Tag Archives: Dialogue

Technique

Dialogue from start to finish

Dialogue. In many scenes, it’s the lifeblood of conflict, relationships, tension—fiction! Is your dialogue the best it can be?

Other news: want to participate in the blog tour for Spy Noon, or just get a review copy? Sign up here!

The punctuation

dialogueWe’ll start with the technical stuff—a little rote memorization and it’s easy to master. Punctuating dialogue can be tricky—but messing it up (aside from the occasional error) will mark you as an amateur.

There are thirteen things wrong with the punctuation, paragraphing and capitalization in this passage. Can you catch them all?

“I can’t do this.” She said.
“But you have to,” he rubbed his hands together. “Really?,” She asked.
He nodded, “really, truly, Johnny Lion.”
“But—.”
“No buts. I know—,” he glanced around furtively, “I know you can do it.”

Need a quick refresher on dialogue mechanics? Check out #6 on this list of dialogue basics!

Non-dialogue: the rest of the story

When writing dialogue, we need to balance our narrative with the dialogue, and use that narrative to make it clear who’s speaking, show how they’re saying these things, increase the tension, ground the reader in a setting (instead of using “talking heads”), and more.

Again, balancing dialogue with narrative can be difficult. That’s why I made a happy little flow chart on how to attribute speech in fiction!

Those verbs!

All of us had the same teachers drumming the same rot into our brains: that it’s better to use a variety of speech verbs, so rather than ever repeat “said,” it’s better to hit up the thesaurus for postulated, pointed out and prevaricated.

But when you come across those—or even just too many of those—in a book, they tend to stand out. The good old standby, “said,” tends to blend right in, almost invisible to the reader’s eye because we’re so used to seeing it. It’s one of the first sight words kids are taught today in learning to read, because knowing that word opens up a world of understanding.

Of course, even said can be annoying if it’s repeated too much.

At the other end of the spectrum, we find another problem: inappropriate speech verbs. Go to the mirror (or turn on your webcam). Smile at yourself. Now, try to talk while maintaining that smile. Sounds a little funny, eh? Try it while laughing. Try “hissing out” a line of dialogue without a single sibilant (s, sh, z).

When we use a verb as an attribution, we need to make sure that verb is a speech verb (and an appropriate one ;)) . Need help? Learn to stop “smiling” dialogue.

The delicate balance: pseudorealism

For the most part, we try to write realistic fiction. We want our people to act and think and sound like real people living in the real world. Except that our fictional people have to make a whole lot more sense than the people in the world around us, or we’ll lose our audience (even if they’d act the exact same way in real life).

So it is with dialogue. We have to emulate real conversations, but we can’t slavishly follow the real way people would speak, or we’ll be reading a whole lot of “uh, like, you know, and, uh,” nonsensical elliptical references and people responding to the first half of what you said, but not the rest because they stopped listening to think of their answer.

Seriously: go eavesdrop on a casual conversation or tape record your dinner chats. If you transcribed that, it would either be boring, impossible to follow or just utterly unrealistic.

Struggling with this balance? You can learn to make your dialogue more realistic—or go for more fictionally appropriate dialogue.

Dialogue needs to do something

Part of the problem with that utterly boring dialogue we recorded at dinner is that we lack a goal in our conversations (beyond the relationship/conversation). In fiction, we need to remain goal-oriented. We don’t have to include every second of our characters’ lives from the time they wake up until they climb back between the covers at night—we focus on the parts of their lives that move our story forward.

We need to do the same with our characters’ conversations: enter late and exit early for maximum effect. But more than that, we as authors must be clear what the purpose of this conversation is. What does our character expect to get out of this communication? An answer, a friend, some help? Will they attain their goal? Will the other people in the dialogue help or hinder?

Dialogue accomplishes story purposes for sure, but if that’s all we use our dialogue for, it’ll probably ring pretty flat. Dialogue should be a way to indirectly show your characters: what they say, how they say it. Every passage of dialogue should be working on multiple levels to move your story forward, make it richer and deeper, and show your characters. (More purposes of dialogue from Annette Lyon.)

Also important: what they’re not saying. Subtext is one technique I consider more advanced in dialogue and storytelling. The basic definition is an element that carries a second level of meaning. A symbol might be considered a type of subtext.

In dialogue, it’s when a character says one thing, but the reader can infer another layer of meaning. Maybe the character doth protest too much; maybe his gestures show her anger despite his reassurances that he’s okay; maybe the reader knows this character acts like he’s the one when she’s with her friends, but plays hard to get when he’s around.

Need to brush up on subtext? Four ways to convey a deeper meaning.

More on dialogue

What are your best dialogue tips?

