And thank you for your thoughtful reply!

I’ll go back and look at it keeping those things in mind.

The scene marks a pivot-point in the script: Two women who up to this point have been using each other are forced to admit they actually care about each other. (And that makes the scene sound MUCH more romantic than it is.)

Do you (Sterling Editing) do developmental edits of scripts or portions of scripts?

Hmm. Since I don’t know the particulars of the dialogue, let me throw out some general suggestions. Maybe one of them will feel useful.

One of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever read comes from a theatre director who said, “If the scene isn’t working, the entrance is wrong.” I use this all the time in my own work (prose and screenplay), and it’s spooky how often it’s true. So one immediate suggestion is to take a look at your entrance (into the scene, or into this particular conversation between the characters), and see if perhaps there is something you can do there that will alter the course of the middle section of the dialogue.

Another suggestion is that perhaps your dialogue isn’t working because it’s two different-but-connected conversations. Sometimes the most telling parts of a conversation is the long silence that’s followed by one character re-directing, re-attacking, doing an end run, getting up and cleaning the kitchen… essentially finding a new strategy. Or even continuing the conversation later in the story, in another scene.

If this is an expository conversation, perhaps you need to actually introduce the information earlier or later in the story. If it’s an emotional conversation, perhaps your characters needs to have higher stakes. One of the things I sometimes do when I’m wrestling with dialogue is to imagine the worst possible thing that one of the characters could say at this moment, and then see what happens when they say it (grin). I don’t usually stick with whatever it is, but it does help open up the options sometimes.

Is any of this helpful? If not, I’m happy to keep swinging at it and see if something connects.

What do you suggest to someone who can’t seem to make a bit of dialog work?

I’ve been trying to rewrite a couple pages of dialog off and on for days, and nothing I do feels… right. I know where the scene begins and ends; but the middle part is eluding me.

Good luck with it!

As Andrea stood in the doorway, trying to decide whether to enter the bedroom, Francis barreled out almost knocking her down.

There’s a lot happening in this one sentence both physically and emotionally, and it feels rushed. I think it would be great to break up this sentence so that the reader gets a more clear picture. And I’m assuming that since the question about dinner is the best Andrea can muster, that really she wants to talk about something else. I think indicating that can help break up the action and also show us even more of their emotional dynamic:

Andrea hesitated in the doorway. (this is an example of using a verb that carries an emotional meaning, rather than “trying to decide” which is more intellectually-based). “Francis, can we –”

Francis barreled out of the room so fast she almost knocked her mother down. She shoved her iPod into her pocket as she continued down the hallway.

I changed “picked up her iPod” because it’s not clear whether she’s dropped it on the floor because of running into Andrea — but if the reader thinks she has, the whole encounter seems much more violent than I think you intend. If I’m wrong about that, then you just need to make more clear that it’s the kind of impact that could have really hurt Andrea.

@Donna, nice to see you here! I agree with Dianne’s comments on the nice dynamic between the characters, and also on the dialogue tags: as Nicola says in her latest dialogue post, when you use mostly “said” for dialogue tags, then when you do decide to use “cried” or “shouted,” it has more impact on the reader.

There are also ways you can streamline the prose just a bit. For example: “She wrapped it gently in her fur cloak” lets you lose the clause “gently handling it”. I think it makes the action cleaner and easier for the reader to visualize.

I love that you call Ava a knight without explaining why it’s “okay” or “unusual” for a woman to be a knight. Great choice. It’s a very effective way to let us know something about the world of the story without “telling” us.