Why Revising Your Dialogue First Is Leaving Your Characters Flatter...

I want to talk about a revision loop that traps writers for longer than almost any other.

The writer has a character that feels flat, sometimes this can be experienced as a character that feels hollow. The writer feels like this character is not landing the way the way they were hoping, they don’t feel distinct, they blend into the scene rather than driving it.

In an attempt to fix that, the writer leans into their intuition and finds the character’s dialogue lines and start rewriting them. They make the lines sharper or more specific or more revealing of who this person is inside.

And when the writer is done, the character still feels flat.

So they revise again. And again. The dialogue gets better with each pass, absolutely, but the character stays exactly as flat as they were before the first revision, and by now the writer is ready to pull hair out.

This loop can go on and on, and the reason it never resolves is that the writer is working on the surface of the problem while the problem itself sits one layer deeper.