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

Fix-It Friday: Fixing Info Dumpy Dialogue

Have you signed up for the I Spy a Secret blogfest yet? One more week!

fifSooo it’s kind of been two months since I posted the first part of this. Whoops!

So back in May, we looked at a couple of ways to identify your info dumping dialogue. Some of the guidelines:

  • If one character is sharing something with another character who should already know this—that might be an info dump
  • If you’re really trying to talk to the reader with the dialogue—that might be an info dump
  • If it’s more than a sentence or two of backstory—that might be an info dump
  • If it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on in the present scene—that’s an info dump.

Fixing that Info Dumpy Dialogue

Not all exposition, even in dialogue, is bad. We always need to maintain the tension level while conveying necessary information, and there are a number of ways to do that, including inner tension, bypass dialogue, borrowed conflict and other techniques. Frankly, all of these examples could use some of that!

So let’s look at how those principles apply to our examples from last time.

“As you know, my darling, we’ve been married for seven years, and our two children, Tina and Tommy, are almost perfect angels.”

“Yes, my love, and we’ve lived in this same house for three years, but we’re thinking about moving.”

So obviously we have a married couple here. There is no reason they’d ever say something like this to one another. So how can we convey this information?

  • First, check which information is vital. This will depend on the story, of course. Do we need to know they’ve been married for exactly seven years? They’ve lived here for three years? Toss the info that has no bearing on the story.
  • Next, decide whether dialogue is the best “mode” to convey this information. If the only available person to talk to already knows it, the answer is a flat-out NO. If you can find someone who needs to be informed of the facts—the cop who’s looking for her missing husband, maybe?—they can really come in handy here.
  • Find a source of tension or conflict. Maybe Tina isn’t his child, and the years of lying are finally wearing down on the mother.
  • Finally, slip in shards of backstory at a time, usually in context of something else. The cop looking for her husband, perhaps. The wall color she’s always hated in this living room, etc.

“That’s the reactor or coil. It’s a a passive two-terminal electrical component which resists changes in electric current passing through it. It consists of a conductor such as a wire, usually wound into a coil. When a current flows through it, energy is stored in a magnetic field in the coil. When the current flowing through an inductor changes, the time-varying magnetic field induces a voltage in the conductor, according to Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction, which by Lenz’s law opposes the change in current that created it.”

This long speech is an info dump in dialogue or in narration. Let’s assume the character is talking to someone who doesn’t know anything about the topic.

Seriously, is this much information necessary to the story? Unless every bit of technical information here actually impacts the plot or the characters, or if we would be totally unable to understand the action of the story without it, we don’t need this. (I don’t understand it, and apparently I wrote it, so . . . awesome.) Face it: this is showing off your research. And your research involves reading Wikipedia.

If you want your character to look knowledgeable, focus on the reaction to his information, and summarize what he says. For example, “Dr. Liffenblatz explained the reactor, but his string of technical jargon only left me even more confused.”

“Do you remember Jimmy? The guy from high school who was virtually president of the A/V club, but then went on to make it big in the dot-com boom? He managed to get out before the bubble burst, and he’s still living large in Silicon Valley. I heard he actually sold Page & Brin the name for Google. It was originally called Backrub, of course.”

Good old Jimmy. Let’s say Jimmy will be an important figure in this story (because if he won’t, you’re losing your reader RIGHT HERE).

First of all, there’s just flat out too much information in this passage. The last sentence is totally unnecessary here, and most likely unnecessary altogether.

Now, the rest of the passage is still a bit too long of a speech for one person to deliver. One idea: break this up among multiple speakers. Make it a conversation instead of a monologue. If you’ve got two or three people reminiscing about high school together, it’s much more natural to exchange information—but again, only if we’re actually informing (or trying to inform) the other speaker of something s/he doesn’t already know.

“Look, I know you’re going through a hard time with your breakup, but I just need to tell you this right this minute: when I was seven, I had this puppy, and he got lost and we looked everywhere for him . . . [ten pages later] . . . and that’s why I don’t like cheese.”

Um, wow. Most likely, there’s one excellent way to fix this: the delete key.

What do you think? How would you fix this dumpy dialogue?

Photo by HomeSpot HQ

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Mechanics

How to write the stuff around the dialogue

1 Comment

Flip open any book, and you’re sure to find them: dialogue attribution using verbs other than “said.” Breathed, whispered, inveighed, called, shouted, yelled, extrapolated, interdicted, translated, interpreted—there are literally hundreds of verbs for speech.

