The Voice Behind the Words: Warming Up for the Dialogue Craft Clinic

Our upcoming Dialogue Craft Clinic on November 11 is fully booked (hooray!), but I want everyone, whether you’re coming or not, to start tuning your writer’s ear. So, let’s talk about something essential to great dialogue: voice and tone.

Voice is who your character is; tone is how that voice feels in a particular moment. Voice is unique, constant, recognisable. Tone is their mood. As in, ‘I don’t like your tone, young lady!’ Goodness, I heard that quite a bit from the nuns at my convent school.

How many times have you heard a tone of voice that forces your reaction? Ha! Heaps! Tone shifts with emotion, circumstance, and tension. When you work both Voice and Tone together, you don’t need to tag every line with ‘she said’ or ‘he replied.’ We hear your characters. We feel your characters. We know your characters!

To start practising, take one of your own scenes and strip away the dialogue tags. Can you still tell who’s speaking? Does your dialogue sound like your character, or like you, the writer, trying to push them along? This is where real voice work begins.

Tune the Tone

Take a short exchange between your people, say, two of your characters. No more than six lines. Now, do three things:

Write it once as anger.
Keep the same words, but let emotion seep through rhythm, punctuation, and word choice. Does one character cut the other off? Do sentences shorten, harden?

Write it again as love.
Same words but let warmth, softness, or humour change how it sounds. Notice how rhythm, pace, and phrasing shift.

‘You’re late again!’
‘Yeah, I know!’
‘You said you wouldn’t be.’
‘I tried, alright?’
‘Tried isn’t enough!’
‘I’m doing my best!’

‘You’re late again.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘You said you wouldn’t be.’
‘I tried. You know I did.’
‘Tried isn’t enough.’
‘I’m doing my best.’

Can you hear the difference? That’s tone at work. It changes everything without a a big swap out of words.

Give it a go!

Make a note of these dates in your diaries so that next year you really focus on your writing. Each of the following Zooms is designed to deepen your storytelling craft:

• Feb 17, The Art of Scene: how to craft vivid, emotionally charged scenes that move a story forward.
• March 17, Memory into Memoir: shaping real experience into compelling narrative.
• April 14, The Major Dramatic Question: identifying and sustaining the central tension that keeps readers turning pages.
• May 12, Character and Conflict: understanding what your characters want, and what stands in their way.

Details and booking links will be announced soon. Keep an eye on these Newsletters!

A Note of Thanks:

Thank you so much for your beautiful and personal messages of congratulations on my Fellowship at the State Library of New South Wales for my new book, POISED, a memoir about my mother, June Dally-Watkins, (and me, note small writing because she is the star). I really, really appreciated hearing from you. Your encouragement means more than you know.

In very paltry news:

I’ve got no stories to post this week because nobody’s sent one in. Pop your big person pants on, stop lurking in the shadows, and send us something to read!

We’re looking for excerpts to publish. Short reflections, creative insights, or works in progress. The Art of Writing community thrives on real voices, so be brave and share your words with us.

If you’d like to read more of my work, you can buy the e-book of The Promise here and Or Death in the Mountains here. Each tells a story close to my heart. One of love, the other of loss and the search for truth.

And finish with a bang:

Over the next two weeks, we’ll be announcing the where, what, why, and when of our Art of Writing 2026 Creative Writing Retreats. New locations, inspiring teachers, and the themes that will shape next year’s workshops. Stay tuned. It’s going to be an incredible year of creativity, learning, and connection.

Warmly

Lisa Clifford

The Art of Writing