INTRODUCTION
Whether you’re writing novels, children’s books, screenplays or short stories, dialogue makes the characters you create come alive on the page. Good dialogue does more than entertain the reader; it advances your plot, fleshes out your characters, and adds background.
Creating meaningful dialogue is one of the hardest skills new writers must learn. master. Theoretically the task should be easy, since we spend so much of our time either speaking or listening to others. But try recording a conversation, then typing it as dialogue. The resulting exchange will be dull and loaded with clichés. You’ll discover, as many writers have, that there’s a critical difference between real-life conversations and good fiction.
One thing I’ve learned about writing is that almost any rule can – and probably has been – broken. However, you’ll find that authors who successfully break the rules have something in common: they mastered them first.
During the 2002 Olympic games in Salt Lake City, the figure skaters from China stumbled or fell almost every time they performed a difficult jump. One sportscaster said this was because the Chinese didn’t have teachers; they’d learned to skate by studying videotapes of other skaters. Although they had power and athletic ability, these athletes hadn’t mastered the basics of ice skating. When a jump went wrong they couldn’t correct the problem in midair and still land on their feet.
To become a world class figure skater or an outstanding writer, you must learn the basics before you can master the art.
Alas, I can’t give you a secret formula or magic bullet for writing dialogue. The ability to write believable conversations comes from three sources: natural talent, mastering the details, and practice. Although no one can sell or give away talent, Speaking of Dialogue will show you ways to develop your talent as you master basic skills.
This book is short, because I’ve tried to present the essence of dialogue without frills and long quotes. You’ll read what dialogue can do and what it shouldn’t do. You’ll learn when to add, when to cut, and how to edit. At the end of each chapter you’ll find exercises to hone your skills and stimulate your mind.
Whether you’re a seasoned writer or a novice bent on learning new skills, Speaking of Dialogue will show you step-by-step how to make dialogue work.
So read on, and enjoy!
CHAPTER ONE
Let Your Characters Speak for Themselves
One of the most exciting things about writing a novel or screenplay is when your characters find their voices. People who’ve existed inside your head, gesturing, shouting, and laughing, suddenly come alive on the page. Your job is to capture those voices so readers can share your vision.
This chapter presents an overview of how you can use dialogue – one of the most versatile tools in the writer’s toolbox – to bring your characters to life and enrich the stories you create.
Nothing feels better than writing a scene where the dialogue suddenly takes off. Characters seem to speak on their own and your fingers fly over the keyboard to capture their conversations. The plot moves forward, the characters reveal their innermost feelings, and you’re writing in the groove.
Perhaps your heroine finally tells an obnoxious boss where to place his missing files. Or a father interacts with his grown son for the first time in years, saying the magic words, “Son, I’m proud of you.” A serial killer mumbles to the voices inside his head while he stalks his next victim; a policeman tells a father his daughter was killed by a drunk driver; and a sixteen year old lies to his parents about where he spent the night. These scenes are fraught with powerful emotions, expressed through your characters’ words and body language.
What dialogue can accomplish.
Dialogue attracts the reader’s interest. When used in the right proportions, dialogue hooks your readers and draws them into the story.
Good dialogue is action, and each line should keep your readers coming back for more. In well-constructed dialogue we get to skip over the boring small talk and enjoy conversations loaded with conflict and drama. Even the pauses between sentences are meaningful, as your characters reveal their thoughts and feelings through their actions.
Dialogue propels your story and creates tension. When my writing stalls and I can’t figure out where to go next, I sometimes rewrite the entire scene in dialogue – letting the characters take over and say what’s on their minds. This exercise helps me determine what’s most important, and sometimes I end up replacing the original narrative with dialogue.
When you’re trying to convey information without drama, a few lines of narrative usually work best. But dialogue is the key if you want to show conflict, tension, details of a developing relationship, or changes in a character’s thinking.
Dialogue lets characters speak for themselves. The way people speak and what they say is a vital part of characterization. Earl Stanley Gardner once wrote, “The reader isn’t interested in what you tell him about the character of one of the actors in the story. He’s more convinced if he finds out for himself in the way he would in real life.”
With this in mind, each character in your novel or screenplay should have his own voice. Consider his mannerisms, cadence of speech, level of education, and how well he expresses emotion. Here’s an example of dialect used effectively:
“Ain’t none of us been fightin. We’re peaceful folks,” Caleb said.
Sheriff Hogge studied him for a second. “Is that so? Did ya’ll go into town
yesterday?”
“No, sir. We was right here at home all day.”
Compare the above dialogue to this sanitized version:
“We haven’t been fighting. We’re peaceful folks,” Caleb said.
Sheriff Hogge studied him for a second. “Is that so?” Did you go into town
yesterday?”
“No sir. We stayed at home all day.”
Obviously, the first dialogue shows more about Caleb and the Sheriff. It sounds like real human speech and pulls us into the story. We quickly understand we’re eavesdropping on country folk who probably live in Appalachia or the south.
Dialogue helps you show instead of tell. “Show, don’t tell” is a basic premise of the writing craft. People may not believe what they’re told, but they will believe what they hear with their own ears or see with their own eyes. Well crafted dialogue lets the reader discover things for himself. In this example, the writer tells too much:
“Well, tell me what you think, Shawn? Do you have doubts about what you just read in the Bible?” Brother Hancey often used such a strategy, answering a question with a question, forcing the boys to exercise their own minds and thought processes.
