Believable dialogue is one of the most important skills a fiction writer can learn. The speed and rhythm of a character’s speech tells a lot about their personality, the environment they grew up in and their education. It is essential to give your characters a believable voice to give them life.

Like a musician who develops his ear to understand when something is not in key, the writer develops a sense of when the dialogue of their characters becomes unnatural, stiff or forced.

One very effective way to learn to write well-paced, well-judged dialogue is to try writing a comic. The aim of the exercise below is to learn to keep your characters interesting and the story moving forward. And you don’t have to be a visual artist – draw stick figures, if you like.

Take an 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper and make 9 equal, vertically standing boxes – panels, as they are called in comics. You don’t have to rule them out, eyeing them is fine.

Using the nine panels, compose a friendly conversation and see if in nine panels you can move the conversation and story forward to its end. Then try these sample ideas:

• your character is getting repeatedly timed-out trying to get concert tickets;
• two people breaking up;
• a wife tell her husband she’s pregnant;
• an unexpected encounter.

It’s up to you to decide whether the dynamics of the conversation are joyful, tense, conflictual, or even blazé. Any story you have in mind can work.

Allow time and space to enter your conversation. Between each panel you will have left a small border – in comics, called the gutter. Perhaps the conversation takes place in an apartment or a café. Perhaps the conversation continues from morning until late afternoon. The gutter symbolizes a passage of time. Maybe 30 seconds, maybe 30 minutes. Explore ways of moving your dialogue, story and events forward in time from one panel to the next

Repeat the exercise for as many scenarios as you wish to imagine – or have already imagined.

Of course, some writers will be tempted to dismiss the exercise.

Just because you write or aspire to write books, doesn’t mean that your education begins and ends in the literary world. It’s easier to write convincingly about what we know, and about experiences to which we have access. Eavesdrop on conversations while drinking coffee in a café. Overhear conversations. Pay attention to how people talk. Listen to the way they breathe. When I think of dialogue I think of words and movements together. Watch their body language, the way they move their hands (or don’t move them). Watch and listen to how people interact and converse with one another. I watch foreign films: reading the subtitles will teach you a lot about dialogue.

Keep a notebook, jot down anything you hear that interests you. Listen to people from as many different places as your travels will allow. Eventually, you will have a library of people and personalities filed away and when you go to write a character, its voice will emerge naturally from the voices you can call up.