Dialogue, A Handout
Next week, Leslie and I are going to break down the following hand out from the workshop we did on dialogue. Read this over, and if you have any questions about dialogue, please post them so we can address them. Thanks!
Tips for writing effective dialogue:
1. Make sure the dialogue matches the “tone” of the scene you want to convey.
2. Keep the dialogue realistic to the time period, style of your book. Different books contain different types of dialogue:
A. Historical vs. contemporary
B. Suspense vs. warm family saga.
C. Comedy vs. drama.
3. Make sure the dialogue matches the character you’re writing.
A. Example: A society woman’s reservations can’t be found. “I’m quite sure you’re mistaken, can you check again?” vs.
B. A young, loud teen’s reservations can’t be found: “Yo, lady, you better double-check that book because somebody has screwed this up.”
4. Choose slang and pop cultural references carefully, but don’t be afraid to use them for fear of it being outdated in reprints in ten years.
5. To speed pacing, use bouncy dialogue…think of it as a tennis game, or a game of hot potato. Lob that sucker right back over the net!
6. To slow pacing, use longer sentences and interject more scene descriptions or emotions between each spoken sentence.
7. Keep the reader feeling what the characters are feeling by showing the internal dialogue with external.
A. Example: “Yes, I’ll be at the party.” God, she so did not want to go to a party honoring a backstabbing witch, but there was no way out of it.
8. Use physical responses to convey how the dialogue is spoken. Examples:
A. “Yes, I’ll be at the party,” Karen said with a heavy, resigned sign.
B. “Yes, I’ll be at the party.” Karen nearly bounced on her toes and her voice shook with excitement.
C. “I’m so scared,” Jess whispered as she hugged the shadows along the side of the building.
D. Jess smirked, not a bit concerned about Don’s threat. “I’m so scared.”
E. Elizabeth’s hand shook as she reached for the envelope containing the results of her lab work. With a calm resignation that belied the raging beat of her heart, she admitted, “I’m so scared.”
9. Try to avoid excessive use of attributions.
A. Stick to said, asked, replied. The K-I-S-S principle is important in attributions.
B. Use character traits or action to identify the speaker. Example: As usual, when cornered, he began to stammer excuses. “I’m…I’m sorry, I, I didn’t mean to do it.” (Don’t need to say, “he stuttered”. The reader can see that.)
10. Read your dialogue out loud to see if it sounds natural.
Dialogue should:
Advance the plot
Develop character
Set or match the tone of the book
Speed up or slow down the pacing
It should never:
Be inane
Be clunky
Take Up Space!!
I have a question about writing a conversation between the hero and heroine. When you are writing the conversation do you have to put anything before or after the statement to signify who is speaking. I understand that you should explain who is speaking initially, but do you have to keep the doing the he said/she said thing. When you read the scenes out loud they make sense, because between the voice of the character and the normal flow of conversation make the statements obvious, but I had two critiques done on one chapter and both of them came back with different opinions for the scene. One said keep it the way it was you could indentify each character by their voice and the other said she felt it needed more description i.e. what the character was doing. What is the general rule, or is there one?
Okay I hope you understand the question, it’s so hard to write it out and explain it all at the same time. LOL Thanks for your time.
Comment by Patty L. — August 25, 2007 @ 10:35 am
Patty L, I totally understand your question and we will absolutely address this in the discussion next week. It’s a very good question.
I will say initially that the amount of description/exposition/internal dialogue that exists in between external dialogue is stylistic. Some authors write a lot, some don’t. You have to find what works for your voice and storytelling style.
Comment by Julie Leto — August 25, 2007 @ 10:58 am
Patty, I second your question…lol
HELP!
Although I wanted to know, how do you feel about over using he/she? I was recently told that I needed to refer to my characters more by name as opposed to he/she, which I thought was a little stupid because in the scene that was critiqued they were the only two people in the room, so why would I have to keep saying Mary/Bob? When I went back and added the names, I thought it kept the scene from just flowing, which just made me more confused
Comment by Tina Martinesi — August 25, 2007 @ 11:02 am
Tina, another great question…and I’ll make sure we discuss it at length, too. But the quicker answer is…go with your gut on this one. If there are only two people in the room…seems obvious to me. In that case, if you use the name once a page, that seems plenty.
Comment by Julie Leto — August 25, 2007 @ 12:04 pm
Tina I have had the same advice about the Mary/Bob he/she issue. I personally think that the scene should dictate the need for names vs. he/she. I think that if you are half way through a book and you don’t know the characters name you have more problems than the gender of the character.
Comment by Patty L. — August 25, 2007 @ 12:05 pm
Yea! I’m so glad you guys are doing this. I think I have a pretty good handle on it but I know there are things I still need to learn.
Comment by Vicki — August 25, 2007 @ 12:29 pm
lol Patty, I was thinking the same thing!
Comment by Tina Martinesi — August 25, 2007 @ 1:10 pm
I just wanted to say thank you, again, for doing this for us. Hope everyone is having a great weekend!!
Comment by Jodie — August 25, 2007 @ 7:28 pm
Great lecture today Julie…I finally got a chance to sit down and read it…it is very imformative…I have learned that I am able to apply some of the things I learn from these Saturday lectures to some stuff that I do in acting class…today we actually wrote dialogue, but we focused on what we wanted without sharing our objectives…it was a great exercise…we had to make sure that the scene was able to develop from the lines we came up with while working in pairs…some of them were really good, but others were inane…nobody would want to see that movie, which carries over into reading dialogue in a book…thanks again for sharing your expertise with us…the
rock!!!
Comment by Paula R. — August 25, 2007 @ 11:45 pm