Notice how the writer interrupted the dialogue with a heavy-handed description of Brother Hancey’s style. The scene would work better if the author revealed Brother’s Hancey’s teaching methods by showing the students’ reactions:
“Well, tell me what you think, Shawn? Do you have doubts about what you just read in the Bible?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Shawn stared at a crack in the floor boards, wishing he could hide from the teacher’s piercing blue eyes.
But Brother Hancey was unrelenting. “Do you think Jesus could really turn water into wine?
“This is Sunday School. You’re not supposed to ask questions like that,” Shawn said.
Through dialogue, a writer can explore a character’s feelings by letting him speak emotional words. Anger, fear, doubt, happiness, and every other human emotion can be expressed in words. Conversely, dialogue might also express lack of feeling or show us characters who can’t verbalize their thoughts.
Dialogue provides information. Every story needs to present background material, but you needn’t burden the unsuspecting reader with blocks of text that explain each character’s history. Dialogue can help you avoid describing a character’s life and family; it’s a crafty way to sneak information into the story without boring your readers. However, you should not have people state the obvious, as in this example:
“Your brother Fred is a doctor and I think maybe you should talk to him about those stomach pains,” Rachel said.
“Yes, but you know Fred and I haven’t spoken for ten years because we didn’t pay back the money we owe him,” Tom said.
This contrived dialogue exists only to let the writer add background information – a subterfuge that irritates readers and makes the characters sound like total idiots. Here’s a more direct approach:
Tom’s brother Fred was a prominent physician.
“Why don’t you call Fred about those stomach pains?” Rachel asked.
“Are you kidding? He’d hang up on me,” Tom said. “Besides, I can’t come up
with the ten thousand we owe him.”
“So what? Tell him you may have stomach cancer and you need his help. I think
it’s time you two stopped acting like kids.”
In real life, the things we do while we’re speaking sometimes reveal more about us than our words. Think of the people around you and how they communicate. Do you know someone who can’t speak without using her hands? Someone who often chews on toothpicks or an unlit cigar? A person who flosses his teeth at the table?
Skilled writers often use dialogue to reveal details of a character’s physical attributes and personal habits. To accomplish this, you can have characters describe one another, or skillfully weave your descriptions into the conversation, as John Grisham does in his novel, A Painted House:
“You got a boy named Hank?” Stick asked.
“Maybe,” Mr. Spruill said.
“Don’t play games with me,” Stick growled with sudden anger. “I ask you a question, you give me a straight answer. We got a jail over in Jonesboro with lots of room. I can take the whole family in for questioning. You understand?”
“I’m Hank Spruill!” came a thunderous voice. Hank strutted through the huddle and stood within striking distance of Stick, who was much smaller but managed to maintain his cockiness.
Stick was hot on the trail and quite proud of himself. With his tongue he moved the blade of grass to the other corner of his mouth, then looked up at Hank again.
This exchange shows a lot about the two characters without giving a detailed physical description. Can’t you visualize a cocky deputy sheriff chewing on a blade of grass as he confronts the intimidating young punk?
Use dialogue to foreshadow events. Foreshadowing, a technique for planting information about future events, is especially important for mystery and suspense novels. When the story reaches its climax, readers must believe the events were meant to happen exactly as they occurred.
A good novel or screenplay contains clues most readers will miss the first time around. The movie The Sixth Sense provides classic examples of foreshadowing. The director cleverly inserts hints and clues throughout the film, but viewers may not catch them all during the first viewing.
Readers enjoy foreshadowing when it’s done with class and subtlety, because finding the clues is fun and makes them feel clever. Careful use of this technique can add depth and interest to your writing. On the first page of her book, White Oleander, Janet Fitch uses a character’s words to foreshadow a later tragedy:
We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon.
“Oleander time,” she said. “Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.”
Character driven stories: Dialogue is especially important in stories that are character driven rather than plot-driven. A story is character driven when the main characters’ personality, motivation, conflicts, strengths, and weaknesses create the action or plot. By contrast, a plot-driven story might center around a natural disaster or war scenes where the characters are secondary to external events. Much of the dialogue consists of phrases like, “Watch out!” and “Get him!”
The movie Changing Lanes is a striking example of a character driven story. Two cars collide on an expressway and their drivers, who are seemingly opposite, engage in a brutal cycle of revenge. Characterization is so strong in this film that the plot unfolds in a seemingly unstoppable manner. By the film’s end, we realize the social and economic differences between the two men can’t disguise the dark, angry nature they share. The dialogue is often terse and angry, much like the characters. Certainly, it reflects each character’s motivation and internal conflicts.
Many novels, both new and classic, are character driven. A notable example is Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens beloved story, A Christmas Carol. Where would this story be without the cantankerous Scrooge? As Dickens describes him:
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
And what are the first words we hear from Scrooge in this character driven tale?
“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!'” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.
“Bah!'' said Scrooge, “Humbug!”
Charles Dickens understood the need to develop strong characters who would make his dialogue believable. Stories with cardboard characters lack depth and, consequently, they don’t hold the reader’s attention.
Good dialogue is more than witty exchanges and memorable lines. In fact, well-crafted dialogue can salvage a mediocre book or movie. Although some writers sweat over every speech while others have natural talent for dialogue, dialogue is a skill you can master.
Exercises...
Studying the experts is an excellent first step in learning to write dynamic dialogue. Read
a chapter of your favorite novel or screenplay and look for the following:
1. How does the writer use dialogue to create tension?
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
2. Does the writer give each character a distinct voice? Give an example:
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3. How does the dialogue provide information about the characters?
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
4. How does the author provide background material through dialogue?
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
5. Does the writer use dialogue to foreshadow events? How?
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
Let Your Characters Speak for Themselves
