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Tag Archives: Dialogue
Is this too much like how people talk?
All too often, it seems, I hear something that isn’t working in fiction justified because “that’s how it is in real life.” That may be, but fiction is not real life. Fiction has to be believable, consistent and have a point. Oh, and be interesting. I don’t think my life has ever felt like all four of those things at once.
Dialogue in fiction has to be all of those things, too—and dialogue in real life seldom is.
“Hi. How are you?”
“Good. You?”
“Fine. Really coming down out there, isn’t it?”
“Yep. Can I get you anything to drink?”
“Nah, I’m good. What have you been up to this week?”
“Not much. Cleaned the basement.”
Is it boring? Let’s face it—we all have conversations like the one above, probably several times a day. And yet there’s almost never a place for something like this in fiction.
Much of the time, we can skip to the heart of the conversation. We don’t need the warm-up parts—and including them may be a sign we’re starting the scene in the wrong place.
[27 pages of the above . . . aaaaaaaaaaand scene]
Boring multiplied, yes—but more importantly, there’s no point, no conflict here. Conflict is necessary—something most of us try to avoid in real life conversations. As Nathan Bransford says:
A good conversation is an escalation. The dialogue is about something and builds toward something. If things stay even and neutral, the dialogue just feels empty.
Dialogue in fiction is like a symphony or a theorem. (Sounds appealing, eh?) A symphony will develop musical themes and work to a climactic point (often with a literal crescendo). Similarly, a theorem builds on each previous fact to reach its apex, the conclusion. Extraneous arguments and points aren’t included. Well-known theories can be summarized (AAS for triangle congruity) (oh, come on, you remember eighth grade math, right?).
“Vanessa, you drive me crazy!”
“Shut up, Jerica! Or should I say Jerk-ica?”
“I swear, if you ever pull that kind of stunt again, so help me, Vanessa—”
Okay, that looks ridiculous, doesn’t it? And yet when we’re really upset in real life, we do use the other person’s name surprisingly often. (Or maybe it’s just me; I’m pretty sure I’ve argued with my husband by only saying his name.)
These jump out when we read fiction. I read a book six months ago where the author apparently didn’t know this (though it wasn’t his first book). Entire scenes of dialogue had the characters calling each other by name in literally every line of dialogue—sometimes up to three times in a mini-speech. Even non-writers commented on this in the online reviews.
What do you think? What else doesn’t belong between the quotation marks?
Photo by Adam Bindslev
Posted in Technique
Tagged Dialogue, fiction and real life, good dialogue, realistic dialogue
7 Comments
Is this how people talk?
If you don’t have a natural “eye” for dialogue—and, let’s face it, even if you do—reading your dialogue aloud is the best way to tell if your dialogue sounds natural. In her EDITS system, Margie Lawson suggests reading all of the dialogue in a chapter—and nothing else (on that pass).
As you read, ask yourself: is this how people talk?
The following examples have been exaggerated to protect the imaginary.
“At this juncture, I firmly believe, from the bottom of my heart, that it would be most beneficial for us if you would open the door, proceed down the hall, and retrieve beverages of your choice for our consumption.”
Is it too formal? Tone down the formal language, use contractions, and/or cut out some phrases. In fact, we use elliptic speech most of the time in conversation—sentence fragments that are easy to understand in context. Do your characters use too many complete sentences? (“Why, yes, yes they do.”)
[in chapter 2]
“Did you steal the diamonds?”
“You know, I just think we shouldn’t go assigning blame for stuff like that.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Let’s go for a walk.”
“I like walking.”
Is this too direct—or not direct enough (see #1 above)? Real dialogue doesn’t always follow quid pro quo. Sometimes we’re evasive, sometimes we try to be pithy or clever, and sometimes we spent more of our time formulating our response than listening. (Of course, that last one doesn’t come across so well in fiction…)
“As everyone in this room knows, if the timer reaches zero, we’ll all die.”
“Yes, Jenny the doctor, we will.”
Do they discuss things that they wouldn’t really have to talk about? If everyone in the room already knows something—from the time on the timer to the characters’ relationships to their shared histories—dialogue isn’t going to be a natural way to clue the reader in.
