Practicing Dialogue

Here is a personal tip from my own efforts at writing fiction, but I found an interesting and fun way to practice writing realistic dialogue. This partially came about because of a job I started, but I was tasked with transcribing an interview. How is this realistic dialogue, you ask? Well, there were parts of the interview that diverged into natural conversation between the two people speaking. It was really interesting to see how each talked. When you type out what each person says verbatim, you really start to see the patterns in their speech and how they each express their personality through their wording. I encourage anyone to do this for practice if they can find an interview online of good length. You just might develop a few good voices for characters that you have brewing in your imagination.