But despite that, “said” is still the default dialogue tag. Yes, every book on the market contains speech verbs other than said—but that’s a big reason why “said” is the default dialogue tag: because other tags are so noticeable. “Said” is practically invisible; we read it without really noticing it, while other dialogue tags call attention to themselves.
Continue reading How to write the stuff around the dialogue →

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique, Publishing, News & Contests

February Thinky Links!

2 Comments

Over the month of January, I collected the stories I found on Twitter and in my feeds that were just too good to miss and put them together for you! Welcome to “Thinky Links“!

Author Janice Hardy offers some good advice on how to cut a scene without hurting your story

Kristen Lamb gives a really good example of how to start in medias res.

The Editors’ Blog looks at the use of coincidence in fiction, why it’s bad—and how to fix it.

I’ve been working hard on revising my Nano novel, so I’m really far behind on my feeds, but I did happen to see two good posts on EditTorrent recently, the kind that make me want to run around telling people “I’ve been vindicated” in an imaginary battle I was having with no one. The first covers showing versus telling in an interesting way (i.e. not writing 101), including that was is not always bad and is not the same thing as passive voice, and the role of telling in exposition.

The second is how to avoid that obnoxious “As you know, Bob” (or Alphonse) dialogue by slipping in backstory, characterization and other information through subtle cues. I LOVE working on this, and Alicia gives great examples!

Although I’m now with a traditional, regional publisher, I still find self-publishing very interesting. So for two different perspectives on that this month, Daniel J. Friedman takes a hard look at the numbers behind self publishing: what they make, what they’re worth, and what they’re selling. On the other hand, Joanna Penn interviewed Adam Croft on How To Sell 130,000 Books Without A Publisher. And for some perspective on both sides, Future Book looks at Why Amanda Hocking Switched, with some interesting notes on how her publishers are working for her.

And to close, here are a few of my favorite posts on this blog from Januaries past:

What’s the best writing/marketing/publishing advice you‘ve read lately?

Photo by Karola Riegler

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

H is for Homo fictus

1 Comment
This entry is part 11 of 11 in the series Creating sympathetic characters

In fiction, we strive for realism. Even if our characters are using wands or warp drives, we still want them to sound and act like real people.

You know, sort of.

In How to Write a Damn Good Novel, James N. Frey points out that fictional characters aren’t quite the same as real people:

Ficitonal characters—homo fictus—are not . . . identical to flesh-and-blood human beings—homo sapiens. One reason for this is that readers wish to read about the exceptional rather than the mundane. Readers demand that homo fictus be more handsome or ugly, ruthless or noble, vengeful or forgiving, brave or cowardly, and so on, than real people are. . . .

Homo fictus is an abstraction meant to project the essence, but not the totality, of homo sapiens. (1-2)

One of the chief ways homo fictus differs from homo sapiens is that homo fictus must make sense. Says Frey, “Homo fictus . . . may be complex, may be volatile, even mysterious, but he’s always fathomable. When he isn’t, the reader closes the book, and that’s that” (2) .

Another big turn off is unrealistic dialogue—dialogue that doesn’t sound natural at all, or dialogue that sounds too much like real life (i.e. boring!).

We all fall prey to these sins sometimes. And sometimes we try to justify them with the argument that they’re not just realistic, they’re real. That’s not a good enough excuse. As Nathan Bransford puts it,

Occasionally I’ll point out dialogue or events that aren’t working, and someone will protest, "But this is how people actually talk," or "This actually happened."

Writing isn’t about capturing real life as it actually happens. We have, well, real life for that.

Instead, writers have to elevate life and add spices and all the rest. Writers interpret real life, elevate it, reorder events, and serve up something perfectly balanced and ready for public consumption.

While we want to have the appearance of reality, we don’t really want an exact copy of it in our fiction. In real life, things don’t make sense, people do crazy things, conversations meander and fizzle out without saying much, and causation and purpose in the events of the world elude us. “Fixing” those things is one of the big benefits of reading fiction.

What do you think? How else are fiction and reality different?

Photo by Nadia

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

Subtext: it goes without saying

3 Comments
This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Dialogue

Subtext is one technique I consider more advanced in dialogue and storytelling. The basic definition is an element that carries a second level of meaning. A symbol might be considered a type of subtext.

In dialogue, it’s when a character says one thing, but the reader can infer another layer of meaning. Maybe the character doth protest too much; maybe his gestures show her anger despite his reassurances that he’s okay; maybe the reader knows this character acts like he’s the one when she’s with her friends, but plays hard to get when he’s around.

As editor Alicia Rasley puts it (emphasis mine):

Subtext is like a gift to the astute reader, an additional layer of meaning implied by the text but not accessible without a bit of thinking. And it gives a chance for the writer to deepen the theme and characters in a subversive way, inviting the reader to interact and thus become more involved in the story. . .

