How To Use Beats To Keep Long Dialogue Passages Interesting Even If There’s No Action

There are times in a manuscript where your characters engage in a longer dialogue exchange. Ideally, those dialogue passages are where important information is revealed for readers. In deep point of view, we want to avoid using dialogue tags (he said, she said) but additionally we don’t want readers to lose track of who’s talking, where the characters are (setting: time and place), or how the POVC (point of view character) feels as the dialogue is happening.

How do you keep long dialogue pas...