To write good dialogue you must step inside of your characters and have an understanding of their motivations and background.
Their country, region, city, education and class all affect their speech pattern and their predisposition will affect speech rhythms. Everyone speaks slightly differently, that’s why impressionists are able to impersonate someone else’s speech after studying them.
I chose a protagonist with a very similar upbringing as my own so that her dialect would mimic my own (although she has a different predisposition so her rhythms would differ from my own). The neighbours may be more difficult because they are to some degree stereotypical of the kind of estate where I’ve spent a lot of time, but they need to be funny rather than offensive which is sometimes a fine line. I need to spend some days listening to people from South London talk again with a concentration specific to dialogue, to get the “Ability to move in and out of all of [my] characters at will”.
The lack of direct communication in speech is fascinating and when Potter discusses ‘interrupted monologues’ it reminds me of certain friends I have and how we speak to each other if we haven’t seen each other in ages or we’re over excited about something. I think I could get very lost in speech patterns and motivations so I will have to make sure I free write first and then go back to analyse my dialogue properly.
