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

Writing good dialogue is a core skill for rom-com authors, so let’s zero in on that aspect of Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life. I’m going to walk you through how Henry uses dialogue in chapter 4 of the novel, but first let’s get a snapshot of all of the components in this chapter, as we’ve done for previous scene studies.

Scene components:

One weakness I often spot in first novels is an over-reliance on dialogue to carry all of the work of the scene. It’s true that dialogue is a flexible tool, as we’ll see, and it can create tension, establish character arcs, and move the plot forward, but it works best when used in conjunction with the rest of your novelist’s tools. So even in a scene like the chapter we’re going to look at now, which is structured around two conversations that accomplish everything I just listed above, dialogue does not even make up half of the scene.

I broke down the opening chapter of the novel in a previous post, 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 2 and 3 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 established in chapter 1.

Chapter 4 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’s the kind of person who has a uniform of sorts (and a very casual one at that, possibly at odds with the Lily 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 leaves the scene, 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 ten short paragraphs in detail, so you can see in detail how Henry is using 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 sugar-coat unpleasant or surprising news.

The line about her hands and elbows function as an action tag, dispensing the need for a dialogue tag like ‘says’, and it gives us a visual of the scene, as well as conveying a certain kind of ownership of the space with the elbows on the table.

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 (am/is/are) plus gerund (-ing) verb form dilutes the punch of the verb, so 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 get the sense of Alice reacting to her own mixture of surprise and dismay that Hayden is at this dinner, and the internal mimicking of Margaret’s words hints that Alice might be a little skeptical or wary of Margaret’s chipper tone.

The “extremely terse sip” is a bit of action that again provides a visual and breaks up the dialogue, but also is clearly in Alice’s voice. How does one sip tersely, after all? The word choice, along with the adverb intensifier “extremely” feels a bit like interior Alice laughing at Hayden’s body language. (And maybe also 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 shades of Alice’s voice we get in paragraph 2 add tension to what seems like a very straightforward line. Somehow 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” also feels distinctly like Margaret’s voice, establishing the illusion that we are hearing her ourselves. The “believe me” aside works the same way but also does the opposite of what it says, just as we saw in paragraph 3. We can tell 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 become irritating. That said, you don’t want to go too far replacing said/say with showy tags. Paragraph 3 above uses “admit”, which works well. Paragraph 4 positions the tag 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.”

But 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’s glance at Hayden tells her that he is unlikely to speak first, and it’s going to be her job to break the silence.

The fun simile here again conveys Alice’s voice, as well as her awareness of Hayden’s intensity, and—under all that—a tiny bit of Henry’s amusing self-awareness about how performatively grumpy she’s made him.

(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 here 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 in both 7 and 8 we have what might be considered filter words—“cast a glance” and “look back.” Often you can strip these out because we can assume that it’s the point-of-view character 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 re-establishes all of the power that Margaret has been trying to downplay until this point. It’s a power play to interrupt someone, and then her short, definitive pronouncement underscores her 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. Having the characters speak in unison, as well as these two very short dialogue lines, also increases the pace of the scene.

(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. 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”?

I think that’s enough to give you a sense of how a series of seemingly microscopic craft choices can work together to convey subtext and theme, in addition to all of the overt meanings you want readers to glean from a dialogue-focused scene.