How Emily Henry uses dialogue to reveal character in Great Big Beautiful Life

Writing good dialogue is a core skill for romance authors because conversation—from flirtatious banter to weighty backstory revelations—is where so many of the central story beats are delivered. But dialogue, a showing component, needs support. Without telling components like interiority, you have a screenplay, not a novel.

I’ll show you how Emily Henry uses dialogue in chapter four, but first let’s get a snapshot of all of the components.

Dialogue is only 38 percent of this scene—even though it’s built around two conversations that create tension, establish character arcs, and move the plot forward.

I broke down the opening chapter of the novel in my post on the opening, but here’s our plot so far: Journalist Alice has tracked down reclusive heiress Margaret Ives in the hopes of writing her life story, but she discovers that prize-winning biographer Hayden is also in the running for the job. Chapters two and three establish the broad contours of Margaret’s story—which is, indeed, quite juicy, with overtones of many celebrity stories: a big helping of the Hearst family (of Citizen Kane and Patty Hearst fame), with dashes of Elvis Presley and Princess Diana. Henry also uses these chapters to force encounters between Alice and Hayden in the small vacation destination of Little Crescent Island, establishing the grumpy-sunshine dynamic between the two that adds extra tension to the enemies-to-lovers trope she’s already set up in chapter one.

Chapter four opens with Alice ringing Margaret’s doorbell once again, there for dinner as well as, she hopes, news about Margaret’s decision:

These opening sentences are a good example of how components work together and can often do double duty. The passage is mostly dialogue and action, but the overall goal is to establish character. Alice is the kind of Southerner trained to show up at someone’s house bearing gifts. She’s trying to decode who Jodi is in relation to Margaret (friend? employee?), and we get a number of hints here about Jodi. She doesn’t spend much time thinking about clothes (and her chosen uniform is at odds with the Lilly Pulitzer vibe of many Southern beach towns), she has a square face (again, not conventionally beautiful or particularly feminine, and thus a contrast to Margaret), and she’s accustomed to thinking first about how Margaret will react rather than how she herself reacts. This last revelation also tells us quite a bit about Margaret, as does the detail that cut flowers make her sad.

A few sentences later, a dialogue line from Jodi establishes a note of tension: “Come on in. . . . They’re already out back.” It seems like an innocuous line, but alert readers know that Alice is expecting a tête-à-tête with Margaret and will suspect that Hayden is the other person present. A chunk of interiority from Alice increases the tension because she doesn’t suspect this possibility, instead assuming these are friends of Margaret’s and wishing she’d brought her recorder. Some setting details carry us through the house and onto a patio, where we get a mix of dialogue, action, and interiority as Alice encounters Hayden and there are some preliminaries about the flowers and drinks. Once Jodi exits, the real purpose of the scene kicks off.

Before we go farther into the scene, let’s just quickly note the various components of dialogue and its helpers:

Let’s now go through the next eleven short paragraphs in detail, so you can see exactly how Henry uses these components.

(1) “So!” Margaret folds her hands together and slides her elbows onto the table. “I’m betting you two are wondering what exactly is going on. Well, you anyway, Alice. I was just telling Hayden here what I’m thinking.”

Punctuation matters! Margaret’s extra-cheery “So!” establishes the way she delivers the word and hints that she is perhaps getting ready to sugarcoat unpleasant or surprising news.

The line about her hands and elbows functions as an action tag, dispensing with the need for a dialogue tag like says. The gestures give us something to visualize, and the detail about the elbows on the table conveys a certain kind of ownership of the space.

Notice, too, how Henry uses verb tenses to make the dialogue sound like spoken language: “I’m betting . . . are wondering . . . was just telling.” This present progressive verb form dilutes the punch of the verb, so it might not be the best choice in narrative, but it works beautifully in dialogue because it mirrors natural speech.

(2) Hayden here takes an extremely terse sip from his water glass, eschewing the dark cocktail also sitting in front of him.

The italicized “Hayden here” is a great example of Henry’s humor. We sense Alice’s surprise and dismay that Hayden is at this dinner, and the internal mimicking hints she is wary of Margaret’s chipper tone.

The “extremely terse sip” is a bit of action that not only provides a visual and breaks up the dialogue, but is also clearly in Alice’s voice. How does one sip tersely, after all? The word choice, along with the adverb intensifier “extremely,” reads like interior Alice laughing at Hayden’s body language. (And perhaps Henry having a bit of self-aware fun by landing extra-hard on the grumpy trope.)

(3) “I am a little surprised,” I admit.

Notice how the bits of Alice’s voice we get in paragraph 2 add tension to what seems like a very straightforward line? We know that she is more than “a little” surprised—and she knows that Hayden is too. Having a character speak a partial truth immediately adds a tiny bit of tension to the scene.

The “I admit” is a dialogue tag, the little phrase identifying who is speaking. In a scene like this one with three participants, you need more tags than you do in scenes with two speakers, in which readers can follow a back-and-forth dialogue exchange for at least a few turns without losing the sense of who is speaking.

