Want to write better, snappier, clearer, more empathetic…in fact…golden dialogue?
There are rules that help you succeed. They're not exactly 'secret' but certainly they can only be found 'under the counter'. Here they are.
Handled with energy, dialogue can turn a good story into a winning story. Readers like a lot of dialogue because it spaces out the words on the page, easing the reader’s eye, but it is also one of the best ways of creating living characters. Dialogue is crucial to modern writing and can be as fast-paced and exciting as action.
Perhaps a definition of what dialogue is might get us started. Dialogue always takes place between at least 2 characters, just as real conversations involve at least 2 people.
If you are a little uncertain that the dialogue you write enables your characters to build their personalities and engage with their readers, you might try the series of exercise we are going to look at in this blog and take note of the Seven Golden Rules we're going to examine.
The First Golden Rule:
This is one rule that will help you construct conversations you can be proud of: To prevent your characters unwittingly breaking this rule is simple. Always be sure that any conversation you create has at least one of the following functions:
- Impart information
- enrich the characterization
- move the plot along
- develop the characters further within the story
- further the complexities of the plot
- crank up the pace,
- enhance the theme or core truth
- reflect relationship changes and emotions
Kitchen Table Exercise one
Take your notebook to a specific location of your choice where people move or linger, such as a gallery, a country park, a shopping mall. Sit with your notebook closed and observe the way people use the area, listening to snippets of conversation, but also inventing the ‘follow ons’ you don’t actually hear. Think about body language especially, and also reactions to the place. Try to see the place through the eyes of the people there. Start making jotted snatches of dialogue scenes, using what you see and what you hear about you.
Golden Rule two:
For dialogue to feel natural, it can’t ever be natural.
Real conversation is dull and repetitive. People stutter, or forget a word. They don’t quite catch what others say, interrupt themselves with inconsequential, often illogical comments, and go off the point, changing subjects, becoming irrelevant. Real people trip over their words and produce poor syntax that sounds unintentionally comic. In fact real speech is 80% inconsequential; humdrum data of living, and at least 10% more is in shorthand, because we know the other person so well, we don’t need to use full speech to get in tune with them – it’s how we human’s mostly communicate.
Having listened to people chatting in the mall, you will now be aware that prose dialogue cannot be transcribed directly from real speech – the writer must edit it. As well as smoothing over the verbose cracks, this editing should smooth the ride by breaking up longer speeches with description, action and observation.
To put this succinctly, for dialogue to feel natural, it can’t ever be natural. This is something that is learnt as one reads, writes and listens, and the more dialogue one writes, the easier it becomes. Try listening to conversations then transposing them into dialogue to help enhance this skill.
Start a new piece of dialogue between two characters you're working with, or would like to create. But instead of setting it out in the normal format for dialogue, set it out as a script. To create a strong rhythm, emulating the simple A, B, pattern for your two speakers. This can be very liberating, and should at least persuade you to create a scene, with dialogue, if you find yourself generally writing exposition. It will also encourage the dialogue writer who is having trouble with Rule Two to get into a good A B tempo. Make sure you are naturally changing the line length of each speaker at will__________________________________________________
Golden Rule Three;
Dialogue should be pertinent to the character’s personality.
Don’t allow the character to talk with your voice; they need their own. Don’t allow all the characters to sound the same; this is an ‘early’ mistake and one that can be spotted by reading your work aloud. Try to ‘get into the shoes’ of the person speaking, so that it’s their words on the page…not the writer’s. Allow various characters to have differing speech patterns, but do not go overboard with this; it can lead to reader irritation. Be particularly careful about accent or dialect; use one small thing that can exemplify the speech pattern and leave it at that. Keep well clear of phonic representation. If you read Christopher Brookmyre’s crime fiction, you will see a master of this skill at work, but his passages of lowland Scottish dialect are often difficult to follow.
Kitchen Table Exercise Three
Place a character you’re working with, or hoping to work with, in a situation where they have to talk. Think about how they would react. Not how you'd react, but them.
See things through your character’s eyes. You don’t need to link this with any writing you’re doing at the moment. This time, use what you’re seeing and hearing alongside what you are imagining. Now is your chance to allow your character to speak as this individual might. Think about this person before you start, and all the way through writing the piece. Allow them to speak to another character, or in some other way, if it helps.____________________________________________
Golden Rule Four:
Be careful how you impart information
‘How are you Mary?’ asked Sue.
‘Well,’ said Mary. ‘Since the death of John, six months ago, I’ve been very depressed.’
How do you overcome these problems? One way is to use interior monologue:
‘How are you Mary?’ Sue knew that Mary had been depressed since John’s death, but
even so, she was hoping for more than a grim sigh in answer to her question.
‘No better, to be honest with you,’ said Mary.
Another is to wrack your brains for a more ‘natural’ approach:
‘How are you Mary?’
‘No better.’
‘What is it now...six months?’
‘Yes. But it’s like John’s about to walk in the door any moment.’
Another approach I recommend is not to worry too much about imparting this sort of information in the first place. Readers like mystery, even if the story isn’t actually genre mystery. They like to be teased, so long as the mystery is solved somewhere along the line:
‘How are you Mary?’
‘No better.
‘What’s it now? Six months?’
Sue gave a grim sigh. ‘Feels like six years sometimes and six hours at others.’
Here's another place stagy dialogue rears its head:
‘As you already know, Henry, the polyribodigestive test tube results are outstanding. And you also know that we’ve found a guinea pig for the transplant experiment among the staff - at least, when we say guinea pig, of course, we mean flunky.’ Henry’s assistant leered at him...
