Using Dialogue to Bring Your Characters to Life

They say we all smile in the same language. Fortunately for us writers, just about everything else we say, we say in our own unique way. It doesn't matter if everybody in the room speaks the same language (English, for instance); accent, dialect and all the different words and idioms we tend to use have given each one of us a way of speaking which is almost as peculiar to ourselves as our fingerprints. For us story tellers, understanding and harnessing this knowledge can be the difference between writing a good story and creating a masterpiece.