How can you advise writers on dialogue? Firstly, I ask them to use their ear; read their dialogue aloud. Those who get it right have what amounts to a musical gift but, frankly, most of us don’t have a knack for it. It takes hard graft to get to a basic level, where the speech doesn’t sound weird. Successfully varying your style for each of your characters is a whole other ballgame. The most common howler I see is the educated-sounding blue collar worker, and I don’t think I’ve worked with a single writer who’s a whizz at teen speech.
Sometimes writers craft a series of staccato sentences in a stylised thriller style (that can get unbearably annoying if overused) while pairing this with grammatically perfect dialogue. Wrong way round surely? Who on earth speaks in perfectly constructed sentences complete with subclauses and connectives?
Other dialogue traps:
Dumping information and backstory into dialogue for convenience with no calculation as to whether this would take place in real speech.
One you often see in second-rate TV dramas is where a professional spells out a procedure to a colleague in the same business, who would darn well know all about it. It helps to deliver information to the viewer but it’s lazy.
‘Writing on the nose’ dialogue, a term that can equally apply to novels as it does to screenplays, is when a character spells stuff out – giving a script an instant leaden quality. Of course, as with any show/tell issue, the reader or viewer would get much more enjoyment if they were able to fill in the gaps for themselves. Robert McKee uses the scene in Sideways where his male protagonist discusses wine to show a master screenwriter at work. The subtext, if you recall this scene, is all about the man’s repressed love, but it is never something that is actually spelt out.
Lastly, please don’t sidestep dialogue – many underconfident writers do. Go for it – and as David Thomas, author of the Sam Carver thrillers, recently advised in a series of tips: ‘Study the masters’ - both novelists and TV and film scriptwriters.
I love dialogue. My tutor noted I was good at it but my teen dialogue has been criticised for sounding too adult. It was quite intentional and those who read on understand that eventually, but I often get people come back to me after the first few chapters saying they don't believe they are that young. Very difficult because I'm not going to change who they are to fit the readers' perception of 13 year olds' conversation, but I have modified some of what they say to make their adult ways less noticeable. The reader is supposed to notice them, but maybe it was too obvious before. Either way, it's always a balancing act.
Thanks Adrian. I like those playwrights. I'd add George Bernard Shaw to them :)
Renee.
Plays are dependent on good dialogue. I suggest you read plays by, Ibsen and Miller.
I hope that helps.
Good luck.