“What do you think of irrigation reform?”
“Well, I hadn’t ever really considered it, but now that you mention it, I can see that irrigation reform is not only necessary but beneficial to all parties. I mean, so many farmers hog all the water—pardon the pun—and we have to use that same water supply for all the farms as well as the rest of us. Not to mention the frequency of farm-related spills and water contamination.”
“Yeah, but considering that water rights are used for political ends so often, I think there’s an even more important argument for irrigation reform that you’ve missed. Let me explicate it for you over the course of the next seven pages. You may speak, but only in single sentences, preferably phrased as questions perfectly timed to introduce the next tenet of my argument. And please wait for me to finish my sentence before you attempt to speak.”
“Yes, of course. How are water rights used for political ends?”
Is it realistic? Real people seldom spout off prepared speeches—or let other people make them.
Next time: Is this how people talk part deux, in which I totally contradict myself sort of.
What do you think? What kind of things do you see included in dialogue that shouldn’t be?
Photos by Akuppa John Wigham and Gillie, respectively.
Dialogue: the bare essentials
Cool note: this is my 300th published post on this blog!
There’s so much to be said about dialogue. (Oh, wow—totally unintentional pun!) Some of us do it well naturally—we have an “eye” for dialogue. (And it drives us CAH-RAZY to see bad dialogue in published books.) But we all have different strengths—and we all have things to work on and learn.
The barest basics of dialogue are the simple mechanics, in no particular order. (Because, hey, we all have to start somewhere!)
- Make it clear who’s speaking.
- As a corollary for #1, change paragraphs when changing speakers. (Not necessarily every time someone begins speaking—see #4.)
- Use actual speech attributions (verbs like “said”) sparingly, and default to the near-invisible said and/or asked as often as possible.*
- Use action beats to help identify the speaker (among other important purposes). Keep those action beats in the same paragraph as the speaker, and if you involve more than one character in the thoughts or beats, make sure it’s clear who’s speaking.
- Do not use action beats as speech attributions. Or, as Annette Lyon put it in a guest post here, “Stop smiling words.”
- Punctuate thusly (American style): “I can’t do this,” she said. [comma, followed by a lower-case letter for the speech attribution]
“But you have to.” He rubbed his hands together. [Always a period there! Always a capital next! This is an action, not a way to speak.]
“Really?” she asked. [question mark, lower case for the attribution]
He nodded. “Really, truly, Johnny Lion.” [Again, use a period for the action.]
“But—” [Em dash, no comma or period—but if this was a question, you would put the question mark in. Just to make it hard on you.]
“No buts. I know—” he glanced around furtively—“you wish you weren’t here.” [Although this one may vary depending on the house style.]
*This is actually one I don’t particularly follow. A couple weeks ago, I read something I wrote ten years ago, and I found almost no speech attributions. In fact, I only used speech attributions if the way someone spoke was important—and couldn’t be conveyed through the dialogue (i.e. whispering, sarcasm, etc.). But I’ve also taken that too far, and sometimes it’s hard for my readers to tell who’s speaking. So I’m slowly learning to slip in those little invisible saids without twitching. Too much.
Tomorrow: what goes between the quotes!
Is dialogue one of your strengths? If so, share your best technique, trick or advice—in a guest post!
Photos by Leo Reynolds
Posted in Mechanics, Technique
Tagged Dialogue, punctuation, said, speech, speech attributions
3 Comments
Dialogue series?
A while back I took a class on dialogue. While the instructor did give feedback on the dialogue itself in our assignments, it seemed like the things we were really learning wasn’t how to write actual dialogue, but how to paragraph (which is apparently all science, no art) and incorporate everything that’s not dialogue into a conversation. Useful skills, yes, but not what I expected from a class 
about dialogue. Oddly enough, I kind of thought things would focus more on what goes inside the quotation marks.
I know a lot of people already consider dialogue one of their strengths. But even if it’s one of your best skills (as I consider it to be), we can always learn more (as I am even now).
