, the author of the book Story Grid and an editor with over 30 years' experience.

In this episode, we take a look at a question about writing great dialogue.

How do you write great dialogue and how do you do it if you're an introvert? And I think

most of us writers are introverts. So it's a great question. It's one that I think we all deal with

and Sean has some really good feedback on it. So let's just go ahead and jump in and get

started. So Sean, this week we got a question in from Adrian. He says, I'm struggling with dialogue.

Any tips for an introvert writing extroverted characters? Well, I think it's a good thing to

just sort of formalize what you mean by

dialogue. Dialogue is not just words that you use to fill out the blank page. Dialogue is action.

It's motion. It's verbal action. When you're writing dialogue, if you find yourself just sort of riffing and like,

good morning, Jim, oh, hi, Bill, how are you? Good. How are you doing? Not bad. How's the wife? She's good.

That's all baloney. You don't want that. Is that like the speaking version of shoe leather?

Yes.

Okay.

Now, you can certainly write that in a draft and then just cut it later.

But my point is that remember that a story is hyper real.

So what you want to do is edit out all the stuff that nobody cares about because they can already put that in,

right? So if somebody is conversing with another person in your story and they're doing shoe

leather verbal action, you're just going to alienate the audience because it's boring. So, oh, geez,

then what do I put in for the dialogue might be the next question. Well, you've got to consider what the purpose of each sentence that somebody is uttering is.

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