Kitchen Table Exercise Four
Search through previous pieces of your writing to find some dialogue that now, you might consider 'staged'. Try rewriting it. By treating characters and their dialogue as if the story grew organically out of the world they inhabit, you will find yourself naturally only giving your reader only just enough information detail. ‘Just enough’ can be interpreted as ‘far less than you first imagine they’ll need’. For a start, you don’t want to write down to them, or treat them as fools. But also, they will be quite happy to read along, delighting in finding the details are revealed bit by bit, in just the same way as the example of Mary’s bereavement.
Golden Rule Number Five
Who Should be Talking?
It is a standard guideline, especially for short stories, that a conversation should not be reported directly on a page unless a key (focus) character is in it – in other words, characters your story cannot do without. Clearly, both the protagonist and the antagonist are essential characters, but it is up the writer to decide which other characters are key. In actually deciding this, it is quite a good idea to pose the question the opposite way round; which of your characters could actually carry dialogue as the main character in that scene? Crucially, the template is that no scene, no conversation, should take place without one or more facets of the First Golden Rule; and if only minor characters are in that conversation, that is unlikely to be so to any degree.
Kitchen Table Exercise Five
Take any piece of writing you are working on, or any you have completed. Look through it, to check to see who is driving any dialogue and whether they are an essential character. If you find any dubious conversations, ask yourself; does this work? Do I need to re-evaluate the need for this conversation? Is the dialogue going to hold a reader? Does it follow Golden Rule One?______________________
Golden Rule Six:
How speech tabs should be used
Careful handling in the use of ‘tabs’ – the ‘he/she saids’ of dialogue – will really help your dialogue to have a great rhythm and flow. .
Tags are the verbal additions that describe who/how the dialogue functions. They are sometimes very hard to get just right. The secret is to use ‘said’ as much as you possibly can. This is because it is almost invisible and readers skip over it. It is a functional necessity that does its job like a postman...never really seen.
If you can get rid of a tag altogether, that often creates fast-past dialogue – very useful if the scene is also fast-paced. Also try to break up the tabs by using actions to get a good rhythmic flow… ‘It think it’s time,’ Simon took a sip of his espresso, ‘to talk about the contract.’ By sticking to ‘said’, you will avoid overuse of other tag verbs (muttered, added, chattered, etc).The less you use, the smoother and more readable will your work be; even the most common tags (asked, called, whispered etc), should be cherry-picked; try not to have more than a couple in any patch of dialogue. Some verbs should never be used because they don’t function well as tags at all – laughed is the most common of those...it is almost impossible to laugh and talk at the same time. Chuckle and smiled can be ‘got away with’ but constantly check that certain characters don’t spend all their time smiling as they speak, for instance. Oh, and don't ruin all that good 'tab' work by adding an adverb. Don't tell us the character said something 'bravely'; show us that bravery through the words they use.
Kitchen Table Exercise Six
Spend ten minutes writing a new conversation between two old characters. Perhaps these characters have never met in your previous fiction, or maybe they are already aware of each other. Whichever scenario you chose, make sure this is new dialogue. Free write the conversation first. Then read through it. How did you use speech tabs? Are you already an old hand at getting the dialogue rhythm right with a varied amount of tabs, no tabs, action instead of tabs? Do you mostly stick to 'said'?
Golden Rule Seven:
Brief and clear. Make sure you keep in control of what comes out of character’s mouths. As it progresses, dialogue must take the reader by the hand, and lead their thoughts in the direction you the writer want them to go. This is why it must never ramble away from the point it’s trying to make, even in an attempt to enhance any of the golden rule. Keep conversation tightly on the subject in hand
At almost no stage of your writing should any character speak for more than three or four lines. That is not to say that this character might have a longer speech to give, and yes, they can give it, but they should be interrupted in various ways. Try to allow the dialogue to be visual so we can see the characters as they speak, breaking up the speech patterns with action, interior thought processes, description of character, etc. But it must never ‘feel’ broken up. To achieve this, create a rhythm to the dialogue sections, a feel that has a lyrical sensation. Avoid repeated beginnings, and break down repetitive ‘tab’ patterns that might annoy a reader.
Fascinating. Even if the personality you’ve given your character is dull, their speech should not be. If your reader wants to listen to inane speech, they can tune into a TV chat show! Real conversation is pedestrian or repetitive at times because we have to think on our feet while talking. But characters should stand out on the page, and in the same way their dialogue should be larger (although never more grandiose), than real conversation. Characters (or rather their writer) have the luxury of something the rest of us do not have – the chance to think through what they say and say exactly what they mean (presuming they intend to say what they mean...). Polish and buff their speech to create fascinating dialogue.
Multi-tasked. Multi-tasking in dialogue writing is the major area where real conversation alters significantly from dialogue in fiction. It should constantly be focused on that first golden rule – all dialogue should further the story in at least one way from that list – if you can make that two, or three, you are beginning to understand how to multi-task your dialogue. Don’t just let conversations enrich developing characters, make it move the plot along and further its complexities at the same time. And although not every conversation is going to crank up the pace or enhance the theme of the story, make sure some dialogue achieves this – especially towards the end of a short story and at least half way through a novel. Part of this ‘cranking up’ may also reflect emotions, etc into good measure.
Kitchen Table Exercise Seven.
Tap into your writer’s imagination by imagining dialogue when you're not at your writing stations Tune in to your character’s conversations. You may find what they say when they think you are out of earshot will surprise you and add richness to your story
While you are still learning your writing trade, it does not harm to check the golden rules each time you’ve created dialogue, especially when this is a longer chunk of conversation between characters, because this can feel a very complex aspect of writing creatively.
But remember, your first draft does not have to be perfect. You can continue to experiment with dialogue, change it and allow it to grow.