We could look at the basics of creating realistic and readable dialogue, more intermediate things like skipping the boring parts, and advanced techniques like “indirect” dialogue. And naturally, since I know so many of you guys are good at dialogue, I’d love to have guest posts with your favorite lessons, tips and techniques.
What do you think? Would you like a series on dialogue? Maybe an “advanced” series?
Photo by Peter Patau
Comparing notes on paragraphing
There is at least one hard-and-fast (mostly) rule for paragraphing in fiction: when you change speakers, change paragraphs. But from there, things can get a little complicated.
If you have a character react to another character’s dialogue without speaking, does that get a separate paragraph? What if the first character continues speaking? Or, to use an example, how would you paragraph this (we’ll call it Exhibit A), assuming it’s the same person doing all the talking:
“That’s the stupidest blog post idea I’ve ever heard.” He scowled at his sister. She rolled her eyes heavenward and sighed, as if begging for the patience to endure him. He took her by the shoulders. “You’re only thinking like this because you’re editing.”
I don’t know that one way is better than another—it mostly depends on what you want to emphasize, and making sure your meaning’s clear. Interestingly, I’ve read a couple books published in the 1950s and ’60s lately, and there seems to have been a rule that every time someone starts speaking, you need a new paragraph, so this example might be:
“That’s the stupidest blog post idea I’ve ever heard.” He scowled at his sister. She rolled her eyes heavenward and sighed, as if begging for the patience to endure him. He took her by the shoulders.
“You’re only thinking like this because you’re editing.”
Which I find confusing, since I think the paragraph change is setting up a speaker change, and it’s not. (
And that might be precisely why they’ve shied away from that.)
Along those same lines, I made sure to include (in this totally-made-up-not-for-real example) a sentence that brought the speaker back into actor position before the second part of his dialogue to try to make it clearer who was speaking. (This may or may not be successful. We would assume it’s him because we haven’t changed paragraphs in the first example, but if the sister’s action was the last sentence before the second part of the dialogue, it might be hard to parse who’s supposed to be speaking. While we may want to “challenge” our readers, we probably don’t want to challenge them just to understand what’s happening 
.)
And then there’s narrating internal monologue. How do you think you’d do this in Exhibit B?
Terrence looked up as soon as he heard the hollow clack of high heels in the vestibule. Andrea came tripping in to the chapel, casting her eyes about hopefully. Terrence read people for a living. The way she leaned forward, her eyebrows drawn up inquisitively: she was eager to see him. And she only knew him as a lie. He suppressed a sigh.
How about Exhibit C?
Angelica nearly missed the meeting. Why she’d spent so long fussing over her hair was beyond her. No amount of fussing had ever made it behave particularly well—and she shouldn’t be so concerned about how she looked. She was lucky to reach her seat before the presentation began. But she was glad of the fussing as soon as they began the introductions—and she knew Mr. Griggs was there. She hadn’t seen him yet, but she could almost feel his presence. Or maybe his eyes on her.
How would you add paragraph breaks to these examples (if at all)?
Photo by kami68k
The science of paragraphing
How’s that for nitty gritty?
Usually in school, when we learn what a paragraph is, it has a fairly standard definition: three to five sentences, the first being a topic sentence and/or thesis, and the others relating to that topic. The last sentence should usually offer some sort of segue into the topic of the next sentence to show the logical structure of the overall essay. (In the first paragraph, the last sentence is the thesis of your work.) And that’s a great structure—for non-fiction.
In fiction, paragraphs are still important, but unfortunately they’re not quite as easily defined. We aren’t simply relating information or crafting a persuasive argument—we’re trying to make a cohesive narrative come to life.
There is at least one hard-and-fast (mostly) rule for paragraphing in fiction: when you change speakers, change paragraphs. Beyond that, we’re left with . . . more like “guidelines.”
One of those extremely important guidelines is clarity—break paragraphs to make your meaning clear. Breaking a paragraph between speakers is one reason why we do this. We might also break a paragraph to better illustrate the relationship between the character’s actions: showing cause and effect, for example.
