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.
Dialogue is really difficult.
I'm submitting a short story for 'The Visit' competition and it's mostly dialogue. One character is cockney so the accent is all important and she uses phrases like,
“I told ya she wouldn’t mind Sylv. Dint I? Int it lovely ‘ere on the river Sylv?”
It wouldn't be possible to read the story or know this character without her accent and this is not a fictional character..
Any tips?
Thanks
Every time a character speaks, I ask myself whether they are speaking in character. Is it above or below their intelligence? Does it suit their mood? Does it sound right when spoken aloud? How would someone of their gender, class, ethnicity, culture, religious background speak?
I find dialogue useful to focus the readers like and dislike in characters. Show how the characters function: Elianor is sensible, Marianne is over-emotional, Macbeth is ambitious, etc.
I enjoy writing dialogue but it’s very hard work. My novel is historical fiction, so I use plain speech. I don’t want to slow the readers’ enjoyment by using accents, or the language of past times.
My novel probably consists of over 50% dialogue. I have used it to establish settings, warn of impending disaster, delineate and individualize characters, and to reveal snippets of back-story. I use streams of thought to let people know my characters inner world; reveal things that would not be revealed in any other way.
I’m doing a thorough edit of all the dialogue in my completed manuscript.
Even though I have got to know my characters, I made a brief synopsis of my characters before I started to edit ALL the dialogue.
I soon realised from the first chapter onwards, that I would have to make many changes because of my characters growth throughout the novel. It’s mind-bendingly hard to make a scene work.
I believe a good tip is to see how playwrights write dialogue.