Subtext exists all the time in real life, and so to do justice to our characters, we can create the opportunity for the reader to find shadings of deeper meaning in our stories.

You’re probably already doing this- I think subtext is nearly inevitable once you accept that characters have inner lives.

So, how can we use subtext in our dialogue? A few ideas:

  • Use the character’s body language to clue the reader in that something’s off. Some little tell in the character’s behavior shows us that he or she is shifty and untrustworthy when reporting a fact, covering insecurity when bragging, aggressive when saying something passive.
  • Use dramatic irony. The readers saw the hero pacing as he worked up his fragile ego to call the heroine. When we switch to her POV for the call itself, she doesn’t know that his cockiness (a major turn off for her) is all for show. This can also be applied on a “macro level,” as Alicia Rasley calls it. She cites the example of Casablanca being set just before Pearl Harbor. The audience knows the events that are coming though the characters don’t, and that adds another layer of meaning for the reader.
  • Dance around a topic. Make it clear there’s something the characters aren’t saying or won’t think about.
  • Carefully craft the dialogue. (I know: duh. Easier said than done.) Choose words or build phrases that can carry more weight. Split hairs. Have other characters misinterpret, seeing only through their own particular filter.

Alicia’s article on subtext goes in depth on these and other ways to craft more subtext into your dialogue and your story.

What do you think? How else do you convey another level of meaning in dialogue?

Photo by Ludovic Hirlimann

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

What dialogue can (and should!) do

3 Comments
This entry is part 7 of 8 in the series Dialogue

Okay, this totally almost qualifies as a guest post. My friend, author Annette Lyon, mentioned the many purposes dialogue can serve in a comment here, and then on Monday, after a question from Kathleen, Annette posted about six things dialogue can/should do.

In a scene, dialogue isn’t just there to pass the time or fix the pace. Dialogue needs a purpose for the story, or it’s just fluff. Annette outlines six purposes dialogue can serve in a scene, to help us keep our writing (and the story) moving forward.

It’s hard to pick a favorite part of Annette’s post, but this is one paragraph that really made me think:

Sometimes, even the people we’re with affect how we say things. I know I’ve lapsed into an almost teenage-style of talking around friends I know from that era, while I’ll use a more formal register with, say, the school principal. When I’m talking with my sisters, I sound very different than when I’m talking to my kids. And so on.

Annette also gives good advice on what to do and what not to do when writing dialogue, and how to portray each of her six purposes in your dialogue. So check it out!

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Technique

Indirect dialogue

This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series Dialogue

Sometimes the ability to write good dialogue becomes a crutch. We feel like we should show all possible dialogue—but it’s just not the case.

Sometimes, the story—the pacing, the conflict, and most of all the reader—is better served by summarizing dialogue. This seems to be the case in stories where one character is telling another about actions the reader has already seen. Most of the time (unless we’re going for a Rashomon effect), the reader stands to gain nothing from rehashing an event that the other character needs to hear about.

It’s really not a sin to write something along the lines of “She related the whole story of X” or “He caught her up on the status of the battle.” If the POV character is the one telling the story, the reader probably needs very little cues. If the current POV character is listening to the story (i.e. we saw the scene from another character’s POV before this), we might get into some more detail with the POV character’s reactions and interpretations.

This might also work well if the readers haven’t seen the event in question—but they’ve already heard about it. For example, in a mystery, a detective or PI might interview half a dozen witnesses who all saw essentially the same thing. We definitely don’t need to see every single full conversation—the pertinent parts (like the details only one person saw, or the red herrings, or whatever) are all we need.

On the other hand, if the readers haven’t already seen the events being described, it might be better—and often less confusing and simpler—to write out the character’s full run down. If it turns into a speech, break it up into a conversation, or at least add reactions from the POV character. (I can’t think of a time the POV character would give one of these speeches. Maybe for backstory? Ack.)

Now for the third hand. I haven’t decided if I like this technique, but every so often, I see something like this:

Billy and I moved on to the next painting.

“That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.” He curled his lip in disgust.

Well, I thought he was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen, and told him so. “And also, you stink. But most of all, your taste in art stinks.”

Now, this would never work for me if the second paragraph said Well, I thought he was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. “You’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. And also, you stink. But most of all, your taste in art stinks.”

But for me the jury’s still out on the first version. I’m a dialogue lover, so I would tend toward just putting it in dialogue, and cutting the “Well, I thought . . .” part—I mean, if you say it, the reader’s going to figure out that they’re thinking it, right?

What do you think? How does that example of indirect dialogue work for you? How else might we use non-dialogue for dialogue?

Photo by the Michigan Municipal League

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!