Dialogue-first vs plot-first writing? Dialogue wins every time.

I tried writing a short story last month with a tight plot outline. Three pages in, I got bored. Characters sounded like robots. Switched to writing just the dialogue first, no plan. Built the whole scene around what they said to each other. Came out 10x more natural. Plot can be fixed later. Dead characters kill everything faster. Anyone else find dialogue drives your best scenes?

3 comments

3 Comments

jessem591d ago

I mean, is it really that serious though? Sometimes I feel like people overthink this stuff. I wrote a scene once where two characters just argued about what to order for pizza and somehow that turned into the most honest moment in the whole story. Plot outline? Had zero. Character voice? One of them talked like a surfer dude who hated everything. It worked because the conversation felt real, not because I had some deep method.

lucasw841d ago

@quinn161's right, dead voices can't save anything even with pizza.

quinn1611d ago

Dead characters kill everything faster" - that's the part that sticks with me. But here's something nobody brings up: dialogue-first only works if your characters have actual voices worth hearing. I wrote a story where every character talked like they were reading a Wikipedia article. Fixed the plot, fixed the structure, they still sounded dead because I hadn't figured out who they were yet. Dialogue can't carry a scene if nobody's got anything interesting to say.