People are interested in people, and a good way of making your description writing readable and fun is to populate it with characters. In this section I’m going to use the word ‘character’ as a catch-all to refer to the people in your writing, whether they’re real or invented.

The secret to presenting people in descriptive writing is to let them speak for themselves. This is really just an extension of the old writing rule that you should ‘show, not tell’. Rather than saying ‘Dave was a bit of an idiot’ or ‘Susie is really intelligent’, let your readers witness Dave’s stupidity or Susie’s brains for themselves by letting Dave and Susie speak.

You don’t need to use a ton of dialogue for it to be effective. Here’s a post from a blog about British tourism, involving two characters:

I’ve never understood why Paris has a reputation for rude serving staff in restaurants when the kind of customer service I get every day in London is ten times worse than anything I’ve come across anywhere in France.

Take yesterday, for example. Hanging around Covent Garden, killing time between meetings, I decided to have a coffee. Without making much of an informed choice (I never do) I walked straight into the nearest café and sat down.

Within about five seconds a waitress appeared. She glared at me: why had I sat down?

I don’t know about you, but I never manage to put together an adequate response when someone challenges me like this – well, not until afterwards, anyway – so I stammered something about just wanting a coffee, and all the tables being empty. This was true: I was the only person in the place.

That wasn’t good enough. She informed me that customers had to wait to be seated, and pointed to the sign by the door that said this. So I stood up. Resetting her internal anger mechanism, she asked me where I wanted to sit. I point out that the table I was hovering above would be fine, and she nodded her permission.

I sat down, and we were back to where we’d been twenty seconds’ previously.

As you can see, describing what was said in the conversation is quite awkward and wordy. In sequences like this it’s much better to report the conversation using dialogue. It’s quicker, and it brings description to life.

Crucially, dialogue breaks up your description into very short, impactful paragraphs. It draws the reader’s eye. Having dialogue at or near the start of a blog post is a very powerful way of hooking your reader.

Here’s that extract again. I’ve omitted the initial two paragraphs of description and rewritten the rest using dialogue:

Within about five seconds a waitress appeared. She glared at me.

‘Why have you sat down?’

I don’t know about you, but I never manage to put together an adequate response when someone challenges me like this – well, not until afterwards, anyway.

‘Er, well, I just wanted a coffee, and you know, all the tables were free..’

‘All customers have to wait to be seated.’

‘But…’

‘It says on the sign.’ I stood up. ‘So where would you like to sit?’ she demanded.

‘Um, just here would be fine.’ She nodded her permission, and I sat down again. We were back to where we’d been twenty seconds’ previously.

If you’re reporting a real-life conversation, don’t obsess about not being able to remember the exact words that were used. Travel writers and reporters don’t tape every word of every conversation they report in their books and stories. Instead, they recreate an approximation of them. Reporting the truth of what happened – the general direction the dialogue took – is more important than recreating the conversation in exact detail, with all its ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’.

(Of course, you can use ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ in written dialogue – but where you think they work to build the rhythm and texture of the speech, rather than everywhere they were actually used in the original conversation.)

If you’re unsure about how to lay out speech punctuation, pick up a novel by your favourite author and see how he or she does it. Most speech uses ‘speech marks’ – in British English, that usually means single speech marks for direct speech and “double” ones for reported speech (i.e., speech within speech). In US English it’s the other way around, though it’s sometimes a blurry issue.