Tag Archives: Dialogue

Technique

Enter late and exit early in dialogue

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This entry is part 5 of 8 in the series Dialogue

I’m not even going to pretend to point fingers. I’ve fallen into this trap myself. “Hey,” I think, “I’m good at dialogue. Dialogue makes scenes go faster. Dialogue is a great way to show conflict and characterize and keep things moving. We’re supposed to show not tell, right? And readers like dialogue. So I’m going to show the entire conversation.”

And two thirds of the conversation is the exact sort of boring warm up we talked about last week.

Just like we need to do in our overall stories and in our scenes, we need to enter a lot of dialogue late and leave early. Skip the greetings and the small talk, and get out of there before the conversation dies out.

I found one way to avoid this in Don’t Murder Your Mystery by Chris Roerden. I’ve mentioned it before:

Flat-out editing can help—especially for phone calls. (Eesh. I hate those!) Roerden uses the example of a phone call from a novel where the protagonist is in her car, realizing she needs to get a clue from her husband. She’s already thought about the context—when they heard it, what bit of information it is exactly—so why show that in a phone conversation? Indeed, after the words “she called him,” the author skips right to the husband’s answer: “‘Yeah, I’ve got it right here. . . ‘”

We can do this in other types of conversations as well—jump into the scene once the dialogue gets to the good part. Like Elmore Leonard, we want to leave the boring parts out!

What do you think? Do you try to enter late and exit early in dialogue? When would you not do this?

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Technique

Dialogue and what goes outside the quotes

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This entry is part 4 of 8 in the series Dialogue

Okay, I’m still firmly of the belief that a class on dialogue should focus mainly on what goes inside the quotation marks. But that doesn’t mean that what goes outside the quotation marks doesn’t matter. It still does—especially since what goes outside the quotation marks can (and will) impact the dialogue’s effect on the reader.

For example:

“So, how are you doing?”

Jenna weighed the question. Did Brian really care? Sure, he leaned forward and lowered his tone, but with a question like that, it was a bit of a stretch to assume that it was sincere.

Then again, maybe he did care. He couldn’t have known how she felt, especially after the stresses of these last few weeks. Her grandmother’s beloved poodle had passed away at the beginning of the month and it had been a steady downward spiral since then: paying for the funeral, moving with Grandma to a new pet-free apartment, selling her old house, changing her address at the bank, transferring the utilities, and so on and so forth.

It was too much of a strain to put on a 17-year-old, or a 70-year-old, for that matter. Grandma’s memory had grown dimmer every day since her move. What if she couldn’t take convince a court she was a fit guardian at the end of the month?

“Been better,” Jenna finally said.

Okay, did you give up before we got to Jenna’s answer? When she finally got out of her head and back into the real world, did you even remember what the question was? At that point, Brian was probably thinking she wasn’t going to answer at all. (In fact, I envision him wandering off somewhere around the time the poodle comes in.)

This is a case of narration undermining dialogue. The dialogue isn’t actually important here (boooring), but the narration makes a bad situation even worse. Even the characters aren’t interested enough to keep up the conversation.

Contrast:

“How have you been?” Brian leaned forward. Was that a glimmer of concern she saw in his eyes?

He couldn’t know—and she wasn’t about to let him. Jenna gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Been better.”

We have to work to balance narration—be it description, internal monologue or action—and dialogue. That’s not to say they have to be equal—most of the time they won’t be. One element is going to be more important: the interaction between the characters or what’s going on outside the quotation marks.

And yes, sometimes the narrative is more important 😉 . In an action scene, for example, we don’t need a full conversation between punches. Here, extensive dialogue slows the scene down. In a verbal argument, however, excessive focus on the character’s thoughts or actions can have the same effect. On the other hand, we’ll probably need at least a little insight into the POV character’s thoughts as s/he argues, or the character will look like a psychopath, incapable of emotional connections and reaction. We also need to ground the characters in the setting and in general, so we don’t devolve into talking heads. And of course, gesture can be an important way to convey subtext (which we’ll talk about later this week!).

What do you think? How do you manage what goes outside the quotation marks?

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Technique

Is this too much like how people talk?

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This entry is part 3 of 8 in the series Dialogue

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?

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Technique

Is this how people talk?

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This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Dialogue

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?

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Mechanics, Technique

Dialogue: the bare essentials

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This entry is part 1 of 8 in the series Dialogue

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!)

  1. Make it clear who’s speaking.
  2. As a corollary for #1, change paragraphs when changing speakers. (Not necessarily every time someone begins speaking—see #4.)
  3. Use actual speech attributions (verbs like “said”) sparingly, and default to the near-invisible said and/or asked as often as possible.*
  4. 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.
  5. Do not use action beats as speech attributions. Or, as Annette Lyon put it in a guest post here, “Stop smiling words.”
  6. 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!

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Technique

Dialogue series?

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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?

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Mechanics

Comparing notes on paragraphing

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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)?

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Mechanics

The science of paragraphing

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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?

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