Dialogue is more than words. It can show the reader how your characters interact. In every scene, characters talk (or avoid talking) because they WANT something. They may use different strategies to get it, communicated by words and actions. If one strategy doesn't work, then a character will try something else. That scene construction leads to conflict and forward movement in your story.

The simplest way to make dialogue realistic is to invest time listening to how people really talk. Tune in at a baseball game or concert. Eavesdrop on the booth behind you in a restaurant. Listen to children chatting at the bus stop. What you'll notice is that people don't give a summary of events because the person they're talking to already knows the situation and remembers what's happened to this point. Also (although there are exceptions) people seldom say exactly what they mean. How often have you heard a real person say something like: "I'm being extra particular about ordering my meal from the waiter because I want you to think I'm in control when actually I'm really nervous about being out with you for the first time." That may be an extreme example, but on TV last night, I heard this line of dialogue: "You are a bad woman because ..." I cringed for that writer.

Beyond listening to real people talk, WATCH how they interact. Listen for what isn't being said. This observation can spark ideas about what characters do when they want to avoid communicating. Do they fidget? Dive into their smart phones to play Sudoku? Actions say more than words about how your character interacts with others; they show rather than tell the reader about the scene's undercurrents.

Sometimes, just listening to real people isn't enough. Writing believable dialogue in historical fiction is a challenge. The writer teeters on a tight rope between evoking a sense of the period and being unintelligible to modern readers. If you're writing period dialogue, look at books written around that time, or for the 1920s on, movies. Note words and sentence patterns that convey a sense of the time while still being understandable to modern readers. Arm yourself with a good etymology dictionary to avoid anachronisms, but use your own discretion too about a word sounding right for the historical period. Even when you're right and the word is of the time period, if a reader wonders about it, then you've pulled them out of the story. An example is the word "bouncer." It's been around since the mid-1800s, but if I read it in a story set during the Civil War, will I wonder?

Dialogue is an indispensable building block for constructing scenes. Using these tips can result in characters that interact in engaging, believable ways, so that readers keep turning the pages to find out what your characters will say (and do) next.

This post originally appeared in Laurinda Wallace's SimplyLife blog.

My humdrum list of beach reads needed a blast of bracing artic air. I looked north to Alaska, which I had long associated with writers like Jack London. To my delight, I discovered that America's last frontier also teems with exciting contemporary writing by women.

Jean Craighead George mined literary gold when she wrote Julie of the Wolves back in 1972. While not an Alaskan, George wrote the Newbery Award-winning novel after spending a summer in Barrow learning about wolves at the Naval Artic Research Laboratory.

Since then, other women writers have explored Alaska across many genres. Here's a small sample of what I discovered for my summer reading list.

For young readers, Shelley Gill writes both fiction and nonfiction. Check out Sitka Rose or Prickly Rose for fiction and Alaska's Three Bears for nonfiction. Mindy Dwyer puts an Alaskan spin on classic fairy tales. See The Salmon Princess and Alaska's Sleeping Beauty.

For middle readers, Kirkpatrick Hill has written several books, including The Year of Miss Agnes. Her latest book, Bo at Ballard Creek, won the 2014 Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Award.

Women writers dominate the mystery genre in Alaska, with long-running series by best-selling writers Sue Henry and Dana Stabenow topping the list. For literary fiction, check out Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child and Nancy Lord's book of short stories The Man Who Swam with Beavers.

Nancy Lord writes nonfiction as well, including Early Warning: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North and Beluga Days: Tracking the Endangered White Whale. Sherry Simpson, a former Anchorage Daily News reporter, has a wonderful book of essays called The Way Winter Comes. She has also written several other nonfiction books about Alaska. Velma Wallis, who grew up in remote Fort Yukon, retells Athabaskan legends in the haunting Two Old Women and her second book Bird Girl and the Man Who Followed the Sun.

If you'd like to explore more writing from our biggest state, check out Alaska Sampler 2014. Editors Deb Vanasse and David Marusek created this free e-book, which features ten of Alaska's finest contemporary writers.

Can you spot what's wrong in each of these sentences?

• She has less quarters than Jim.
• Over a hundred people attended the meeting.
• He needs alot of practice.

Choosing the right words to describe "how much" can be confusing, but five simple rules can help.

1. Use "less" for indefinite quantities, those you can't count. "The teacher has less time to grade papers this week" or "This recipe would taste better with less mayonnaise."
2. If you 're writing about something you can count, then use "fewer," not "less." "She has fewer quarters than Jim" or "He found fewer seashells on the beach than he expected."
3. Use "over" to describe where something is, not to describe an amount. "The fish jumped over the net" or "The railroad company built the bridge over the lake."
4. Use "more than" to describe an amount. "More than a hundred people attended the meeting" or "That bottle holds more than a quart."
5. "A lot" is always written as two words, no exceptions. I remember it this way: Would you write "abit" or "alittle"? The sentence above should be: "He needs a lot of practice."

Keeping these five rules in mind will make it easier to correctly describe amounts.