Dialogue is a powerful tool. It gives your readers a chance to hear the characters speaking, efficiently revealing aspects of their personality and inter-personal relationships that are difficult to show in narrative.
Something you quickly learn if you read and write fiction, though: realistic dialogue isn’t easy to write, and even great writers sometimes get it wrong. If you’re looking for ways to enhance your dialogue, here are some tips that can help.
I’ve been reading novels in Spanish for about a year—successfully, at least. One of my main motivations to become fluent was so I could read Marquez in Spanish, and as a chronically impatient human, I made an aborted attempt at Cien años de solidad a few years ago, well before I had the skills to navigate it. I had to stop multiple times every sentence to look up words I didn’t know, making it impossible to just sink into the story; I set it aside after about a page.
In the simplest terms, point of view can be defined as the perspective through which a story is being told. A story’s POV identifies three things:
Who is telling the story
The relationship between the narrator and main character
The distance between the characters and readers
Those things are all critical to how a story comes across to the reader, and shifting the POV—even if it’s just from one 3rd-person close narrator to a different one—can have a huge impact on how the reader interprets the story (and how much they enjoy reading it).