Dialogue

Dialogue is both a strength and a weakness for me. I recently discovered that when I am in a hurry to read a book or story, I'll skip much of the narration and go from one passage of speech to another. Hence, I write decent dialogue but lousy description. I just never even notice it.

I'm not sure how many writers would agree, but I believe that dialogue is the conveyor belt on which a story is carried through the factory of the mind. We are a culture of eavesdroppers, learning what we can from people by their speech. Who hasn't ridden a bus or subway car and listened to someone else's story? Who hasn't made a snap judgement about another person by his or her accent or speech patterns?

What you say is at least as important as what you do, particularly in fiction. Otherwise, you'd be acting out your stories instead of writing them down.

You will soon learn that readers will identify your characters more by what they say than by how they appear. Dialogue is a powerful tool for identifying your characters.

Follow these guidelines for writing dialogue:

• You should be able to tell a character by what he says and how he says it.
• Don't use dialogue to control the characters or deliver information.
• Attribute dialogue using the word "said" or nothing at all.
• Avoid using dialogue to explain backstory.
• Cut commonplace dialogue, even if it is realistic.
• Remember body language is part of dialogue.
• Be careful with dialect.
• Yes, it's okay to use profanity--sparingly.

You should be able to tell a character by what he says and how he says it.

Dialogue is one of the best ways to create compelling and interesting characters. It is efficient and direct; why tell us about a character when he or she can tell you everything you need to know?

It is important to ensure that your characters sound differently from one another. It is easy in the heat of composition to have characters speak with the poetic diction you have in mind while writing, but each has his or her own methods of speaking.

I love Ray Bradbury, but he certainly has a lot of characters who become moved to similar levels of eloquence when the spirit strikes them. And how many characters named Douglas can there be?

How do you make characters sound different?

• Use catch phrases sparingly. We all become attached to certain words and use them frequently in our speech. A person trying to capture my speech would probably notice I use the words "bizarre" and "great deal" a lot. I refer to a wide array of people by the title "chief." We all have our pet phrases. Used sparingly, these can become clues about a character.
• Write in simple language. Use words on the level of the character.
• Some characters speak more than others. Introduce characters who aren't very talkative.
• Make sure characters say only what they'd naturally say.

If you have a clear sense of a character, you'll know what he or she will say in a situation in just the same way you know your mother won't say, "Remember when your grandfather had gangrene?" at a restaurant. Even though I know mine will.

Perhaps the best practice I can think of for this is to imagine people in different situations. As a child, I didn't always have a lot of friends, so I'd imagine Han Solo or Indiana Jones or Admiral Kirk would hang out with me at the supermarket or bus stop or whereever. What would Han Solo say if the store was out of milk? What would Kirk say to the teacher if he got a C? Simple things to think about.

Don't use dialogue to control the characters or deliver information.

Sometimes it is tempting to use a character to drive the story ahead unnaturally by forcing him or her to say something either out of character or obvious:

Fred pointed. "There's our childhood home, Rick. Remember when Dad used to flog you with his belt in the backyard for all the neighbors to see? Those were the days."

"Yeah," Rick replied. "I'll never forget its sting. Let's get in the car, drive out west, and shoot him in the head."

This is crap. A brother wouldn't bring up your abuse that casually. A victim wouldn't reply that way, either.

Dialogue like this transforms your characters into puppets, serving your motives as an author.

Characters have their own lives and agendas to follow. Your job is to depict those as dramatically as possible. You've created a world for them to live in and the situation they face, but if they respond unnaturally, your reader will never believe they are real and will never empathize with them.

Attribute dialogue using the word "said" or nothing at all.

This is a hard one, if reams of bad fiction are anything to go by.

"Fetch me that pistol," he said bravely.

"Oh, my God!" he ejaculated.

These are bad. If you can't tell they're bad by looking at them, we have a lot of work ahead of us.

The safest thing you can do when writing dialogue is use the word "said." We've been conditioned by decades of horrible English teachers (I can say that--I was one) to be as varied in our usage as possible. "I just used 'said' two lines before," you say. "Shouldn't I use 'muttered' or 'mumbled' or 'spat' instead?"

No. Said will do just fine:

"Put that bloody cigarette out!" he said.

You can tell from the text of the dialogue itself exactly how it was said. Was that said calmly? With cool deliberation? Or with sudden, angry force?

Even better, don't use traditional dialogue attribution at all. The only reason to use "he said" or "she said" is to identify where a character's speech is in the flow of dialogue. If you can hint at that differently, you're that much better off.

Try using stage direction instead:

Helen opened the window. "Damn, it's hot in here."

