How to develop convincing dialogue in your travel writing

Travel is all about dialogue and interaction between characters.

Too often though, beginning travel writers focus exclusively on one character (the narrator), with little effort made at capturing others’ voices.

For example, a beginning writer will describe a place, say a pueblo in Mexico, then add a brief dialogue:

“Hola,” said the man. “How are you?”
“Muy bien,” I said.

And that’s it. The writer will go back to describing his or her adventures.

The #1 easiest way to improve your travel writing is to pay attention to the way your characters sound and try to capture their individual voices. In other words, make the effort to write strong dialogue.

Dialogue Serves Multiple Functions

In the example of shallow dialogue above, the conversation served only a single function, which was to advance the story through an exchange, an interaction. Good dialogue, besides advancing the story, always performs secondary functions.

Here are a few possibilities.

Tell Backstory

“What happened?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Not a goddamn thing. Story of my life. Meet a guy at a bar and carry him home so he can pass out on my bed.”

–Jay McInerny, Bright Lights, Big City>

In this case the dialogue not only reveals the immediate backstory of what happened the night before-the narrator got drunk and passed out-but gives a glimpse of the extended backstory – “Story of my life” – of one of the characters.

Portray Action

Example 1. A doctor is examining the narrator’s wounds:

“Fragments of enemy trench-mortar shell. Now I’ll probe for some of this…Does that sting? Good, that’s nothing to how it will feel later. The pain hasn’t started yet. Bring him a glass of brandy…”

–Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

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David Miller has published nonfiction, fiction, and poetry in a variety of newspapers, alternative weeklies, and literary magazines including Mountain Gazette, Boulder Weekly, 34th Parallel, and Poetica. He is also Editor of Matador Travel.

Did you miss David Miller’s last travel writing article? Check out “2 Powerful Techniques To Illuminate Your Travel Writing”.