Also, breaking a paragraph can help keep POV clear. I thought it was rather clear whose POV we were in in one scene that I wrote, so the POV character could comment on other characters’ dialogue in the same paragraph as the speech. My CPs found paragraphs like the made-up one in bold below confusing POV:
Lisa leaned back in her seat, trying not to look like she was eavesdropping. They were talking about her—again.
“Well, we were going to tell her.” Oh, really? Like when?
As we read, we need white space to help our minds psychologically space out information. We can use this to great artistic effect (as we’ll talk about tomorrow!).
What do you think? How do you paragraph? How would you paragraph this example?
Photo by Xosé Castro Roig
Backstory through dialogue
Dialogue can be one of the most effective ways to slip backstory into your work—but as always, there are some major, common pitfalls to avoid in conveying backstory information in dialogue. For example, as you know, gentle reader, we want to avoid “As you know, Bob” dialogue. If both the characters already know something, why would they inform one another of those facts?
Inserting a character who doesn’t already know the situation can work—but it can also backfire if it’s obvious that character is there mainly as a plot device so the author can info dump. It also leads into what may be the biggest problem with using dialogue to convey backstory—it’s still boring. Even if it’s a secret baby or rich uncle or life as a courtesan, sometimes it’s just not interesting.
Why is it boring? There’s no conflict. Sometimes it’s easy to find the conflict: the heroine calls the hero by her abusive ex’s name in the middle of an argument; if the hero finds out about his brother’s secret baby, he’ll flip, etc. But it’s not always that easy.
In Don’t Murder Your Mystery, author Chris Roerden offers a bunch of techniques for binging out, adding or just simulating conflict in dialogue, including bypass dialogue, borrowed conflict, simulated disagreement and flat-out editing (179-184). (I posted about these techniques during the tension & suspense series, too.)
Of course, the answer may also be simpler: if there’s no conflict to this backstory here, is this the right place to put it? Are these the right characters to be discussing it? If you change/add/subtract characters, does it change the dynamic?
And, as always, good dialogue technique is important. One character delivering a monologue about his or her life history isn’t any different than a regular info dump in narration. Interruptions, reticence and context (and subtext!) can add to not only the conflict, but the meaning of the words your characters are saying—and may require less jabbering to for the same impact.
What do you think? How do you reveal backstory through dialogue?
Photo by Beppie
Posted in Technique
Tagged Backstory, bad backstory, boring backstory, Dialogue, integrating backstory
2 Comments
Sound is golden
Sound is generally the second easiest for us to remember to include. Little sound cues from knocking at the door, to a ringing phone to church bells to footsteps provide transitions and introduce characters. Technically, dialogue is a sound, but I think readers seldom process it that way (and that’s probably good), unless we specifically call attention to the way a line of dialogue is delivered.
Of course, we don’t want to use too much sound—especially not if we bring sound to the forefront as with the above (and even more so if we do this more than once in a scene). While sight will be used in pretty much every scene (even if we don’t need description), sound probably won’t play quite as prominent a role.
Hearing the scene
Sound generally doesn’t ground us as strongly as sight does, but it can still enhance a sense of setting and scene. Here are some tricks I use to focus on the sound in a scene:
- Close your eyes. What are the background noises in this setting (traffic, natural, people, etc.)? Does the character notice them—or would s/he notice if they disappeared?
- Look for missed opportunities to set the stage with sound. What sounds are (fairly) unique to this setting, that could help to ground your characters and readers and convey a sense of place?
- Don’t neglect the dialogue. Are there any lines of dialogue that need a little help conveying their full meaning or emotional impact? (Yes, make sure the dialogue is as strong as possible on its own first, but if it’s still not enough—or if the words contradict the speaker’s meaning—add to the tone.)
- Closely related: Read the scene aloud for cadence. Does the rhythm of the words sound natural, and does it fit the scene?
Silence is golden
Don’t neglect silence as a part of sound. Whether it’s an awkward pause in a conversation or the still that falls over forest birds when a predator is near, silence can convey as much meaning as sound, if used properly.
What do you think? How do you use sound in your scenes?
Photo by David Boocock