Try using a character's thoughts:

Man, I was screwed. "Uh, maybe it's my roommate's crack pipe."

Avoid using dialogue to explain backstory.

This is referred to in the business as "Maid and Butler Dialogue:"

"As you know, Trevor, our Master is fond of sleeping naked in bacon grease."

Don't use dialogue as a shortcut to explain the story. Remember what a character does or does not already know, and don't have other characters explain what is going on.

Likewise, try to avoid academic discussions of arcane concepts between characters. Heinlein, a writer I love enough to subconsiously assume his writing sins, does this often: two characters in a disastrous situation somehow manage to touch upon the flaws of the human race while trying to solve it.

Write naturally. Let the information flow from a character at its natural pace. There's no hurry. Your character needn't rush onto the stage like a frantic medieval page and report the day's news before the king has a chance to sever his head.

Patience. Stories have a way of presenting themselves when the time is right.

Cut commonplace dialogue, even if it is realistic.

Something that writers forget in their search for realism is that readers don't want to read a story that is as boring as their own lives. While striving to show people acting naturally, we sometimes forget that too much realism can be a bad thing:

"Hello, Larry."

"Hello, Dianne."

"Nice spot of weather we're having, eh?"

"Think it'll rain?"

"Maybe."

"I heard the MacPhersons got some new chickens."

"What color are they?"

"White, mostly."

"Like chickens usually are, I suppose."

The only way to save this passage is to add this line at the end:

"You reckon the lake monster'll like 'em?"

Here we've twisted the ordinary to deliver something unusual.

Spider Robinson said that the problem with the news is that by its very definition, the news is the unusual. Therfore, people who are depressed by the news are depressed by things that happen so infrequently that it is news when they do. You're reporting dialogue that is different from the norm. The reader can assume the bread-and-butter speech they witness everyday. You're showing them what's different.

If you remove all of the commonplace dialogue and there's nothing left behind, you've discovered a bigger problem: you have no story. Or you're not getting to it as quickly as you should.

Remember body language is part of dialogue.

Sometimes the flow of dialogue inspires a writer to keep the banter going back and forth with no breaks between. People do not stand in the same spot and look straight at one another to speak. They walk around. They pick their nails. They glower or sneeze or look away when they're not paying attention.

Stage directions can be as important as speech:

"Did you file the papers?" asked Jane, still clutching her briefcase.

Dave turned on the television.

Do you think Dave filed the papers?

Use action during conversation to reinforce (or better, replace) dialogue. Don't forget we speak as much with our gestures and actions as we do with our language.

Be careful with dialect.

There's an old story about a play that took place in Scotland. The director demanded absolute fidelity to the subject matter and hired a Scottish speech coach to train the actors on perfect Scottish pronunciations. After weeks of grueling training, they successfully learned their lines in authentic accents.

The play closed after one performance because no one could understand them.

For the sake of accuracy, it may be tempting to write in the exact dialect or pronunciation of your characters, but unless you have an excellent ear and a talent for it, you'd better try to avoid it. A poorly-written dialect can be distracting.

To portray a person with a different speaking pattern, you can do any of the following:

• Use a few scattered instances of dialect sprinkled throughout the text as reminders of the character's mode of speech.
• Use vocabulary alone to convey the speech of a character. We can assume a character who use the word "ain't" frequently might have a Southern accent.

What you want is not absolute fidelity to speech but the appearance of it. Be subtle.

Yes, it's okay to use profanity--sparingly.

Some anal-retentive prude once said that profanity is the last refuge of people not eloquent enough to better describe their feelings.

I will grudgingly admit that yes, the world is overly dependent on profanity to express complex feelings.

On the other hand, there is something viscerally satisfying about saying the word "fuck" very loudly and in the presence of fundamentalists. When you slam a hammer on your hand, it isn't enough to say, "How unfortunate. My hand is now a flaccid sack of bone and cartilage."

It's more fun to say, "Fuck!" And to say it loudly enough to the neighbors hear it.

Say it now. "Fuck!" Doesn't that send a jolt of energy through your spinal cord? If not, you didn't say it loudly enough.

Good. Now it's out of your system. Don't sprinkle it into your fiction to look cool or trendy. Use it only when your characters would use it, and then only if you have to. You can think of better words to use, and your characters should use them only when there is no other recourse.

Frequently, profanity is a short cut to feeling that doesn't pay off, like using the word "tears" under the assumption that it will provoke a reader to be moved. A few "fucks" here and there in your fiction will certainly grab someone's attention, but if it isn't natural, you don't want that attention.

Follow your character. He or she will know what to say and when.