(4) “I know, I know,” she says. “I tried to make a quick decision, believe me, but I kept thinking about what you said, Alice.”

The repeated “I know” feels distinctly like Margaret’s voice, establishing the illusion that we are hearing her ourselves. The “believe me” aside works the same way, but it also serves to increase tension, just like that partial truth in paragraph 3. We know that Alice is wondering if she can believe Margaret.

(5) “What I said?” I say.

Here we get the italicized emphasis in dialogue rather than narrative. How sparingly you use this technique will depend on a number of factors like your overall tone and genre (is it comedic or serious?), the character speaking (have you established that they have a dramatic personality?), and the situation (is it inherently dramatic?). But you don’t want to overuse it because it will quickly lose its impact.

Here is our third dialogue tag of the passage so far. Standard writing advice used to be to rely primarily on plain vanilla “said/say” for tags because readers glide over them while reading quickly. However, in audiobooks, the repeated “said/say” can stand out, so you may want to vary your tags if audio is an important format for your book. That said, you don’t want to go too far and end up with showy tags that distract attention from the dialogue itself. Paragraph 3 above uses “admit,” which works well. Paragraph 4 repeats “say” but positions it in the middle of two lines, which makes for a nice variety.

(6) “This only works if it’s with someone I completely trust.” She shrugs. “And seeing as how I’m not the most trusting gal, determining who that might be will take some time.”

Here Henry shifts back to an action tag—“She shrugs”—instead of using a third “say” in a row. The shrug also supports the dialogue line. Margaret is selling her point here; the shrug conveys “I can’t help that it takes a while to win my trust.”

In the dialogue line itself, notice the use of the casual “gal.” Neither Alice nor Hayden would dare refer to Margaret as a “gal.” Margaret using the term for herself feels like another bit of misdirection, trying to downplay her own power in this situation.

(7) I cast a glance toward Hayden. He’s staring at his water, as if he’s trying to make the glass shatter with only his brain.

This bit of action and observation builds some suspense while Margaret’s last dialogue line hangs in the air—who is going to respond first and how? Alice can see that Hayden is deep in thought, and it’s going to be her job to break the silence.

The fun simile once again conveys Alice’s voice and emphasizes Hayden’s intensity. His performative grumpiness is almost over the top—Henry’s knowing wink to readers alert to tropes.

(8) With a quick clearing of my throat, I look back to Margaret. “That completely makes sense. We should spend a few more days getting to know each other before you commit—”

The first sentence serves as an action tag. After a paragraph break, we might think that we are shifting to another character, so the action tag here alerts us that the next dialogue line is going to be Alice’s.

Notice that both paragraphs 7 and 8 include what might be considered filter words—“cast a glance” and “look back.” Often you can strip these out because we can assume that the POV character is the one seeing or otherwise experiencing whatever is being narrated. For example, 7 could read simply: “Hayden is staring at his water . . .” with the first sentence deleted. However, sometimes you want to call attention to the act of looking, hearing, feeling itself, and that’s what’s going on here. Henry wants us to visualize Alice glancing uneasily from Margaret to Hayden and back to Margaret.

(9) “A month,” she says.

Having one character cut another off is an easy way to add tension and increase the pacing of the scene. In this case, it also reestablishes all of the power that Margaret has been trying to downplay until this point. It’s a power play to interrupt someone, and her short, definitive pronouncement underscores that power. This is an edict, not a request. Note that you always want to arrange your action or dialogue tags so that the interrupted speech and the interruption are back to back.

(10) “A month,” Hayden and I say in unison.

Here, the surprise justifies the italics, and the characters speaking in unison is a nice touch. They are enemies, but united here in their surprise and dismay—a first taste of how the Alice-Hayden-Margaret triangle is going to operate throughout the novel. Henry also increases the pace of the scene by offering two very short dialogue lines in a row and having the characters both reply at once.

(11) She smiles cheerily, but the expression flickers when she reads something in my face. “Now, don’t worry,” she cries. “I’ll pay you both for your time, of course. Jodi’s inside working on some paperwork for you two to sign.”

The first sentence is an action tag focused on body language that shows you just how complex and nuanced you can go here; Margaret’s expression is in reaction to Alice’s expression. Throughout the scene, we’ve gotten the sense that Margaret is overacting her cheerfulness, and this line confirms it.

The “she cries” dialogue tag helps vary the “she says” tag and also establishes tone. Here again, the somewhat histrionic tone contrasts with the dialogue line itself, adding a bit of tension. How would we interpret the “Now, don’t worry” differently if the dialogue tag was “she says calmly” rather than “she cries”?

See just how much meaning and nuance you can establish with only a few words? This section I’ve analyzed is just 232 words, only a tenth of the total length of the chapter. Through a series of seemingly microscopic craft choices, Henry is able to use dialogue not only to move the plot forward, but also to convey subtext and theme.

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